Sidewalk Toronto is dead, but its legacy is instructive. It shows that surveillance systems aren’t so much documenting as producing a desired reality — and that erasing these images, rather than increasing privacy, only makes that constructed reality harder to audit

As the work of memory keeping is offshored to social media companies and cloud storage, we are giving up the work of remembering ourselves for the convenience of being reminded. We are surrendering the physical mementos, we previously relied on as containers of memory, leaving us more susceptible to algorithmic forms of manipulations.

The default data hoarding of the internet makes it ripe for conspiracy building. All that’s needed to bring conspiratorial linkages to life is a flood of attention on a certain body of information. The public has become trained in enjoying conspiratorial thinking as a mode of entertainment — not merely watching others solve mysteries but actively participating in deepening and unfolding them.