Brought to you by Micah Keel
B)
I saw everyone is writing their own little preface and I wanted to hop in because I have some shit to say. I have some *epistemological* concerns and feel some responsibility to look after them because I know I’m going to be held accountable for them at some point.1
There's a really key component to when you're trying to compile a story like this and that's the fact that SOMEONE within the story has to be a writer. Ideally, it would be one of us. There's a lot of information we have but cannot pass on because of this constraint. They should’ve sent a poet. Shit like that. Infertility and impotence have way too large a hand in this operation, recurring as basically every turn. There's also the question of whether we should be recording this at all. Ezekiel would kill me for saying that, but it's true. What we can get away with diminishes the more we make an attempt to categorize it. I don't just mean what could happen if this falls into Cobra's lap. I mean that invoking the Spect(ato/e)r has a pretty immediate psychological effect when we know it's there. We lose candidness and we gain self-consciousness, the latter of which we're already sensitive to. My mission, as of late, is to be made as sensitive as possible. I have a heightened sense for voyeurism and I think that's why I'm more apprehensive than anybody else about this article existing. Maybe I don't have a particularly scientific mind. Despite this, I get the feeling I may become one of the core contributors to it, as a consequence of my gift.2
As a contributor, I want to poke more holes into the methodology, beyond the fact that none of us are self-identified writers. There’s problems with the data that go beyond how it is presented. It’s just the nature of this that we are going to have the most legitimate documentation of the least important things first. Not to say I won’t do what I can to make sure some actually important leaks get through - I just know they won’t be as easily won. For the most part we’ll be relying on secondary sources for whatever Menagerie or COBRA deem actually locking down. Additionally, the trouble we’ve had getting footage of any higher or lower beings necessitates *all* secondhand sources for those accounts. (Except in instances where they can hold a pen, actually.)
I also have some concerns about the chronology. As Elena mentioned, we didn’t start working on this anthology until pretty late into the game. There’s a lot of backlog from before everyone met each other - at this point it’s almost all backlog! So we have that to deal with. We also have to try and keep track of everything that is happening right now. Here’s the issue with that: it’s fucking difficult to be this close to it all and care about writing it down. We aren’t exactly drowning in free time and we don’t have the distance needed to write about this kind of thing objectively. Actually, we tend to be very affected and unwilling to think about it, like real action heroes.
But another thing about keeping things sorted in the present time is it’s not always clear what’s important - or going to be important. We’ve already had a lot of false flags in the past. I guess the solution is to record everything, but an unfortunate thing about that is by the time the bombs go off, that information will become pretty useless to us. I suggested a kind of secondary network where we can offload all the information no matter how valuable it is, but I’ve been informed this already exists.3 This is all to say that the chronology is all over the place, at least for the time being. As we accumulate more info and get deeper into the current project, it will start to sort itself out. June has actually volunteered to create a timeline for reference, which should make things easier. I assume someone will make an index. All things in time.
My privacy concerns are something that probably deserve their own essay. I understand that everyone who has agreed to be apart of this project has in a sense consented to sharing their personal information. I think they are deeply unaware of just how personal it’s all going to get.
1 Just a guess.
2 My coauthors and I have talked at length about the validity of Psychic Majicks in journalism. Everything gleamed will be presented with the disclosure that it was, in fact, gleamed. We displace the responsibility of comprehension onto the audience. Fuck you. The great wheel of authorial irresponsibility rolls on for you to inflict upon the next sucker.
3 Social media. Tabloid Gossip. Elena’s groupchat. Xavier's groupchat. My Twitter mentions.