One of the things I've appreciated about living abroad is that it's helped me better understand context that I used to be swimming in. Sometimes it's context on the breadth of the human condition, but sometimes it's just my daily lesson on filter bubbles.

Google knows enough at this point to show me SCMP articles about the MTR/Cathay Pacific thing (no I'm not going to link this, because my point is precisely that maybe five people reading this know enough not to have to look it up). If it was the MTA that had banned an American Airlines ad depicting a you don't know what goes here, do you?, then I'm near-certain that it'd be all over (my) Facebook. But no, I logged in today just to check, near-certain that I wouldn't find a single mention of it. I was right.

This isn't an objective fact about the world; it's a subjective fact about who I'm talking to. Somewhere, someone has a Facebook feed full of this; they're just not talking to me. The people who are talking to me are talking about other things. I'm talking about other things to them.

The conversations that everyone knows everyone is having are optional. The "everyone" that everyone knows everyone means by "everyone" involves a choice. Not in the sense that you or I could choose different ones, but in the sense that all of us could. No moral ontology where some things must always be talked about survives contact with a world in which sometimes everyone chooses to just not talk about them, to talk about something else.

So then, what will we talk about

Today, I was going through my morning newspaper feedreader^[1], saw a few links I liked, socked some away for Friday's linkwrap, dropped some others in my blog's reading feed, on the off-chance that I -- or someone else trawling the archives of Faults -- would want to revisit them later. Another one was an annoying article on Bloomberg about how the FCC's Title II reclassification of Internet Service Providers will raise rates by $X and thus price Internet access out of the reach of Y million households.

And I closed it, and didn't show it to anyone, and hoped that that would mean that fewer people would look at it. Yes, I could have pointed at it for the purposes of dissent, but I've got a post about vaccines to write, and blogging confrontationally makes me sad, so I decided that it was easier to flush it down the memory hole that is ctrl-W^[2] instead.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four occasionally seems like one of those books that missed slightly in meme-space and fifty years temporally, but nevertheless was disturbingly prescient. Of course we've all ported ourselves off paper and nothing's truly lost forever on the Internet, but all the same...the real question is becoming less "is the record around" and more "does anyone remember it?"

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last