[...] Choosing to be an activist wasn’t choosing surveillance: choosing to make surveillance was choosing surveillance. I knew what she meant because we’d had this argument before, which is one of the advantages to talking with old friends, all that shared history, all those old conversations in the data-bank. It was also the crisis of talking to old friends, because it liberated the fragments that had been compartmentalized years ago, let them stretch and breathe and remind you of all the ways you had disappointed yourself and everyone whose opinion you ever cared about.