One thing I haven’t been able to get off my mind all year is the silencing of people all over the world whose narratives I have been trying to amplify with my (now successfully throttled) socials. When I first got on social media, I knew that whatever I did and however I got attention, the end goal was to have the capacity to amplify the voices of others and causes I find important. This was before I fully understood how algorithms work to suppress certain voices. The silencing of truth-tellers, whistleblowers, and human sentinels is not just alarming— it’s scary!!! It’s even scarier that so many of our fellow humans are sleepwalking through life, unable to properly identify distress signals in others, and are instead consuming their messages as entertainment. (Just take a look at literally any reality show or snark page).
Although I fully trust and believe that the world will soon correct itself and the voices of survivors will be heard, I want to offer a comparison.In the quiet hours before dawn in Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, the rainforest holds its breath. Then, from the canopy, a chorus rises, and it's not the usual dawn song of howler monkeys, it's something sharper, more urgent... Alarm calls ripple outward. Bodies shift in the branches. Within seconds, the group of howler monkeys moves as one.
Field observations have captured exactly this kind of moment. When a real gunshot echoes through the forest, howler monkeys respond instantly with heightened vocal intensity and coordinated movement through the canopy. That single exchange reveals something essential: sentinel species do not merely react to disturbance. They announce it— often before the full extent of the threat has even fully arrived.
Now, I want you to imagine another kind of forest. A jungle if you will...
This one is made of institutions, narratives, screens, and unspoken contracts. In this forest, the disturbances are not chainsaws or gunshots but something quieter and more pervasive: the slow erosion of trust, the normalization of harm, the colonization of minds through repetition and omission.
Here, too, there are sentinels.
In this world, we have human sentinels. I call them "human sentinels" because they send out signals when they detect disturbance. They (and others) amplify those signals so the collective can register the threat. This means we have both distress-signal broadcasters and amplifiers in the game.
These are the people who speak anyway when they know silence would be safer. The survivors of sexual abuse who are brave enough to name people and patterns inside powerful systems. The insiders who expose covert programs. The voices who surface evidence of child trafficking networks, suppressed technologies, media architectures designed to shape perception. Those of us who amplify their content and repackage it for the masses. These are the people who, like the howler monkey or the kinkajou in the deep night, suddenly intensify their signal— then go quiet, retreat, or keep speaking anyway— because something in the environment has shifted into danger.
For a long time I was extremely shy in a way that made visibility feel dangerous. So I created a character (IYKYK) as a protective persona the way some artists create an alter ego to do the work their everyday self cannot yet carry. Beyoncé had Sasha Fierce. I had Dove. She was bolder, braver, paradoxical, allowed to be angry, more willing to stand in the center of attention. She could post the things I wanted to say even when my own nervous system wanted to stay hidden.
Originally intended to be my senior project for art school, I used her to run a sort of social experiment on myself and on the internet at the same time.
My goal was simple in theory and complicated in practice: use online visibility as both a tool and a test. I wanted to see what happens when someone deliberately steps into the spotlight while secretly doing sensitive work. I wanted to draw attention to systems that harm people and the planet, and I needed enough eyes on me for it to matter. At the same time, I was studying the cost of that visibility in real time— how attention amplifies signal and distortion in equal measure, how quickly narratives form around a person most people have never met, and how rare it is for anyone to actually receive the quieter, more encoded messages underneath the performance.
Very few people picked up on the distress signal I was sending through the noise. Most saw the character. Some loved her. Many attempted dissecting her. Very few seemed to register that the performance itself was, in part, a distress flare— a way of making myself large enough to be noticed while still trying to stay intact.
I’ve come to understand that online visibility, especially when it’s strategic rather than purely personal, functions like a high-stakes social experiment. You put a version of yourself into the collective field and watch what the field does with it. You learn who is actually listening and who is only consuming an image. You discover how quickly a persona can become a container for other people’s projections, fears, and unresolved material. And you learn, sometimes painfully, how few are equipped to hold the full complexity of a real human being who is using visibility as both armor and offering.
The parallel between those who expose harm and sentinel species is not poetic. It is structural.
At my job we use advanced sensors to listen to sentinel species. These systems do not rely on any single sense. They fuse three streams: continuous acoustic recordings that register vocal shifts, visual recordings that capture what bodies do when they cannot be heard, and careful human observations of behavior— all aligned in time and space. It is only once these streams come together that we can say with confidence that a disturbance occurred and the sentinel responded in a measurable way.
Human sentinels operate the same multi-modal system... Only, their “sensors” are human.Their phones and networks function as the acoustic layer— the place where the first signal leaves the body and enters the world. A voice note, a document drop, a post that cannot be unseen.Their evidence: screenshots, recordings, internal files— functions as the visual layer.Their lived testimony and the subsequent reactions of communities, institutions, and platforms function as the behavioral layer.When these three align— when the story, the proof, and the collective response synchronize — the signal becomes undeniable. Just as precise temporal alignment is required to connect a disturbance with a sentinel’s response, society requires alignment between testimony, documentation, and public reception before meaningful intervention can occur.
Consider the timing...
Sentinel species often signal anticipation of disturbance. Their vocal cadence may change, or they may fall into sudden silence and move away before the full threat reaches them. Human sentinels frequently do the same. They speak from inside systems while the harm is still building— before the full archive of abuse is public, before the trafficking network is fully mapped, before the technology of control is normalized. Their courage is not reactive. It is anticipatory. They are proactive responders whose signals can initiate communication and protective movement across the human landscape. Without these signal broadcasters, we amplifiers wouldn’t know what to do.
The cost is identical in structure.
When disturbance enters the soundscape, some animals increase vocalization, others go silent, others flee. All of these are costly behaviors. Energy is spent. Attention is diverted. Risk increases.
When a human sentinel steps forward, the same economy appears: reputation expenditure, relational rupture, safety expenditure, sometimes physical or psychological survival cost.
The signal is metabolically and socially expensive. That is why so few give it.
Field protocols in this kind of listening work often use controlled simulations of human disturbance to create repeatable conditions. Standardized sounds and presences allow clear measurement of how sentinels respond. Over time, these individual signals build a living dataset that future observers can use to recognize patterns more quickly.
The difference is that nature’s dataset is open by default. Human sentinel datasets are often deliberately fragmented, censored, or buried. The same forces that create the disturbance also work to degrade the signal-to-noise ratio. Media architectures that function like dense canopy — repeating certain frequencies while absorbing others — make it harder for the collective to perform the equivalent of clear sensor fusion.
This is where the deeper parallel becomes medicine.
In the work of listening to living systems, technology is used to amplify natural intelligence rather than replace it. The sensors do not invent the alarm call. They simply make the call legible across time and distance so that timely response becomes possible.In human systems, the equivalent capacity already exists: encrypted channels, decentralized platforms, community archives. These are our social listening tools. When they are used with integrity, they do not create the signal— they simply prevent it from being lost in the acoustic clutter of manufactured consent.
The human sentinels concerned with peace, with the return to indigenous healing practices, with the decolonization of perception itself— we are not anomalies. We are the howler monkeys of the human ecosystem. Our messages carry information about the health of the whole. When we treat ourselves as isolated controversial figures rather than as living indicators, we are choosing blindness over early warning.
There is a quiet revolution available to each of us.
It begins with recognizing that every one of us carries sentinel capacity— our natural intelligence. This is the part of us that registers dissonance before the mind has language for it. The part that feels the temperature of a room shift when truth is being avoided. The part that notices when a story being told does not match the evidence arriving through other channels.
"Tending the community mind-garden" (phrase I made up to ease people into the whole Collective Consciousness thing) means learning to honor these signals— both within ourselves and in others— the way one learns to honor a sudden silence or an increased intensity in the forest. It means listening deeply and effectively to others with more empathy. It means seeing the book beyond its cover. It also means thinking twice about what we see and read about people online (especially those who call out harm and abuse), on social media and Epstein/Maxwell-afflicted platforms like Reddit.
It means protecting "the sentinels" rather than consuming their signals as entertainment and then moving on like you guys do to the birds every day. Every time a human sentinel is isolated, ridiculed, or made to pay an unbearable personal price, the entire ecosystem loses resolution. The next disturbance becomes harder to detect in time.
The rainforest does not need us to save it. It needs us to stop drowning out its own alarm systems.
Human society does not need more perfect heroes. It needs more people willing to treat truth-tellers as the living sensors they are— early, costly, and often accurate indicators that something in the larger body is under threat.
When the howler monkey calls, the forest has a chance to respond before the disturbance reaches the next ridge. When a human sentinel speaks— whether about abuse, secret programs, trafficking, or the architectures that shape what we are allowed to perceive— we are being offered the same chance.
The question is no longer whether the distress signal exists.The question is whether we have built (or are willing to build) the listening capacity to receive it in time.And then, whether we will tend the garden that grows from what we have heard.
If you are someone who has the ability to identify and announce threats to the ecosystem before they fully arrive, remember that you are doing important work in raising the Collective Consciousness. Do not go silent. The rest of us need you to expose these harmful systems so that we may help correct them.
0 comments