Man Applying For Most Surveilled Job In America Lectures Citizens On Dangers Of Transparency

SACRAMENTO—In what experts are calling "a masterclass in unexamined irony," California gubernatorial candidate Nicholas Thompson spent forty-five minutes on Wednesday lecturing a crowd of supporters about the dangers of living transparently, before asking them to sign up for his email newsletter, purchase merchandise from his online store, and register to vote through a government database that requires their full legal name, home address, and date of birth.

Thompson, who is actively seeking a position that requires published tax returns, a 24/7 security detail, archived meetings, recorded phone calls, and constitutional accountability to 39 million Californians, expressed what he described as "cold, hard anger" and "special contempt" for citizens who text their family members without end-to-end encryption.

"Your mother isn't sharing dinner plans," Thompson declared from a podium bristling with microphones, his face illuminated by seventeen press cameras. "She's feeding coordinates to the machine."

The candidate's website, which features his name, photograph, political positions, campaign schedule, donor portal, mailing address, blog archive, RSS feed, and a "Declaration of War" nestled casually between "Vision" and "About" in the navigation menu, has become a source of particular fascination for observers.

"I've never seen someone declare war before introducing themselves," noted Dr. Patricia Holloway, a professor of political communications at UC Berkeley. "It's right there in the nav bar. Issues, Vision, Declaration of War, About, Contact, Shop. He declared war and then told us his hobbies. Hoodies ship in five to seven business days."

Central to Thompson's philosophy is the concept of the "Deviancy Signal"—the theory that citizens who live openly and then attempt privacy for the first time will trigger algorithmic suspicion, having created a "baseline of normalcy" against which any deviation becomes visible.

"You posted a casserole recipe in 2019," Thompson wrote in a recent blog post. "Unencrypted. Innocent. Foolish. In 2029, the regime shifts. You download a VPN. Congratulations—you've become a nocturnal animal walking in daylight. Your first act of privacy is your loudest confession. The casserole was the trap. You set it yourself."

When reached for comment, area grandmother Dolores Whitman, 67, seemed confused by the accusation that her location-tagged photos of heirloom tomatoes constituted "weapons of mass normalcy" and "bricks in a cage."

"I just wanted my daughter to see how big the Early Girls got this year," Whitman said, visibly concerned. "Is my zucchini really... forging chains?"

According to Thompson's framework, yes. Whitman's zucchini is forging chains.

Thompson's supporters have rallied around the message, many expressing enthusiasm for the candidate's vision of a society where "normal is so rare the watchers have nothing to compare us to."

"The stated goal is universal illegibility," explained campaign volunteer Derek Morrison, 34, who signed up using his personal email address. "Everyone should behave so erratically that human pattern recognition fails entirely. That's the platform. That's the utopia. Disorder is the plan."

When asked how this squares with the campaign's extensive digital footprint—the blog archive, the newsletter signup, the donor database, the voter registration drive to a state-run website—Morrison paused.

"Well," he said, after a moment. "I guess we're doing irony?"

The campaign has also drawn attention for Thompson's theory of "friendship as data breach." In a widely-shared blog post, Thompson described a hypothetical privacy-conscious person who spends "a decade becoming a ghost in the machine," only to have their work "actively dismantled" by a friend who texts them "lol."

"Your phone became a government microphone," Thompson wrote. "Ten years of discipline, vaporized by two vowels and a consonant. Friendship was the vulnerability."

Local resident Sandra Chen, 41, who recently texted "omg same" to a friend, has reportedly spent the week in existential crisis.

"Did I... did I dismantle someone's entire life's work?" Chen asked, staring at her phone. "I was just agreeing about how busy we've been. I didn't know I was shouting into a government microphone."

Thompson's response, posted to his public blog: "You were. You did. You are."

Perhaps most striking is Thompson's insistence that unencrypted grocery lists constitute "a failure of imagination so profound it borders on moral crime."

"In the tribunal to come," Thompson wrote, "the milk will be Exhibit A. The eggs will corroborate. You confessed in the dairy aisle and didn't even know it."

Representatives for the California dairy industry declined to comment on their products' role in future thoughtcrime prosecutions.

The campaign has sought to clarify that Thompson's vision is not about hiding wrongdoing, but about "destroying the baseline" and "making privacy the default." To this end, supporters are encouraged to "become deviations" and "obliterate normalcy."

"Forget voting," Thompson wrote in his most recent post. "Forget jury duty. The real measure of citizenship is becoming a statistical anomaly. The Founders didn't write 'We the People.' They wrote 'We the Untrackable Noise.'"

Historians have been unable to locate this phrase in any founding document.

As of press time, Thompson was preparing for a televised town hall in which he plans to explain why citizens who allow themselves to be photographed at family gatherings are "teaching the algorithm what peace looks like," which he describes as "the ultimate betrayal."

The town hall will be broadcast live, recorded for archival purposes, and available on the campaign's YouTube channel, which has 47,000 subscribers.

Viewers are encouraged to register for email updates.