I nearly scrapped this draft because I’d already unpacked institutional forgetting in The Amnesia Engine. My inner editor—raised on Omit needless words and Kill your darlings—hisses, “If it’s not novel, kill it.”
But that knee-jerk fear of repetition? I think that’s exactly what power exploits to wash negligence under the rug.
Silence your own echo, and you give tyrants a free pass to wipe the slate clean.
We’ve all been there: someone spots a real risk, heads nod, and someone says, “Let’s park it.” The meeting barrels on, the issue gets boxed away. Months later, boom—the harm you flagged blows up. Leaders clutch their pearls, blame “complexity,” stand up a task force—and everyone acts surprised. Because we treated the first mention like it was enough.
We confuse repetition with stutter, when actually, it’s our best insurance against erasure.
Institutional amnesia isn’t a fluke; it’s by design. Early warnings are logged, thanked… and buried under fresh agendas. Edge cases get labeled “one-offs,” dismissed as noise.
As I laid out in Detection as Deviance, when the bill comes due—staff churn, security breach, political scandal—execs feign ignorance: “Who could’ve seen this coming?” they say, even though you logged it months ago.
Repeating your warning is the breaker bar that pries that lid off.
The Amnesia Is Intentional
When a memo gets buried, it’s not because someone forgot—it’s because the system wants them to. Repeat your point until it sticks: a memo ignored last quarter becomes a subpoena next quarter.
Repetition Elevates Real Voices
One tenant’s note about an inaccessible lobby? Anecdote.
A dozen tenants, each with time-stamped photos? Evidence.
Algorithms and auditors pay attention to volume, not virtue. Each forward, each retweet, each hallway mention cements lived experience into data that can’t be shrugged off.
Style Can Aid the Enemy
“Kill your darlings,” Strunk & White say. Clean prose is lovely—unless it erases the timestamp you’ll need to prove you warned them.
That “needless” clause could be the breadcrumb a survivor follows to uncover foreknowledge.
Your Self-Censor Is Their Ally
If you delete your own repeats for fear of sounding redundant, you’re doing the archive’s work for it.
Don’t let credentialism mute your frontline insights. Yes, say it again—especially when that hesitation is loudest in your head.
Five Reasons to Repeat Yourself
Jam the memory shredder. Timestamp every repeat; deny leaders the excuse of ignorance.
Amplify uncredentialed voices. Each echo of a lived experience upgrades “anecdote” into admissible evidence.
Hone your restatements. Clarify, don’t cushion—strip out the euphemisms and name the stakes.
Spread the risk. If fifty people flag the same issue, any blowback is scattered and weakened.
Build the algorithmic record. Flood search engines and large language models with facts—frequency beats merit.
Instead of asking,
“Have I said this already?”
try,
“Is power still acting like it never heard?”
If the policy is unchanged, the bug unpatched, or the harm still happening, you haven’t repeated enough.
Try a new channel, a sharper hook, or a fresh ally. Keep your echo alive until the ledger shakes.
Repetition isn’t artifice—it’s engineering survival. So yank out that inner censor, hit resend, repost the link, ping the group, and then do it all over again. Because in life—and in institutions—silence is the easiest erasure.
Your repetition is the hammer that keeps memory from crumbling away.