Trust Your Eyes
How to See Power When Narratives Collapse
I remember as a kid, I always wanted to watch a live magic show. I wanted to watch a real magician cut their assistant in half, make doves appear from thin air, and pull impossible objects from their hat. I wanted to see how it was all done.
“The secret isn’t in the trick, kid. It’s in where they make you look.”
That maxim has never felt more relevant than it does today. Over the past 24 hours, we’ve watched a series of national stories unfold that feel like a grand, tragic magic show. In Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, and the official story was that he was a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin.” That story turned to dust within hours as bystander videos showed a very different reality. In a Los Angeles courtroom, landmark trials began against the world’s biggest social media companies, with plaintiffs arguing that platforms like Instagram and TikTok are deliberately designed to be addictive, harming children for profit.
On the surface, these stories seem disconnected. One is about state violence and immigration enforcement; the other is about corporate power and technology. But if we look where the magicians don’t want us to, we can see the same trick at play. We can see the patterns of how power works in the 21st century.
The Great Unraveling: When Seeing is Resisting
What we’re witnessing is a large-scale collapse of official narratives. The story the government told us about the Minneapolis shooting wasn’t just a lie; it was a sophisticated attempt at perceptual management. They released photos of the victim’s gun, used loaded terms like “terrorist,” and tried to frame our understanding before we had a chance to see for ourselves. Their story was designed to make us see a threat, not a VA nurse with a licensed firearm who was filming a protest.
But then, the videos emerged. And suddenly, we were all faced with a choice. Do we believe the official story or do we trust our own eyes? Minnesota’s Governor, Tim Walz, put it best when he urged Americans to do the latter. This act of trusting our direct perception over institutional authority is a powerful form of what tfp Collective calls adaptive refusal. It’s a refusal to accept the terms of reality set by those in power. It doesn’t require a protest sign or a political party; it just requires the courage to believe what you see.
This pattern, official narrative versus documented reality, is everywhere. It’s in the social media trials, where internal company documents allegedly show that platforms like Meta and TikTok knew about the mental health harms their products were causing to children, even as they publicly denied it. The legal battle is an attempt to hold them accountable not for their intentions, but for the pattern effects of their designs. The platforms are designed to make us look at an endless scroll of content, to keep our attention captured, because our attention is their product. The real magic trick is convincing us this is just harmless fun.
Tension and the Interplay of Intentions
So, what do we do in a world where institutions of power are actively trying to manage our perception? Shift our thinking. Instead of seeking some final liberatory victory or a perfect solution in the moment, create small, unstable pockets where domination can’t fully rely on you to behave responsibly, predictably, or coherently. This is a different relationship to what feels necessary. It’s a variation of intention, inviting tension and discontinuity in the reproduction of violence.
When bystanders film police, it creates tension and interrupts the continuity of power by challenging the official narrative. When parents and schools sue tech giants, it creates tension and interrupts the continuity of power by imposing legal and financial costs on the business model of attention capitalism. This creates tension critical to the capacity to change.
When we refuse to accept simplistic, partisan explanations and instead look for the underlying patterns, we’re making domination work harder. We are refusing to be easily sorted into predictable categories. This is what solidarity in practice looks like. It’s not everyone agreeing on everything. It’s unexpected alliances forming in opposition to a specific form of power. In Minneapolis, we saw gun rights advocates and critics of federal immigration enforcement find common ground in their skepticism of government overreach. This is messy, it’s not ideologically pure, and that’s precisely why it’s effective. It creates unanticipated friction for the powerful.
These news stories are teaching us, in real time, how power operates. They’re inviting us to become better at noticing the patterns, at refusing the narratives, and at finding solidarity in unexpected places. The world isn’t going to be saved by a single hero or a perfect political movement. But it can be changed, one act of noticing at a time.
The magician’s secret is to make you look away from the mechanism of the trick. Our task is to learn to look directly at it. To trust our eyes. And to get curious about the patterns we see.