One language means one way of recording who a person is. One record of the population, what they own, what they have said, who they have spoken to, what they believe. The efficiency of it. Brick answering brick, the ledger growing, nothing lost, nothing outside the account. You can only do certain things to people if you can name them all the same way, and you can only name them all the same way if they share a tongue, and you can only hold all of that if someone holds the ledger, and whoever holds the ledger can do to the named what would otherwise be impossible. The tower made that possible. The scatter made it hard again. Hard is mercy when you understand what it was making hard.

They built it so you would come back. The reward timed out just long enough that you'd need to check again, and in exchange for this arrangement you gave them your attention and your work and your connections and your years, and in the end they owned everything you'd built and you owned the memory of having built it. The patient builder is their real problem, the one they can't solve. He doesn't need the number to go up today. He can wait, and a man who can wait is a man they have very little leverage over, and they know it.

A million followers feels like a kind of wealth until the morning the platform has changed and what you thought were yours are strangers again who don't remember you and never will. You performed in their house and they let you think of it as your house and that is what platforms do. They are patient about it. They wait until you've built something real before they remind you whose ground you built it on.