The Storm May 31, 2026 david
Target with SAAS
A look at the case-file knowledge database I am building. My own targeting situation is one of its cases, and as the structure comes together the thing that becomes clear is the medium. Dated events, persons, organizations, alternative explanatory scenarios: all of it binds together in an organized way only when the relationships between them are clickable. A word-processing document cannot draw that connectivity. HTML can. The point is to let someone like an investigator drive through my experience the way I saw it, not read about it on a page.
I have been building a piece of software for a while now, for several reasons that do not all reduce to one thing. One of the reasons, and the one this entry is about, is that I needed a place to keep a case file on my own targeting situation. The screenshots above are from the current cut of it: a Knowledge Database — `kdb` — with my situation as one of its cases, called The Target. The first view is the case overview, with the structural pieces a case file actually has — Background, Timeline, Entities (broken out by category), Speculations. The second drills into one of those entity categories — Cultic — to show what a populated category looks like in practice: six entities I have reason to track in that lens. The third is the Scenarios view, where each card is a distinct alternative explanatory account, flagged as speculative on purpose. The fourth is the Vectors view — proposed connections and relationships between entities, grouped by network. Structure first; the content fills in as the case fills in.
What I did not anticipate, and what has become clear as the structure comes together, is that the thing that makes a case file legible is the medium. Dated events, persons and organizations, what they did and to whom, and the competing explanatory scenarios — all of these only ever bind together in an organized way when the relationships between them are clickable. A word-processing document cannot draw connectivity. It can list. It can footnote. It cannot show that this person belongs to that entity, who shows up on that date, in that scenario, with this consequence. HTML can.
That is the thing this is for. If I ever have to hand a record of all this to a serious recipient — an investigator, a lawyer, an agency intake — putting it in front of them as a stack of paragraphs and tables would do most of the actual work to them. Setting it up as a structured, linked, clickable case file lets them drive through my experience the way I saw it, instead of reading about it. The reading is on a page. The driving is the point. I made a metameme for this exact thought today — Pages, in the Metamemes series on Big2Day.
And here is the thing that struck me as I was writing this entry up. What I am building for myself could be useful to other people. Maybe I have just started building the actual kryptonite to this targeting problem. Once it is more polished, there is no reason it could not be handed to anyone else who finds themselves on the receiving end of this kind of sustained pressure — a place to keep track of what is happening to them, and a set of well-developed methodologies for sorting it all out. The thing that helped me get my arms around my own case is, in principle, the same thing that could help someone else get their arms around theirs.
