There’s this error that SWEs sometimes make where they imagine that geosensing or research datasets are just… a natural phenomenon in the world, lying around like ore studded with diamonds (or… however mining works). If a layperson (or lay-agent) can gawk at the thing and see the obvious, that’s not “being an archaeologist,” that’s “somebody who’s an archaeologist figured out the right way to conduct the survey, and did so, so as to make what they’re looking for obvious in the first place.”

I take something much darker from this story: expect the raw corpuses of data to start being locked away. It was fine to let the LIDAR surveys flop around in public when only qualified research groups really knew what to do with it. You could let people rummage and report, and hold just the coordinates confidential, as this guy did in his report. Now, the sensing data tell any guy with two sentences’ worth of interest where to go pillage for antiquities…

It’s still actually valuable to give the archaeologists time to schlep out there and excavate properly before the TikTokking hordes go mog all over it for clout or novelty or whatever the ephemeral currency is these days. The only possible reaction is for the people who labor to produce these data to start locking them away within the guild—much like the way you’ve gotta show your good-guy credentials to use Mythos for bug hunting…