While my research and interests see me swimming in the shit and effluvium of the web (and the data traces therein), it is always interesting to come back to the people at the other end of my power dynamic: unilateral national dictators. Forming their own cliques of power and relationships, grounded in mutual distrust, taken to amazing extremes of sanctifying their Precious Bodily Fluids from scrutiny. Firewalls of suitcases and trained personnel to scrub traces, removing bodily by-products and evidence of existence, a staff of human vacuflushes, virtual faecal networks of Grooms of the Stool. Zero-trust networks extended beyond traditional surveillance into the realm of the bodily, where performances of statecraft banquets must be considered not as vectors of traditional poisoning but in terms of likeliness of evidential excretion, politeness moderated through the act of bringing your own cutlery: 007, licensed to scrub. North and South Korea maintain a famous demilitarized zone; is there a newly virtualised one extended around the Axis of Evil’s Heads of State’s dermis and contact recipients, a King Midas touch turning all they contact not into gold but sterile, inert surfaces? The body disgorging data that there is no Online Safety Act to protect, potential traces of irrefutable internal sicknesses fuelling the stage-setting of geopolitical planning, our collective futures determined by swabs of Putin’s piss and shit and greb, data harvesting in a Jermyn-street Hazmat suit.