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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl

Membrane  
  A listening device.  

She was somewhere behind me, near the closet door. The unit was rustling, falling. I was listening, all listening. I remembered - no, it glistened in my mind for one hundredth of a second - I once had to calculate the curve of a new type of street membrane. (These membranes are handsomely decorated and are placed over all the avenues, registering all street conversations for the Bureau of Guardians.) I remembered a rosy, concave trembling membrane, a strange being consisting of one organ only, an ear...
Technovelgy from We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
Published by Not Known in 1922
Additional resources -

Compare to the telescreen from George Orwell's 1984.

Compare also to this stele found in ancient Egypt!


(Egyptian stele with ears, dedicated by Amenemope
to the sky-goddess Hathor “who listens to prayers”.
From Thebes, c.1100 BC
)

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from We
  More Ideas and Technology by Yevgeny Zamyatin
  Tech news articles related to We
  Tech news articles related to works by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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