In August, a coordinated PlayStation 5 blackout protest arose from a deeply human tension — the desire to hold something real in an increasingly intangible world. Organized in opposition to Sony's removal of disc drives from future consoles, the campaign sought to make dissent legible in the language platforms understand: data. Yet according to market research firm Circana, the numbers never moved, and the silence of millions of absent players turned out not to be silence at all.