In A Wrinkle in Time, author Madeleine L’Engle describes a town called Camazotz, a suburban community held captive by a dark force. There, all the houses are exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray. The same number of dull flowers dot each yard. Children at play bounce their balls and skip their ropes in perfect unison. Conformity is the law.

The key to establishing this uniformity, it becomes clear, is to create a network of citizen informants to report children whose play is not quite right, who throw their balls into the air defiantly instead of bouncing them in time.