Comment by alistairSH
5 months ago
While I sort of agree with the premise, Flock is a camera system - I can't opt out of being recorded by the camera. By walking, I'm only opting out of being easily catalogued by default. It's not a reach for Flock to add a "men with black hoodies" mechanism alongside the existing "BMW with plate ABC-1234" mechanism.
> I can't opt out of being recorded by the camera.
That's the nature of the universe, though. Photons are emitted (including by you), captured, and the impressions they make are recorded and recalled (by biological brains and now electronic ones).
It's the police that we need to abolish, not the cameras that they (and every other organism) uses.
It's the scale - 20 years ago, somebody could stall a VHS camera and record me, but that video didn't get fed into massive databases that linked back to my purchases that day, job history, medical history, etc. Yeah, drawing a line on what's close enough to the past vs what's unpalatable is tricky - does't mean massive surveillance and data processing is a good thing.
Scale is real, but I want to suggest that we can be more optimistic than to regard it as dispositive on this matter.
As a thought experiment: imagine that in the next 20 years, a device or procedure is developed which allows a human to copy, from their visual memory, anything that they've seen (or at least seen recently) onto a digital medium, which some sort of verifiability of its veracity. This obviously presents the same scale challenges to which you're pointing - it will be impossible to walk around in public without being seen and identified in a way that's digitally verifiable.
But does it make police states and surveillance more likely, in the same way that Flock does? I think we can probably all agree that it does not.
And that tells us that it's not the vision or the memory of the vision that is the threat.
When the entirety of the commons is recorded, and the recordings made available for analysis by all, it's perfectly possible (and I think, inevitable) that police brutality (and even police legitimacy) will decrease.
We need to develop the bravery to say out loud that, as vision (meaning, better and smaller cameras, cheaper storage, etc) continues to improve, our need for police (and perhaps for states) decreases.
In this way, the problem of scale to which you correctly point is naturally counterbalanced.
Megacorps hoarding your data and oppressive governments are part of the nature of the universe‽
I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
> Megacorps hoarding your data and oppressive governments are part of the nature of the universe‽
No, I _certainly_ didn't intend to suggest that. In fact, I think that the proliferation of vision is likely to bring about an end to those institutions.
> I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
Of course, but those properties (namely, storage) are shared widely. At some very low-but-experimentally-verifiable-level, photons are force carriers for many of the most easily observed phenomena in our reality.
From that, I think it's probably the peaceful and radical way to derive that, as time moves forward, the universe (and the human condition in particular) is likely to gain vision and not lose it.
Cameras will get better and smaller. Storage will get faster and cheaper and more distributed. The photons in the public sphere will be captured with ever-increasing fidelity.
When all the public sphere is recorded, and all the recordings are available to everyone's analysis, can we overcome despotic tendencies, corruption, and police brutality, and eventually statism itself?
I think that the answer is 'yes'. So I am very cautious about shifting the blame onto the (inevitably widening) vision instead of the institution. As vision grows, the need for police is decreased (and thus, the need for an abolitionist movement is increased). That's the prize on which I hope we keep our... eye.
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