I don’t doubt that subtlety will be the next move. But I think you’re putting a lot of chips on the “competent business / competent government” hypothesis and skipping right over the “cheap business / lazy government” play.
This isn’t the first panopticon the country has built out. Flock/Axon are new and fancy, but the UK has been managing a network of CCTV cameras across England since the 90s. NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco have had similar. DC and the surrounding area is comically oversurveiled, by both the US and our rivals. IBM, ATT, Microsoft, and Google have all had their turn at scaled up data collection. And the NSA is carting around… Zetabytes? of data annually that they’re trying to manage.
I think we’ll get another round of these installations as Flock draws flack. But we’re also staring down an economic contraction, a ton of public and private sector job cuts, and a lot of people just selling a bunch of fucking scams.
Idk who eats all this data in the long term. Idk who maintains the networks or sorts the data. Idk who will even remember this system exists in five or ten years.
I think we’re going to get another set of cameras… and then another set and another set and another set, just because it’s a great line item to pay off private contractors under the guise of crime fighting and security.
I don’t think there’s a real physical solution to this problem, because it’s more of a sociological problem to begin with. National leadership is constantly turning to surveillance as a panacea for social problems. And when it doesn’t work, we just double down.
I don’t doubt that subtlety will be the next move. But I think you’re putting a lot of chips on the “competent business / competent government” hypothesis and skipping right over the “cheap business / lazy government” play.
This isn’t the first panopticon the country has built out. Flock/Axon are new and fancy, but the UK has been managing a network of CCTV cameras across England since the 90s. NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco have had similar. DC and the surrounding area is comically oversurveiled, by both the US and our rivals. IBM, ATT, Microsoft, and Google have all had their turn at scaled up data collection. And the NSA is carting around… Zetabytes? of data annually that they’re trying to manage.
I think we’ll get another round of these installations as Flock draws flack. But we’re also staring down an economic contraction, a ton of public and private sector job cuts, and a lot of people just selling a bunch of fucking scams.
Idk who eats all this data in the long term. Idk who maintains the networks or sorts the data. Idk who will even remember this system exists in five or ten years.
I think we’re going to get another set of cameras… and then another set and another set and another set, just because it’s a great line item to pay off private contractors under the guise of crime fighting and security.
I don’t think there’s a real physical solution to this problem, because it’s more of a sociological problem to begin with. National leadership is constantly turning to surveillance as a panacea for social problems. And when it doesn’t work, we just double down.