glances at white house
might wana start with that... 👀
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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34x convicted but not sentenced criminal in there.
Thinks it can ~~eliminate all crime in America~~ make a shit load of money
And if/when it eliminates all crime it will just lobby to make more things illegal.
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This is just an ad for obvious bullshit. Forbes may as well be running articles about how ozempic is done because of this one weird trick a local veteran discovered.
There's just not much coverage (probably intentionally) but I wanted to post about it bc the only other recent story I could find was this one and didn't know if it would be deleted for not being a typical news source
So they're gunna use AI to find ways to better fund public education and harm reduction programs to keep people out of prisons while eliminating the pretext for hyper-militarized policing forces? Right?
...Right?
I'll believe it when they catch a McDonald's manager shorting his employees' wages.
there's a lot of mid-century French theorists spinning in their graves right now
Can you elaborate please ? This sounds interesting
many mid-20th century French thinkers like Foucault, Debord, Deleuze and Baudrillard spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and technology. Lots of this stuff has turned out to be extremely prescient. (Ellul is another example, but as a Christian Anarchist his critiques of what he called the Technical Society, are a bit of an outlier from the other guys above who, despite a plurality of ideas and perspectives, were all coming from a pretty similar place wrt their philosophical backgrounds)
A pretty easy to digest example is Deleuze's "Postscript on Societies of Control", which is like 5 pages long and available for free online, written ca 1990 that is pretty spooky in how accurately it predicted the current state of affairs.
The real king here is Baudrillard but his writing isn't always the most accessible
I'm reading Ellul right now and loving it. His predictions were pretty freaky accurate. Especially since he wasn't really a traditional philosopher. I think he had a background in sociology, but he was a law professor, and his writing almost seems to be him writing out well educated vibes.
He also joined the French resistance against Nazis during world war ii and was firmly opposed to the idea of separating Christianity from the socialist aspects of Jesus. Just all around bad ass. I couldn't imagine a better foil for the jackass Nazis trying to run shit now.
I kinda feel like most people should be reading the the Technological Society right now bc of how accurate his predictions were.
The focus on efficiency as a means to an end that just keeps on digging new holes to fill old ones.
Becoming so focused on achieving efficiency and then losing a piece of our humanity in the process.
He has a belief about prison camps being inevitable in a society where efficiency is the ultimate goal. But most importantly he makes it a point to emphasize that this isn't inevitable if enough people are warned in advance and revolt against it.
his book on propaganda, The Formation of Men's Attitudes, is also well worth a read.
I think his ideas on concentration camps/prison camps slot in nicely with Deleuze's ideas about Control Societies and the ways that technology is being used to extend the Foucaultian ideas of discrete enclosures to never-ending enclosures in all aspects of life.
And, if you like Ellul, you should definitely check out Ivan Illich's work. He's another social critic coming from a heterodox Christian perspective (Catholic in this case). His ideas can seem a bit unintuitive at and even off-putting to modern sensibilities at times (especially his idea of Life as Idol and his critique of modern medicine in general) but he's another guy with a lot going on that has been pretty accurate in his prognosticating of contemporary society.
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Oh look, it's the main villain in a Cyberpunk novel.
They’re going to build a society in which all basic needs such as access to food, water, education, housing, and health care are provided to all people making the need for most crime unnecessary???
That would actually be cheaper than what they're trying to do.
Before we try to manage the entire population at large, let's just eliminate crime in prisons and jails. That's a controlled environment, but it's rife with crime. If we can't fix a controlled environment, how can we possibly fix an open environment?
They don't want to fix it, they want power intended to help fix it, similar to what prison guards have, outside of prisons.
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This company has illegally installed their cameras in more than one town, then tried to sell the local police force on them.
They have lawyers on staff that they use to coach local politicians on how to hold the votes to establish contracts with them in ways that aren't technically illegal, but ensure that no community opposition has a way to have their voices heard.
You can find a lot of these sprts of stories by searching online. In local subreddits, ones dedicated to talking about flock, and local news.
Benn Jordan has a good 40 minute video giving an overview of these systems, how they work, what they track, and why they are a problem. He highlights some cases where families were held at gunpoint by police due to failures of these systems. He also experiments with defeating the AI that reads plates.
Louis Rossman is currently leading a campaign against their installation where he lives in Austin, Texas right now. Has a number of videos on it.
Overview before the Austin City Council vote: https://youtu.be/4RM09nKczVs
Call for people to show up at the Austin City Council session to discuss the potential contract with Flock, and showing how difficult it is to find this sort of stuff and be involved with your local government: https://youtu.be/g4vL1ERdZ9Y
Call to action 2: https://youtu.be/hDOmYqlwxD4
Austin City Council reschedules the vote (in a questionably illegal fashion) with less than 24 hours notice when they realize they kicked the hornet's nest: https://youtu.be/iscDYp6dtl8
Minor followup during the wait for the revised time, at two of the three parks with 90% of reported car break ins these cameras are meant to deter: https://youtu.be/2QbtDWrlPpc
Also, yeah there really isn't much out there about this surveillance AI company that just kind of appeared out of nowhere ~2017.
Kinda like this other one that appeared out of nowhere ~2015
I wanted to share this article but wasn't sure if it would be allowed bc it's not a typical source https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/ai-surveillance-flock-safety-privacy-us-dunwoody-125090900393_1.html
They were coming up all over the place when I was looking for a new job ~3 years ago. Everything about them skeeved me out and I had to keep ignoring their postings.
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He also experiments with defeating the AI that reads plates.
Whoever figures out how to make this shit worthless is going to be given king like status very quickly
BTW have you heard of this new tx law targeting "jugging?"
It sounds like a made up excuse to pull people over for trying to fool plate readers https://sh.itjust.works/comment/20899084
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Great resources! I'd like to add the ALPR Map of Flock Cameras, DeFlock.
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Does that include the content theft used to train the AI models?
Of course not
Flock? Or other models? Cuz I don’t think they’re training license plate OCR via scraping Reddit posts.
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I want to see the camera that will stop white-collar crime.
That's kind of the point. Only target crime by poor brown people as they can't afford lawyers.
Try putting a surveillance system in a corporate boardroom and see how that goes over.
Are they going to place cameras in the white house? Because that would be a start.
Americans when you talk about gun control: NOOO mah freedom, I need it to protect myself from the government.
Americans when you tell them a private company is going to monitor and track every citizen, basically making a dystopian police state: I have nothing to hide so it's fine.
I feel Europe is basically the other way around, less guns, but more privacy.
I was going to say have you looked at the shit the U.K. is doing lately, but sometimes I forget they voted their way into authoritarianism
I will say though, I'm very surprised there have been so many local governments within Europe that seem to be allowing this kind of shit.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-surveillance-software/a-73497117
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Don't be so sure about the privacy part. Sure Europe so far seems to have had a privacy first policy, but that's about to change in the coming days https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Yeah we (Europeans) should also constantly keep fighting for our privacy and freedom. Thanks for sharing the link I'm glad the Netherlands is against it.
Before reading anything else, I'm going all in on this only mentioning violent or public crimes and ignoring financial or corporate crimes
Cameras + Drones + AI. Yup, nothing to solve the real crimes.
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No they don't.
They think saying they do will make them rich.
If you think you want to live in a place where all crime has been eliminated, you are just wrong. You do not want to live in such a place.
That's the thing, no crime but nobody feels safe ever again.
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Is this ~~damage control~~ propaganda after the popular Benn Jordan video?
Chinese drones, hardware, software will make America great again👍
why wait. pre-crime
Funny story… Flock is already pitching that.
How to stop crime in America in one easy step: lose all laws. Runnerup solution: hold wealthy accountable to existing laws and remove loopholes for the elite, allowing wealth inequality to balance and improve access to education and basic human needs. One to me seems more practical, but I'd bet that many see both as equally horrible solutions.
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Make trains run by the clock, eh?
He acknowledges that programs to boost youth employment and cut recidivism will help.
Even better. State programs of giving people bullshit jobs earning their gratitude, loyalty and readiness to join, say, some paramilitary force?
He’s convinced that America can and should be a place where everyone feels safe. And once it’s draped in a vast net of U.S.-made Flock surveillance tech, it will be.
A knife can be used both for cutting bread and for cutting off heads. And they are.
A gun can be used both for stopping a very bad person and for stopping a very good person. And they are.
And a surveillance net of drones (that can also carry weapons) can be used both for reducing crime and reducing dissent. And it will be.
There are moments when I'm glad I live in a backwards (relatively to the US) country.
You know what prevents crime? Better standard of living and overall living conditions. But sure let’s go robocop surveillance state instead. Can’t mess with the profits.
🎶 It's beginning to look a lot like a dystopia
Everywhere you go
There's drones flying around
Recording all the sounds
And reporting on your every move
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Anyone have any intel on how well these cameras hold up against buckshot?
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