They are watching us, everywhere, all the time. Big government, big tech, the NSA, Blackrock, Oracle, Palantir... The thousand tentacled data Cthulhu known collectively as the surveillance state...
"They" are everywhere. They are all the time. And they are watching. Listening. Recording. Compiling. Filing. Bearing witness to our everything. Constantly.
They are tracking you. They are tracking all of us. Sifting through our emails. Keeping tabs on our movements with those fancy fucking phones they keep pushing on us every few years. Following your car home with actual fucking robots. And using artificial intelligence to make it all run just smoothly enough to crush you before they crush themselves beneath the feral gods they have so recklessly birthed upon a sleeping world.
Roll your eyes and scoff but you know I'm right. People like me used to be "crazy" but now we're just inconvenient. 1984 is now and it gets worse every day while you scroll through Pornhub on your iPhone and try not to think about it. We can't pretend like we don't know anymore. Not after Edward Snowden. Not after Chelsea Manning. Not after Julian Assange and Virginia Giuffre and Wikileaks and the Epstein Files. We quite simply know too goddamn much to go back now. We know "they" know and they know we know.
We know about digital Demogorgons like PRISM, collecting a quadrillion gigabytes of raw data a second from every message you ever sent your grandmother on Facebook and every cat video you ever liked on YouTube and shoving it all into a bottomless silo in the Utah desert for later analysis when you become flagged as a terrorist threat by some backroom rubberstamp court. We know that the Trump Administration that Elon Musk paid for is making that once impossible task of full spectrum surveillance a reality with executive orders giving ambitious AI juggernauts like Palantir a license to use their constantly evolving software to centralize federal databases across agencies into a single monolithic panopticon.
And we know that those same companies and that same technology is being used to make drones semi-sentient murder machines capable of choosing their own targets and deciding if they live or die.
We all know all of these things, but we keep our heads down and pretend we don't every fucking day because we have doctor's appointments and dead-end jobs and three-hour commutes to fuck with and what the fuck can we do anyway. Learned helplessness and antisocial exhaustion are the midwives of every dystopia. That is until a Flock camera uses your "Proud Parents of a 'D' Student' bumper sticker to give you a three-hundred-dollar ticket for banging a U-turn in the 7-Eleven parking lot and the Anti-Flock Wars begin.
For those of you lucky enough not to know, Flock is one of a dozen or so companies polluting America's blacktop purgatory with Automated License Plate Recognition Cameras or ALPRs. You've probably seen them around without even knowing it. Big black poles in the center divide with a solar panel on top. Those things are surveillance cameras, but they do way more than just read plates. They use AI algorithms to catalogue the make, model, license plate, color and scratches on every car that passes by, without a warrant or even probable cause, and then uploads that information to a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can peruse at will with few regulations and very little oversight.
Flock alone has over 120,000 cameras with over 5,000 law enforcement agencies in 49 states and those things, those Ballardian erections have been used and abused by everyone from overzealous ICE agents to knuckle-dragging wife-beaters in blue. If this pisses you off then you're not alone. Over the last year, a movement spanning the great divide between left and right in this country has exploded into a wild rash of direct actions against the machines that surround us. Across the country, legions of anti-Flocking vigilantes have been busy cutting down poles, spray-painting lenses and smashing solar panels. The results speak for themselves.
Those of you sitting back in your papasan chairs, flexing like Ghandi (sexist creep that he is), rattling off the mantra of "violence solves nothing", should check in with the more than 80 cities rushing to cancel their Flock contracts like Penthouse Forum subscriptions before the villagers can run out of surveillance scarecrows to torch and turn their ire on city hall.
Flock themselves seem to be running scared. Announcing all manner of new changes and regulations that promise to reign in the cyber-stalkers in blue and give local departments more control over who they share their little caches of your information with. Even if this were true, the company is basically telling us all to chill out and leave it up to your neighborhood bully with a badge to keep your secrets. However, the reality is that the sheer mass of data we are fucking with here makes controlling it impossible for anyone but the kind of AI data mining companies killing children in Gaza right now.
San Jose's network of 479 Flock cameras alone has been revealed to have been searched nearly 2.5 million times by God knows who in just 6 months with an average of over 15,000 searches a day. We are essentially being told to calm down because Barney Fife will police YouTube sized surveillance traffic responsibly. Fuck off. That kind of boundless spyware is a weapon against basic human dignity in anyone's hands, and it is only a matter of time before creeps like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk figure out a way to monopolize the swarm and integrate it into their brave new surveillance state.
As far as I'm concerned, this means war, but this is precisely the kind of war that we need to galvanize the pissed-off masses beneath the kind of green populism necessary for mankind to confront civilization. The working poor and the traumatized lumpenproletariat need a tangible threat to wake them from their state-facilitated stasis and Flock is just the tip of the spear. Your average worker lives a thousand miles from the nearest operational factory, but they are enslaved by the highway around the clock, every day. ALPRs have affectively turned license plates into government mandated tracking devices, and they are using them to milk DoorDash servants already bled dry by gas prices shot sky high from the cannon of another goddamn forever war.
This was precisely the kind of climate that ignited the Luddite Rebellion of early 19th century England. Already suffering beneath the heavy economic tumult of the Napoleonic Wars, the long struggling peasant class of Northern England was pushed too far when factories began introducing early forms of automation to circumvent basic standard labor practices. The workers went ballistic, dressing in drag and proclaiming themselves to be the "Sister of Ludd" before going on a rampage of theatrical vandalism, destroying the machines that sought to enslave them. It would take military force to suppress them but that was in simpler times. In a savage ironic twist, the kind of technology the Crown killed to keep going has given a new generation of luddites access to things like ghost guns, drones and power tools.
Why not now? Why not here? How much dignity do we have left to spare? How many empty election cycles do we have to cringe through before we start fighting forever wars over the food and water that the fumes of the war machine have turned into dwindling resources?
To be perfectly clear, I oppose initiatory violence, but these are not people that we're fighting. They are machines and they are powered by massive data centers that consume more resources than small cities while remaining virtually unmanned. These are things that destroy people. Maybe it's time for more people to throw the second punch and destroy these things before they destroy us all.
And if that fucking child molester in the White House wants to sic his toy soldiers on a new generation of heavily armed luddites, we'll throw the fourth and fifth punch too, but that's on him.
Down with all kings but King Ludd!
Peace, Love & Anarchy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* N.W.O. by Ministry
* 1984 by David Bowie
* Genesis by Grimes
* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers
* Our Lips are Sealed by the Go Gos
* Violently Happy by Bjork
* Down In It by Nine Inch Nails
* Digital Witness by St. Vincent
* Violence by Grimes
* The Universal by Blur
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