I seriously need to get this giant big cyberpunk writing/worldbuilding project of mine on the road.
Because at the moment, cyberpunk is becoming aspirational. Reality is just, dunno, cyberpunk but dumb as hell.
I like to call it burgerpunk
Its really just called capitalism
Better get the guillotines ready, make the french proud
Surely if the US is engaging in mass surveillance than China can’t be… otherwise which superpower am I supposed to cheer for?
Edgar Friendly
I wasn’t joking when I said the ccp spies on their citizens and I wasn’t joking when I said the US spies on their citizens after the Patroit Act. The normalization of a surveillance police state all across the world is terrifying.
Uk too.
Americans weren’t joking when they said that stuff about China, they were parroting an exaggerated version of the reality, which was being fed to them by people who don’t actually care about limiting mass surveillance.
And what’s worse, eventually all the information gathered from all this surveillance will be turned into training data for AI. So right now, for all intents and purposes, none of us has any true privacy. And one of the most deeply damaging aspects of this is that it changes how we think. Subconsciously, when we’re engaged in thinking and we have even a brief idea that our thoughts might somehow, someday be known (through the actions of a surveillance state, for example), we reframe our ideas so that one day they will be known by someone else; they will have an audience. This is a much different state than when we’re able to think with the freedom of knowing, even subconsciously, that our ideas are completely private.
Not to glaze surveillance, but at the very least it can have some positive results, like in China, where it helped bring down crime to non-existent levels, and increased public safety.
You can just leave your stuff on the street and come back for it later, without worrying about theft. Whether or not it balances the negatives is another question entirely, but I think we can all agree some upsides beat no upsides any day.
As opposed to countries such as the US, Australia or the UK, where surveillance is used for nothing but spying on you and ensuring you’re as miserable as physically possible. Nobody even bothers using the existing surveillance infrastructure for any positive effects. It’s like everything only has the sole purpose of benefitting the oligarchs.
Similarly, the EU is slowly pushing some surveillance plans, with no thought behind them whatsoever. As of right now, they’d be a 100% net loss for everyone, everywhere, in every situation, except the tiny elite class.
I guess they just got tired of pretending lately. Even the good old “think about the children” is used less often nowadays. Soon it’ll just be “submit without question or get executed.”
For so many years we’ve been manipulated to be grateful for everything, because we could always be living in a dystopia like China. And here we are, moving in a considerably worse direction, without even the slightest benefits of those dystopian structures.
Have we forgotten the most effective ways of keeping politicians in check?
You know what eliminates crime way better than cameras? Eliminating poverty.
Murica: “understood”
begins eliminating the poor
In the United States the murder resolution rate is around 50% (in Canada it is around 60-something%) meaning despite massive surveillance they don’t catch a lot of the more serious crimes. In NYC the most surveilled areas actually have lower murder resolution rates.
In NYC the most surveilled areas actually have lower murder resolution rates.
There’s really no way that could be a causal relationship. It’d be worth diving into the data to figure out which variables are related to each of these.
Even the good old “think about the children” is used less often nowadays. Soon it’ll just be “submit without question or get executed.”
TBH we have the “think of the corporations” line these days that’s used more than think of the children
Think of the poor, starving slumlords before passing that anti-rent gouging bill!
poor blackrock! how can we expect people to ever live in a society if they can’t exploit people and then see their plans through to make profit from them at the expense of literally everyone else?!?!
I’d rather have to worry about my shit being stolen than have ANY government owned cameras tbh. I like a little crime in my life.
For so many years we’ve been manipulated to be grateful for everything, because we could always be living in a dystopia like China
I’d like to know what world you’ve been living in where that was the case because for as long as I can remember, being raised in America we are taught about the racism, economic issues, and rise of inequality, and watching it blasted on the news
You are grossly generalizing a country with 50 individual education systems let alone how different regions like the south are from the northeast.
You’re trying to make the same point you’re willfully missing yourself.
Seems like USA is trying to be everything bad with china with none of the good parts
What good parts are there in China for the average citizen?
IDK their public transit and high speed trains seem pretty good. And they seem to actually be building high density, walkable housing (and it must be relatively affordable if some people can afford 2 or 3 places to live).
What ever happened to that Social Credit score
Seems to have been mostly projection. America is the one with the “social credit score” that is used to judge people’s worth before most important transactions.
Umm not sure if you have been to China or actually know people from there, but no, public transportation isn’t good everywhere (especially in rural regions), and housing absolutely isn’t affordable, typically you need an entire families worth of income that goes to the son to afford a home, and on top of that, when you buy a home in China, you are given 70 year lease on the land, so not sure how many Americans would want that sort of thing. Great thinking of how things are far worse in other countries though.
housing absolutely isn’t affordable typically you need an entire families worth of income that goes to the son to afford a home, and on top of that, when you buy a home in China, you are given 70 year lease on the land, so not sure how many Americans would want that sort of thing.
Weird how despite all that, the home ownership rate in China is 96%
Maybe read up a little more on that before touting that 90% number. Not exactly sure you’ll enjoy those results: https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes/
What part of any of that am I supposed to be scandalized by, exactly? Because I read the whole article and I didn’t see a single reason I shouldn’t be touting the 96% home ownership rate.
Aren’t uber and lyft vehicles privately owned cars? They can’t do that…
An important part of the article is that Uber and Lyft are not sending footage - it was an idea Flock came up with and pitched.
I’m sure they will make it part of the employment contract under the guise of “safety.”
Chinese citizen would be living under
Correction: Chinese citizens already living under a surveillance state. UK and now US and also many other countries is merely learning from the best(worst). Mandatory age verification for socmed and game? China already have that years ago. ISP level blocking? Great Firewall of China is there from the beginning.
End to end encryption chats are banned in China btw. China is living in this complete dystopia already and the only reason we don’t hear it because China is very good at hiding this. The great firewall is as much to contain Chinese inside as it is to repel others.
China is very good at hiding this
then how do you know about this ?
End to end encryption chats are banned in China btw
I know imessage is commonly used and it’s e2e. The firewall is a blacklist not a whitelist, and Github isn’t blocked. They would have to manually block any server that hosts matrix/xmpp if they wanted to actually enforce that. The most annoying thing they do (at least in Shanghai) is the ISP’s have
raw.githubusercontent.comresolve to0.0.0.0, but you can just manually add the ip in your/etc/hostsfile. Maybe it’s to make downloading releases tarballs more annoying to encourage domestic alternatives?
The US was spying on all backbone data 20 years ago. The US has no need to block websites because it has a big enough propaganda network to control the narrative on those websites, and there is less incentive to propping up the US tech industry by blocking competition like there is with the Chinese tech industry.
what fucking dashcams connect to the internet? and why would someone want to pay for a dataplan for it?
Uber certainly would. Just sell the data and make profit. Or realistically, just start scanning for bluetooth and wifi mac addresses, and upload that with GPS, which is what Flock is planning on doing, now you just tie it to a one time scanned license plate. Isn’t technology grand? Ugh.
It isn’t just a surveillance state, they are 100% building a behavior prediction algorithm state.
The US government already started pre-crime policing. No future tense about it, full on dystopia is already here.
If a man is guilty for what goes on in his mind
Then give me the electric chair for all my future crimes
John Oliver just did an episode on Police Surveillance Technology. It’s sad and scary stuff.
He also mentioned Atlas of Surveillance, a website to check what’s going on in your area.
Season 3 of Westworld seems to be a bit more realistic than I had initially thought.
The surveillance state is not just in the US. China and the UK love that shit too. Pretty much any government with the money and will for it is doing it for the benefit of a digital panopticon.
Funny how this surveillance never correlates with any happiness or safety metrics. It’s almost like it’s not there to improve society but to control it or something 🤔
For decades people have been warming about inverted totalitarianism… where private companies do the heavy lifting in controlling and surveillance or the population. Very few listened. Now that we are approaching complete sacrifice of your privacy to these companies, people are finally waking up. But it may be too late.
Guillotines
Capitalists are constantly telling on themselves.
This isn’t a capitalism problem. It’s an authoritarianism problem. The only thing about this that relates to capitalism is that it’s a private company setting up the cameras instead of the state doing it.
Capitalism is about gaining all power (capital). Its end goal is complete surveillance. 2+2 = 4
Yes, 2+2=4, but so does 1+3, 0+4, 1.5+2.5, etc.
The problem of mass surveillance is coming from people who want control. The fact that they are capitalist this time is coincidental. It could just as easily be a theocratic government or an absolute monarchy that wants the level of control that mass surveillance can enable.
Capitalism is pretty inherently authoritarian. The boss calls the shots.
That’s a gross over simplification that ignores the influence of the insurance industry shifting the baseline of public surveillance and crony capitalism that infects our municipalities.
Capitalists have been trying to build the panopticon since the first factories.
Yes, that’s how it’s implemented under capitalism.
States further into their authoritarianism don’t need to bother with middle men and cutouts and shit.
They just put up the cameras.
“Decentralize the mass surveillance!” cries the anarcho-libertarian. “Big Government is monopolizing all the cameras! We should let the market decide who gets spied on!”
This is absolutely a capitalism problem. It’s what happens when you let corporations do whatever without consequences as long as they can afford the bribes and in turn get contacts on taxpayer money.
True, but I could also see an authoritarian “communist” government doing all the same surveillance bullshit.
So, while it’s a capitalism problem this time, I don’t think it’s a capitalism-exclusive problem. It really is, at its root, an authoritarianism problem. This time, you’ve got capitalist authoritarianism, but next time maybe a different flavor.
China already has this sort of system completely built out.
Yeah, it’s creepy. There’s almost no secure place in the world at this point.
I’ll tell you more, the UK is one of the leading countries in cameras per capita, either installed or accessible by the authorities (not sure about exact details). They built government surveillance without any communism in sight.
(Leaving alone that China’s state capitalism is the opposite of communism.)
In 2023, China had over 700 million cameras tracking the population.
That’s one camera for every two citizens.
But yes the UK is also building a surveillance state.
But is the technology developed by the state or are they contracting it out to a private company?
How does that matter?
Both are fucking horrible.
But also, China does both. In 2023 they had over 700 million cameras tracking people.
State: communist.
Private: capitalist.
End result: authoritarianism.
You can’t get rid of authoritarianism the same way you can’t get rid of stupid. Some portion of the population will always be the bottom of the bell curve.
What you can do, however, is redirect it into something positive. For example, Japanese social structures are pretty fuckin’ authoritarian. Most people wouldn’t even dream of littering.
You can’t get rid of authoritarianism the same way you can’t get rid of stupid.
True, but you can get rid of hierarchical authority itself, leaving the authoritarians nothing to work with. Ask your local anarchist how.
Authoritarianism means very little, it’s such a broad term that doesn’t localise the origin of repression. Instead of considering the root of the problem here, which is capitalism/private property, you look at a feature or a phenomenon.
So every capitalist country is authoritarian?
Yes, necessarily so if we were to take the epithet that is “authoritarianism” seriously. We just don’t talk about what women in marriage have to put up with (the old adage of not biting the hand that feeds one), how we treat children and how accepted it is to subject people to dismal working conditions. It’s considered normal, this is the status quo. You need to enforce property laws with deadly force, suppress movements and the organic formation of opinions and views, in order to for the system to keep functioning as it has.
Just to recheck, you’re saying that Scandinavian countries are authoritarian?
And, you realize that some capitalist countries with private property and capitalist markets, in practice approach anarchy?
Just to recheck, you’re saying that Scandinavian countries are authoritarian?
Yes of course I am. I am Scandinavian. Have you ever travelled across the Öresund Bridge in a bus? They stop 50+ passengers for upwards of 45 minutes, pull out all the black and arab people seeking work, as well those who look particularly poor, subject them to highly invasive searches and then send some back if they feel like they can get away with it. Or take entering Gothenburg’s harbor by ferry. The send a military ship out to escort your boat. They don’t really have to do this, but they do it to really show you who is the boss/who has authority. When you arrive, something similar to the bus example happens. Take the all the black people into special rooms, make people walk past drug sniffing dogs (that have incredibly high rates of false positives, but that doesn’t matter because it’s about creating anxiety), and metal detectors. it’s not just designed to scare minorities, it’s also meant to incite fear in regular people.
Also, search SÄPO, they are so lacking in transparency that even Swedish government media can’t deny their lack of oversight and unbridled power.
And, you realize that some capitalist countries with private property and capitalist markets, in practice approach anarchy?
I do. Anarchy of production is the chief reason why climate change can’t be battled by capitalism. I am not an anarchist, I don’t know why you are bringing this up.
Meh, there’s some smart people that have come up with a pretty clear understanding of authoritarianism.
https://theauthoritarians.org/
But your conclusion is also partly correct, the authoritarian personality is not inherently bad, they must first be weaponized.
I didn’t say anything about the authoritarian personality and I don’t really care that some people have figured out something they view as being integral to comprehending society. Honestly, I find life under the systems people like Fromm consider least authoritarian, think Sweden in the 70s, to still be be very brutal towards the masses.
But you know what, I believe your conclusion is also party correct. People with an “authoritarian” streak can be used to guard a worker’s movement.
That’s how they get away with it too. Worst constitutional loophole ever.
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The same thing is happening/has already happened in China, the government there can find you and black bag you anywhere at any time. Ask Naomi Wu.
Russia basically is this already.
Europe is also trying to go there with the repeated attempts to pass chat control and age restrictions on internet access.
In the US, capitalism is the tool the authoritarians are using to accomplish their goals, and it is absolutely enabling the spread of the surveillance state. Capitalism itself is not the motivation for the surveillance state, it’s just being used by the authoritarians. If we’re going to put a stop to this kind of behavior, we have to get the targets right. Flock and the other companies like them are a symptom of the larger problem.
Ask Naomi Wu.
To my knowledge, Naomi Wu was never “black bagged”. She’s still selling stuff on cybernightmarket. She’s just done posting politics.
But to compare the grief Wu got (and, from what I read forever ago, it was as much other terminally online types screaming at her as any state intervention) with Leqaa Kordia or Mahmoud Khalil both of whom absolutely were “black bagged” in the literal sense? Wu was not indefinitely detained in a prison camp or threatened with torture unless she “voluntarily self-deported”, at least as far as I could find.
Russia basically is this already.
Russia is so much more, as they’ve weaponized their prison population into military conscripts.
Really not looking forward to the day I’m arrested by an ICE agent who is, himself, wearing a bomb collar.
Capitalism itself is not the motivation for the surveillance state
The surveillance state is a vital tool of private industry when executives fear a proletariat insurrection. It is a necessary precondition to prevent insurrection.
Russia is so much more, as they’ve weaponized their prison population into military conscripts.
It’s even more than that. Russia has weaponized their entire civilian population. It’s straight up nazi-level shit where you’re either Z or you’re a traitor. This is what American maga salivates about - complete and utter obedience through surveillance, legal and cultural bullying.
To my knowledge, Naomi Wu was never “black bagged”. She’s still selling stuff on cybernightmarket. She’s just done posting politics.
She disappeared from western social media, where she was very active before. Her latest post on twitter was chilling, I just hope she and her partner are ok.
Wu said. “- absolutely no one gives a shit. I could be dead in a ditch- but we aren’t actually people, we’re just signs for people like you in the West to wave at each other in their ideological war.”
:-/
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…including, like, the custodian?
You’re not going to win over undecided people by advocating for unreasonable, indiscriminate violence, you’re just going to give the opposition ammunition for calling you an extremist.
It would be far more productive to support groups like the EFF and ACLU in lobbying for legislation to prevent such abusive technology. Also get involved in your local town/county politics to advocate against the installation of such things. The absolute last thing the sick fuckers running companies like Flock want is for people to organize against them. Don’t push people away, encourage them to join.
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Cut it with your divisive fetishism
Pick a side.
Right… I’m the one being divisive, by saying that we should organize and work together. Hilarious.
systems that have already proven useless
The thing doing the most damage to Flock right now is the negative public opinion pushing counties and townships to cancel contracts. Those “useless” systems are actively responding to the demands of their citizens, and Flock cameras are being removed in many jurisdictions. The way you hurt a capitalist enterprise is to take away its money (loss of contracts).
So, how about you “pick a side” and join in with the effort that is actually producing results?
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/09/flock-cameras-backlash-cancellations-01026242
https://banflockcameras.com/tracker/
Take Action
We don’t have to accept this future. You can:
Stay informed about local meetings: ALPR.watch provides a calendar and map of upcoming public meetings with agenda items related to Flock and other surveillance systems. You can sign up for email alerts when meetings near you are scheduled.
Contact your local officials and demand transparency and oversight of surveillance programs. (See 5 Calls)
Support organizations like the ACLU and the EFF who challenge mass surveillance in the courts and legislatures.
Start conversations with neighbors and community groups about the risks of systems like Flock.
Share this website and make your community aware.
We weren’t jokingly saying the Chinese are living under it, though.
Yeah because you were stupid and gullible. :)
