I have a feeling that Flock will eventually go out of business, everyone will cheer and go home, then a new company will take its place behind closed doors and without the media attention
I feel like the truth is that any and all things will be taken advantage by the corpos and gov. Its not a conspiracy in the sense they planned it from the beginning, its just they have the ball and are doing something logical with it
No, and this is a place where this sites conspiratorial assumptions get cause and effect entirely reversed. The ruling class likes flock, the police like flock. They will likely agree under pressure to give up flock and attempt to quietly switch to axon or Motorola alprs, as a counterinsurgency tactic against a rapidly growing popular movement. How effective this strategy will be is yet to be seen, and making it as ineffective as possible through political education and organizing is the duty of communists/revolutionaries.
It could happen, and it is happening. It remains to be seen whether people will keep up the pressure on other mass surveillance brands.
I think the Flock hate is actually downstream of datacenter hate.
As long as they keep building datacenters, any successor product will face the same pushback.
That seems pretty backwards to me honestly
for the average person the datacenter hate is pretty abstract:
“maybe a company will build a life-ruining industrial facility in my backyard just to power their slop and surveillance systems and my local government will do nothing to protect my health and quiet enjoyment rights”
vs with mass video surveillance it’s more like: “I was already being watched in public most of the time but now it’s being expanded into my very neighborhood and streamlined with AI and cops are using it to more effectively do petty harassment, stalking, etc.” which people are already familiar with and at least know someone it’s happened to, not to mention all the big brother fantasies it evokes.
Both struggles are closely linked and more powerful together, but in my area I haven’t seen the causal relationship go that way.
People are more concerned with the direct material impacts of datacenters than more abstract things like slop and surveillance, those are actually afterthoughts. The more pressing problems are jacking up the price of water and electricity, generating noxious fumes and noise pollution, causing computing shortages, and all being done without paying taxes and with government subsidies.
Oh and it’s being done to power machines that they constantly claim will take everyone’s jobs and might end human civilization.
If datacenters were not a direct economic threat to communities I am skeptical that there’d be as much broad opposition to them.
I’m not saying you don’t have correct analysis or anything, but that just hasn’t been my experience in my local area and telling me otherwise won’t change that.
People I’ve met do hate AI, at least the people that aren’t like, PMC bootlickers (and as you say, it’s more because of the economic threat or concerns about water, than just abt slop, that was reductive), and consequently many hate datacenters, for enabling AI and causing the water threat.
They hate them in theory at least… But the one actual datacenter proposal in my immediate area I’m aware of has not yet seen anywhere near the kind of pushback that the large scale datacenters in other areas have.
And I haven’t seen it flow the other way yet, where someone is radicalized about datacenters and then learns about AI or Flock and hates it because it caused the datacenters. That may be just because there haven’t been any widely publicized datacenter buildouts in my local area since this started to become a widely known issue, but that’s what I mean about it being abstract. Datacenters two states away can be used to harm people here in my neighborhood. Flock cameras are right there on the pole, feeding data to the cop down the road. AI is shitting up our feeds and our workplaces.
Police repression based on mass surveillance is not an abstract issue here. I’ve been observed by police drones personally more than once, many people I know are harassed by the police based on surveillance cameras in targeted and overpoliced areas, and ALPR is clearly being used to make that all worse. And that’s not to mention corporate and quasi-public entities also harnessing mass surveillance to police people.
Well, let’s look at numbers.
Based on the Flock Camera Bans Tracker, 17 communities have banned Flock cameras.
Meanwhile 500 have enacted datacenter moratoriums
I just see more energy in anti-datacenter action than anti-Flock action, which I think implies that anti-Flock is downstream. That might be an oversimplification, though, and they’re actually just feeding into each other. People who oppose datacenters oppose Flock cameras, people who oppose Flock cameras oppose datacenters, and they’re radicalizing each other.
I don’t think it’s manufactured you’re just looking at the limits of liberal activism.
tbf in every thread I read on reddit about Flock camera destruction there’s always a few comments from people mentioning that there’s other companies who do the exact same thing like Axon
It’s already happening. You’re right, city and state governments are cancelling their flock contracts and just replacing with Motorola and Axon ones.
The Flock cameras are highly vulnerable to cyberattack, and the public outrage creates a situation to replace the old cameras with better ones while publicly condemning Flock.
No, it’s a win, but you are right that local governments will just try again with another brand. Anytime I’m organizing around this, I make sure to stress that flock is a brand, but not the only brand.
There’s already other camera companies out there doing exactly the same thing.
Ring doorbells are everywhere and hardly anyone cares. I think Flock’s big mistake was selling them directly to police
Any camera needs to go. I too find this too much focus on one brand.
I think this comment has it right and rather than being nitpicky with people’s wording, we should let people call it what they want, and focus on making it clear to everyone that whether or not it’s Flock brand its mass surveillance all the same and should be treated the same. Once the data exists it will be used just like flock is regardless of if it was designed to be an ALPR or not, the push is towards centralized systems like axon fusus which are honestly worse than flock.
It’s a case of genuinely good hearted people getting pissed but they have no real class consciousness or political know-how, so the liberalism means they’re channeling that anger in less-then-ideal manners.
Eg: No political discipline or central command. They have no party for guiding them.
I don’t think it’s manufactured. But people are not politically literate.
There are some places that are putting in laws that go against all the companies, though.
My read is totally different.
Flock is like Kleenex.
Maybe its a name brand, but people in actual language are just using it to mean these surveillance systems
100%, to an extent that if we still bothered with genericizing trademarks Flock would lose theirs immediately.
Most people in the US hate the idea of being pettily surveilled like this. It’s not unique to Flock. Tremendous opportunity for agitation and education here.
Most people in the US hate the idea of being pettily surveilled like this.
I’d argue the mass appeal is mostly carbrain. It scans your license plate, that gets people mad. Nobody cares about the ring cameras or all the other stalking tools cops have and misuse on the regular.
Nobody cares about the ring cameras or all the other stalking tools cops have and misuse on the regular.
I have found the opposite actually. People who have had ring cameras for years taking them down after learning* about how the data gets used. This is in a location that has been targeted heavily by ice in the last year or so though, and I think it’s more to do with it than anti flock sentiment.
*I’ve been trying to tell them the whole time, but now some source they actually trust has repeated it
Yeah people like the idea that they can surveil their own space and protect their stuff (homesteader shit) but they really dislike when outsiders (companies/government/whoever) have access to it.
I’ve heard average people hate on so called “automatic license plate readers” for years, but the catchy name and the idea of “evil tech company” is easy to understand so maybe that helped it become more mainstream, and gives a clear enemy, rather than the more constitutional arguments about surveillance people make about the cameras in general.
The type of people that go to the city hall meetings and press the issue with council members etc seem to make the point that other companies could be just as bad, and have been pushing for legislation that limits it more generally than just banning Flock. But yeah, even if they do there will probably be some subtle rebranding or other maneuvers so that essentially the same company still has government contracts for mass surveillance.
