The Case for Total Control
On Flock cameras, basement bioweapons, and shedding libertarian priors
Part of why I write is to explore ideas and topics. This essay is no different and is inspired as a response to this post. Treat it as a devils advocate position more than anything else. With that slightly cowardly caveat…
In the above essay The American Tribune argues the relatively uncontroversial case that Flock cameras will just increase anarcho-tyranny. He states they won’t save us from South Africanization because it is all about the will to enforce the law. Something I completely agree with and he states it succinctly:
It is not that we don’t know who the criminals are. We do, often by name. There are 1000 people in Atlanta who commit 40 percent of the crime in the city.14 The police know them by name, and know what crimes they commit.
So far so sensible but the issue with Flock camera opposition to me is that it largely misses the forest for the trees. Let’s look at just why Flock has caused such a return to libertarian style discourse in an age of demographic replacement. It has clearly motivated and angered a large portion of the white American populace who are somewhat in doubt to what time it actually is and the reality they have inhabited for some time.
Firstly I think Flock is largely a scapegoat.
The real panopticon is through the citizen led surveillance of each other with camera phones. This is the actual tyranny that most white Americans have lived under and experienced. Just last week we saw a white couple in NYC kissing on a bench filmed by a ‘TikTok comedian’ go viral. Turns out this heterosexual white lawyer was kissing an underlying and shock horror he was married. Now he’s canceled and jobless. Add this to the incredibly long list of white citizens having their lives cancelled and ruined because we live in this citizen led panopticon. In the aforementioned essay Shiloh Hendrix is even mentioned directly though the implications of that seem to have been downplayed. America with the idea of public spaces and the abandonment of a right to privacy has created a perfect panopticon.
Let us contrast that with Europe briefly. In countries like Switzerland you have a right to privacy in public spaces. If someone deliberately targets you with a camera without your consent that is not permitted. This extends to the realm of a technology we rely on in our increasingly chaotic country dashcams. A Swiss court ruled that you can’t even use dashcam footage in court cases in 2019 and they exist in a legal grey area where identifiable things like faces/license plates would have to be obscured. Ring cameras aren’t going to penetrate into that country because that also crosses the line. People there have a right to go about their day without being recorded by other individuals. That simply doesn’t exist in America. In fact you have a whole class of cretins in America now who go around filming in public spaces to provoke reactions and then generate ad revenue of angry people as the film them (and often their kids) in a totally legal way. They call themselves First Amendment Auditors. Imagine a libertarian redditor on steroids with a fetish for videography and you’ll get close, or take a peek on YouTube at this content if you so wish.
Seeing as it is unlikely we’ll get a wholesale change in the 1st Amendment that means we are stuck in the citizen driven panopticon here in the US and so we return back to Flock. The reality is that Flock has upset so many Americans because it has forced them to realize that cars are not all they are made out to be. The car is seen by many as an embodiment of freedom. It is in fact the opposite of that and the ease at which they can be tracked is waking up a large number of people to that uncomfortable truth. I’m old enough to remember when American’s online would mock places like London for their surveillance state level of cameras but really it’s not any different. Flock cameras are part of that slow evolution and creep of power. I’ve also seen other British driving enforcement appear here in the US with the arrival of average speed check cameras. For counties across the US that need revenue installing automated speed cameras will become an ever increasing option and likely presence, no doubt Flock will cash in on that as well.
Flock is an extension of technology we already had but it is curious to me how opposition to it is so outspoken when other much more insidious laws are being passed around new cars that are obliged to record the inhabitants. Forget the roadside camera tracking your license plate there will be interior cameras determining if you can drive at all. Again extending the prison like nature of the car and car centric culture. Americans who are so locked into this infrastructure for a variety of reasons are going to find even more of their notional freedoms revoked and shrunk. Here is the reality we return to though and I think where The American Tribune kind of misses. It is about will and power but the other side of the coin is that it is very difficult to put technology back into the Pandora’s box once it is unleashed. In fact we live in a world so different to our forebears we have to ask dangerous questions.
The larger question here is more about how you regulate technology as it advances. The libertarian priors that many of us hold rub up against reality and the more democratized technology is the more dangerous a world we can actually live in. With the advances of LLMs and many other things it’s not impossible to imagine basement level bioweapons that could decimate society in a way that Aum Shinrikyo cult could only dream of. Think of every embittered leftist you’ve seen and sprinkle a bit more malice and a bit more agency onto them. Maybe they’ll just shoot Charlie Kirk or maybe they, with some help from the Chinese perhaps, unleash some kind of targeted bioweapon cooked up with the help of LLMs. The further along the individual is empowered by technology to cause disproportionate suffering and destruction the more the only real answer for that is a system of total control.
I can hear the retorts already about how he who values liberty accepts a degree of risk and lack of security. Yes broadly we can agree with that but as technology advances no one serious can not grapple with what the disparity that technology can and could bring. That has formed plot mechanisms in iconic cyber-punk fiction of Neal Stephenson with the backpack Nuke - individuals who are state level entities because they’ve become nuclear salient. A lot of the outrage around Flock does stem from a white European masculine desire to not live in the panopticon and the chance to fight back against ‘the State’ and I have a large degree of sympathy for that. But as I’ve said before the point of being a dissident is to engage in dissident ideas. We aren’t just all about freedumb in the same way we shed our Libertarian priors but remember there are still tons of Libertarian types out there actively trying to get more guns into the hands of criminal blacks because muh 2a.
We’re over that.
More than anything the Flock debate just comes back to power and how the right struggles with it. It’s painful to watch people I respect basically doing the same line Republicucks have done for years “What if it’s used against us if we’re out of power?!”. It absolutely will be but there is just no meaningful mechanism to halt this technology and its rise and subsequent use, just as in the USA there is no real way to stop the 1st Amendment auditor types filming people in public. We’re trapped in the system. The best thing we can do is pursue and take power. That is if think we can even live in a world without total control.
I think there is only one ultimate way off this ride and it’s some kind of collapse. Collapse is a process though and it will take some time. That collapse will make such panopticon power heavy surveillance unsustainable but it could be decades in the future. ( Imperium Press has a lot to say more from our side of politics about that, see his tribal future and just understand the timeline is probably further out) Until you get to that collapse though you’re locked in the room with the technology and the camera phone surveilling people you live with. There just isn’t a way off that ride and feel good ideas about a return to vigilantism in an era of high technology, high safety, and long life expectancy for the middle class is just a dream. It isn’t happening until you have a series of downshifts in comfort that prompt radical changes. This is just a very unpleasant fact that I think most don’t want to grapple with. Orania in South Africa only appeared and is only doing well the worse the rest of the country gets. European descended people across the world are only just starting to actually realize the depth of their problems and their minority status as ever increasing immigrant crime rises. The rapes will continue until you make it stop.
So back to Flock, the useful enemy. The tool that has spawned people across easily tracked social media to be protesting so vehemently. Even violently. It seems a certain class of white man is very willing to cut down a Flock camera and that’s probably because the leftist is going to actually side with him, for now. Flock as a technology seems like it was always going to manifest. The modern technocratic state that we live in can’t abide the vacuum of information on which to enact anarcho-tyranny. Of all the causes to fight against to me this seems to most diversionary and pointless. Energy is a finite thing and returning to 2000s era libertarianism in the short run seems very short sighted. Perhaps in an ideal world resisting this makes more sense but the technocratic world we’re stuck with is the real one not some imagined white libertarian ethnostate we want to be in.