“this is how every revolution goes in one image” — @corpsemap
The revolution will be televised! Mainly on surveillance cameras, with footage piped live to police sitrooms. The official streams will be shoddily tapped by the guerrilla IT unit. Police HQ won’t especially mind, because keeping the riot scenes exclusive isn’t necessary.
As we’ve discussed previously, every camera is a surveillance camera when you’re a cop. People reflexively post their footage online, sometimes even helpfully geotagging it. At some point, captions will be run through sentiment analysis automatically, pegging possible insurgents.
So that’ll be fun. (Will be? Or is already being?)
Here’s a semi-related thought from Nils Gilman (who wrote “The Twin Insurgency”):
That the existing system is patently illegitimate alas does not mean that there must exist some self-evidently better alternative Order
He’s talking about US politics — who isn’t, these days — but the point applies in other contexts. Just because things are bad in a given situation doesn’t mean that there is actually a better option. Sometimes things are just bad.
It especially doesn’t mean that your speculative scheme would definitely work better. We’ve already implemented all the ideas with obviously minimal tradeoffs; the rest of the arguments aren’t one-sided (or at least they shouldn’t be).
It’s sort of grimly funny that so many utopian revolutions devolve into police states. Oh, the irony.
