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Getting the Flock Out of Ord, Nebraska

The county seat of my boyhood summers just voted, five to nothing, to pull its surveillance cameras off the poles, the first town in Nebraska to do it. The reasons cut deeper than the invoice. Ord, Nebraska sits eleven miles up the North Loup River valley from the village of North Loup, where I spent the summers of my boyhood on my grandfather’s place, and in the mental geography of a ten-year-old those eleven miles separated the known world from its capital. North Loup had a few hundred souls, a grain elevator, and Popcorn Days. Ord had the Valley County courthouse with a square built around it, implement lots, storefront commerce enough to dazzle a village kid, and a radio station whose call letters spell the valley itself: K-N-L-V, North Loup Valley, on the air at 1060 since 1965 with farm markets in the morning and high school ball at night. When my grandfather’s rooftop antenna strained for television it caught one signal, 10/11 out of Lincoln, and that was the extent of the visible world. Ord was “town.” You washed up a little before going.

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On Synalosis and the Second Wall

(AUTHOR NOTE: Synalosis, a term I coined from the Greek halōsis for the fall of a besieged city, names the single geometric operation by which the set of futures still open to a target contracts to a single point as many agents converge, the same shape running through the hunt, the siege, surveillance, investigation, and the cornered market.) A camera on a pole at the entrance to my town reads the plate of every car that passes, stores the number with a timestamp, and sends it to a database that other towns and other agencies can query. There are thousands of those cameras now, strung across American roads by a handful of private companies, and the most prominent of them, Flock Safety, has built a searchable record of where the country’s vehicles go. The same years that put those cameras on the poles put readers in the parking lots that log the Bluetooth and wifi signals leaking from every phone, and put data brokers in the middle of all of it, buying the location trails and selling the assembled portrait of a life to anyone with a credit card, police departments included. I have spent a good part of the last year writing about this build-out, the plate readers and the signal harvesters and the brokers, and about the thin and late defenses raised against it, like the California law that lets a resident order the brokers to delete what they hold. I went into that reporting thinking I was documenting something new. What I came out with was the conviction that I was documenting the newest body of something ancient.

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Twenty Billion Scans a Month: Have We Already Lost the Farm?

The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.

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The Escape From Politics

Somewhere in the source code of a website the public was never meant to see, a secret society for the people who run the world kept a list of its members in plain text, sitting in the page where anyone who thought to look could read it. On the morning of Monday, June 15, somebody looked.[1] The group is called Dialog, an invitation-only network founded in 2006 by the investor Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, and for two decades it kept one promise to its members above all the others: that nothing said inside the room would ever be written down where the rest of us could find it.[1] That promise held until the society’s own code broke it.

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Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

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Our Re-Future: Limitless Lifecasting and Shiftless Re-Winding

In the comments stream for — Cracking the Fiery Core: We Are Not What We Have — I said this, that has, ever since, had me thinking about the unfolding of such future events:

I think the next wave push is going to be “Limitless Lifecasting” — where you just stream video of your life all day and all night long. You’re online 24 hours a day. Google Glass will be the first step into the bloody morass. Re-winding will be the new Re-tweeting and Re-blogging.

With the revelation this week that Google Glass, Part II is set to debut soon — along with the news that current Glass users now able to invite three of their most gullible friends to shell out $1,500.00USD to share in the pioneer experience of getting punched in the face — our new, shiftless “re-” future is officially embedded among us.

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Curtains Make Good Neighbors and Bad Art

The quickest way to lose any social argument is to hide behind claiming the wellbeing of your children is at risk while not standing in front of them and offering them direct protection.  If you’re truly concerned about the welfare of your offspring, instantly act on their behalf, and don’t slog into the courts to beg a remedy to a simple matter of privacy that could be solved simply by drawing the curtains.

There’s an old saying in the Deaf Community when it comes to watching other people’s Sign Language conversations from across the room — “eyes for for?” — meaning “my eyes are for watching, and if you don’t want to be watched, then move out of my line of sight. Make your own privacy.”

Today, we could say the same thing about a camera in situ — “photos for for?”

There’s a big hoo-hah here in New York City over the right of a family to demand privacy in their floor-to-ceiling windowed apartment — even though they leave the curtains open — so anyone, and everyone, can see directly into their living space.

One neighbor, Arne Svenson, found the patterns of the family’s windows intriguing and took a series of images of them as part of his “The Neighbors” photography series.  Here’s an example from his fascinating collection:

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