“He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication”*…

We’ve looked before at digital regimes that seem a little too close for comfort to Jeremey Bentham‘s notion of the Panopticon. Surveillance has continued to intensify. 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox bring us up to speed…

It’s nearly impossible not to be watched these days. It can start right at home with your neighbors and their Ring cameras—a company that sold fear to the American public and is now integrating AI to turn entire neighborhoods into networked, automated surveillance systems. 

Head out a bit further and you’ll likely be confronted by Flock’s network of cameras that not only track license plates, but also track people’s movements with detailed precision. And as the Trump administration raids cities across the U.S. for undocumented immigrants, tech giants like Palantir are powering tools for ICE, including one called ELITE that helps the agency pick which neighborhoods to raid.

To better understand what exactly we’re looking at in this dystopian hellscape, 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox joined r/technology for an AMA. 

Understandably, people are worried about violations of their privacy by companies and the government. And many wonder, is there any way to go back once we’ve released all this AI-powered, surveillance tech?…

The (lightly edited for clarity) transcript is a bracing– but critically-important– read: “From Flock to ICE, Here’s a Breakdown of How You’re Being Watched,” @jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy and @josephcox.bsky.social in @404media.co.

* “Bentham’s Panopticon [at top] is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery… He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

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As we feel seen, we might recall that it was on this date in 2000, that the dot.com bust effectively began. Between 1995 and its peak five days earlier, on March 10, 2000, investments in the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose from 1,006 to 5,048—a 400% gain fueled by the conviction that the internet would render every prior valuation framework obsolete. It did not.

On March 13, 2000, news that Japan had once again entered a recession triggered a global sell off that disproportionately affected technology stocks. Soon after, Yahoo! and eBay ended merger talks and the Nasdaq fell 2.6%; still, the S&P 500 rose 2.4% as investors shifted from strong performing technology stocks to poor performing established stocks. The market held steady on the 14th. Then, on this date 26 years ago, the broader market begin to drop… and kept dropping. By the end of the stock market downturn of 2002 (the “second chapter” in the correction that began in 2000), stocks had lost $5 trillion in market capitalization since the peak. At its trough on October 9, 2002, the NASDAQ-100 had dropped to 1,114, down 78% from its peak. It took 15 years for the Nasdaq to regain its March, 2000 peak.

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#RenéeGood is dead. An #ICE agent shot her three times through her car window in #Minneapolis. Video shows the agent had time to step away—instead he drew his weapon and fired. This wasn’t self-defense. It was execution.

Philosopher Harry Binswanger traces the philosophical chain: https://hbletter.com/trumps-gestapo-is-now-murdering-protestors/

ICE exists because we philosophically and politically destroyed the concept of #IndividualRights.#Bentham called #rights “nonsense upon stilts” 20 years after #Kant. That became settled doctrine. Without a defensible theory of rights grounded in reality, we got the #Progressive movement’s #collectivism, then the xenophobia that built ICE, and now we have federal agents executing protesters in the street.

ICE has no legitimate function—it exists to grab and deport people, operating with arbitrary force. "The nature of an action follows from the nature of the entity that acts.” ICE's nature is thuggery wrapped in the language of #LawEnforcement.

But there’s also a commercial-political chain that made this possible: government agencies contract with private #surveillance companies to bypass #FourthAmendment protections. What the government can’t collect directly, it purchases from #DataBrokers and information services.

The technical infrastructure—databases, APIs, real-time intelligence platforms—gets built by engineers who think they're just solving technical problems. That infrastructure feeds into operations that put agents on Minneapolis streets with intelligence they couldn’t legally gather themselves.

This didn't have to happen.

Rights theory didn't have to lose to #utilitarianism and Kantian duty. We didn’t have to allow commercial surveillance to become a Fourth Amendment bypass. But we did, and now 37-year-old Renée Good is dead because an agent felt empowered to approach her car, try her door handle, and shoot when she tried to leave.

The horror isn’t just that Renée Good died. It’s that her death was philosophically, politically, and technically inevitable once we abandoned individual rights and built the infrastructure to enforce #collectivist #immigration policy at scale.

#ReneeGood #philosophy #politics #USpol #USpolitics #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism

Die Frage ist nicht: können sie denken? oder: können sie sprechen?sondern: können sie leiden?
Quelle: Animalequality

Jeremy #Bentham (1748-1832):
#govegan #vegan #ethik #Ernährung #Tierquälerei #Milch #Käse

For this reason, in Bentham's writings, evil is not something that comes to man from the outside. It lurks in the heart of every individual from the moment of birth, patiently waiting, hidden, for the right opportunity to emerge and take over the will. Meanwhile, structures of power are the best possible context in which it can come alive and be externalized.

Rafał Nahirny

https://books.openedition.org/iblpan/1391

#quotes
#Bentham
#evil