On Surveillance at Scale

December 9, 2023 timothywstanley@me.com

In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale... A camera offers the illusion of a private sentry, serving you and your castle. Control your tiny corner of a flailing city. Yet once you capture something you didn’t expect, say, a neighborhood vigilante mystery unfurling on your doorstep, the control is breached. Your cam blasts up and away into the stratosphere of attention. The cops get it, the footage gets passed to the prosecutor, who hands it to the defense attorney, who tosses it like chum to the ravenous media, and before you know it, your house cam is on CNN, it’s playing on All In With Chris Hayes, it’s making rhetorical points against Tucker Carlson, it’s basically a live birth on a San Francisco sidewalk, boomeranging the eyes right back on you, threatening to put you on the witness stand, sending a WIRED reporter marching up to your garage on a Friday afternoon, hoping to talk. You wanted to surveil. You end up surveilled.

Lauren Smiley, “How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco,” - https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-doom-loop-citizen-surveillance/.