There's close to 14,000 man-made satellites bopping around in low-Earth orbit. Many of us willingly bring wiretaps into our lives: smartphone apps that constantly listen; smart speakers that do our bidding in exchange for access to our most intimate moments. Every day, your country, state, and neighbors install more cameras in public spaces and private homes. We're tracked using GPS, via cell tower pings, the transactions we make using our credit and debit cards, and every photo of every latte we drink on social media. The weight of the surveillance heaped upon us is vast; crushing.
But hey, it's cool. It's totally gonna make us behave ourselves.
Back in the mid-1990s, Peter H. Diamandis convinced 27 teams of inventors to spend $100 million in an attempt to win a $10 million cash prize. To take the purse, all one of the teams had to do was be the first to build and fly a three-passenger craft 100 kilometers above the Earth. Imagine: someone rolling in it who, instead of offering an award for innovative ways to feed or house the destitute, said 'fuck it, let's go to space instead'. So, when Diamandis writes that we should cheer up and see constant monitoring as a good thing, we should definitely listen. In a recent Substack post, he argues that by 2040, the 21 billion data collection points that humanity is currently subjected to will have exploded to 'trillions of individual sensors, each one streaming a slice of reality into AI systems that can finally make sense of all of it.' And boy howdy, is it ever gonna make us a better species. His premise is that humans behave better when they're being watched. His proof?
In 2012, the Rialto, California police department ran a randomized trial with Cambridge criminologists, randomly assigning officer shifts as "camera on" or "camera off" across 50,000 hours of police-public interactions. Cambridge has since replicated the work across ten more forces.
Use-of-force incidents dropped 60%, and citizen complaints against officers fell 88%, from dozens the prior year down to a grand total of three. Researchers call it the "civilizing effect." When both the officer and the citizen know the encounter is on the record, both sides regulate themselves.
Criminologists might call it the Civilizing Effect, but Imma gonna go ahead and call it bad actors with a badge knowing they'll be screwed, blued and tattooed for using excessive force on film, fired and then get hit with a civil suit. People don't do things differently because they're being watched. We're not shamed into good behavior. We cease our bullshit because we're afraid of facing the consequences for our actions. If a bad cop wasn't afraid of being sued or losing their job, do you really think they'd care about someone seeing them? Rodney King had the crap kicked out of him in 1991 by rotten cops. It was captured on video. Damn near 30 years later, George Floyd was murdered, on video, by rotten cops.
Maybe Derek Chauvin didn't get the memo that he was supposed to be civilized if he's being watched.
It hurt my head even more to read that Diamandis believes, based on data, mind you, that the transparency offered by complete surveillance will prevent wars. Well. The international community knew about the three years of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the early 1990s and did nothing to stop the use of concentration camps or the digging of mass graves. The media managed to get cameras inside of Omarska on that one. Hell, fast forward to the past couple of years in Gaza. The IDF has been killing and maiming Palestinian civilians with impunity and taken activists hostage in international waters. Israel knows that the optics on this are terrible. So their military has kept the international journalistic community out of its theatre of operations. But, in this age of connected devices, stories and data still leaked out. Palestinian journalists were home, embedded in the conflict. As a result, the world saw what was happening. So, Israel started killing the journalists left inside the war zone. Since 2023, the Israeli military and darker, surgical elements of the Israeli government have killed 210 journalists in Palestine. According to the Global Investigative Journalism Network, that's more journalists dead in a three-year period than the combined number of those who gave their lives reporting on every other conflict since 1992.
The vile don't care that they're being watched. It's an insult to our intelligence to insist that they do.
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