Telescreens 2026

     Yes, this one is about these devices:

     Flock has 120,000 cameras in 49 states that capture 20 billion license plates a month—along with dents, bumper stickers and other identifying features. The company says it is giving police a powerful tool to catch criminals. But the same bipartisan public anger that has risen up from towns and cities to stall data centers is now aimed at Flock’s spreading camera network.
     Republican members of Congress have introduced bills to restrict the technology. Jordan appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast last month where the host compared Flock to the ever-present surveillance of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” President Trump has weighed in too, saying last week that Flock’s cameras were “under review.” Flock opponents held rallies in 44 states, while a number of towns—including two in Massachusetts in the past few days alone—said they would stop using the cameras.
     As with data centers, the debate over Flock has spilled into this year’s elections, from Florida to Rhode Island to San Francisco.

     If you have a personal interest in not being watched, this website shows you where the cameras are:

     The usual objection to the proliferation of Flock cameras is that the information they collect is prone to abuse. That’s true. But imagine that somehow, those abuses could be curbed to an adequate degree – perhaps even prevented altogether. Would there still be a Fourth Amendment objection to the omnipresence of surveillance devices? When you leave home and go about in public, do you retain a right to privacy?

     It’s a dubious claim. You’re in public, after all. Constitutional scholars are divided on the matter. Still, many Americans object to being watched, by Flock camera or any other technology. The literate ones point back to 1984 and its ubiquitous telescreens. That was a nightmarish vision, to be sure. But just now I have something else in mind.

     Military science-fiction writer David Drake penned a series of short stories about Jed Lacey: a future detective in a world where surveillance was very nearly total. Lacey makes use of it to pursue his quarries. But privacy could still be had… for a price. Lacey occasionally pays such a price, as do some of his targets.

     The point, of course, is that scarce commodities will always command a price. We casually say “as free as the air we breathe,” because today, here on Earth, breathable air is all around us. But if that air were to become scarce, it would command a price. Possibly a very high price, as without it, there cannot be life.

     Should surveillance devices such as Flock cameras proliferate to the extent of London in the United Kingdom, his comings and goings would no longer be something an American could regard as “my own business.” Each of us would be aware of being watched. It would change the nature of all commerce and social interaction. It would also present a problem for those who seek to use the information.

     Huge volumes of image data are very hard to search. Individual skeins of such data that pertain to particular persons or a protracted series of events, no matter how desirable, would be difficult to isolate. Unprecedented search technologies would be required for the task, to say nothing of the need for many new petabytes of storage.

     What’s that? Did you say something about data centers? Oh, sorry, my mistake. Must be that my hearing is going at last.

     Why are people protesting against data centers?

     AI Overview

     People protest against data centers because the massive facilities required to power the artificial intelligence boom consume immense amounts of electricity and water, drive up local utility bills, create constant industrial noise, and generate very few permanent local jobs relative to their massive footprint.

     Perhaps some protestors against the rash of huge data centers are motivated by the considerations Google Gemini cites above. But perhaps others are thinking about the uses to which such massive repositories of digitized data could be put. Especially given the rapid advances in artificial intelligence programs capable of ultra-sophisticated searches, associations, and inferences.

     I don’t like the trend. But I’m an old man, and unlikely to see it in its full flowering. On the other hand, you, Gentle Reader…

     Garrod lowered his face into cupped hands. There are no satellites, he thought. No torpedoes carrying Retardite eyes down out of orbit. They don’t need them. Not when they’re dusting the whole world with slow glass!
     A preternatural calm seemed to descend over his brain as he considered the mechanics of the proposition. The resolution of Retardite’s crystalline structure was so fine that a usable image could be obtained from a particle a few microns in diameter. Yet each speck would be invisible to the naked eye under normal conditions. They were using it in hundreds of tons—Retardite dust of mixed delays, swirling down over the entire continent from crop-sprayer aircraft. Such aircraft generally used electrically charged ejector nozzles, giving the particles an electromagnetic potential which caused it to be attracted on to the crops rather than drift straight on to the ground. Only in this case, the slow glass micro-eyes were being released from high up so that they would cling to everything—trees, buildings, telegraph poles, flowers, mountain slopes, birds, flying insects. It would be in people’s clothing, in their food, in the water they drank.
     From now on, came the silent scream inside his head, anybody, any agency, with the right equipment can find out anything about ANYBODY! This planet is one huge, unblinking eye watching everything that moves on its surface. We’re all encased in glass, asphyxiating, like bugs dropped into an entomologist’s killing bottle.
     The seconds crept, and he was conscious only of the sound of blood pulsing in his veins. And I…And I did it!

     [Bob Shaw, Other Days, Other Eyes]

     Do have a nice day, now!