technology

I remember the response to the George Floyd protests in Denver. The Air Force, feds, and police were flying aircraft and drones overhead every night. They were collecting every phone ping and social media post, then using those to map social networks of affiliated protesters. Palantir is based there so I'm sure they had a panopticon test run of some kind going on. Unmarked police cars were on every block surrounding the daytime protest park, so peaceful that the nurses marching next to it for COVID masks were louder than the single BLM speaker talking to a smaller crowd. The cops inside were taking long-distance photographs of every person in the park, which was otherwise a normal park in front of the capital building where people were doing COVID testing and sunbathing. I just walked on the sidewalk next to the park and looked at one which was enough to get my photo taken again, and that's obviously being fed into facial recognition software and the same kind of social media mapping.

It's so bleak. That protest was tame enough that I lost faith in its national potential from watching how it played out. Even that was enough to warrant the kind of surveillance we attribute to the Stasi but everything is computer.