this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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When talking about surveilling society at large, as this person is suggesting, it's important to remember that there is no such thing as surveilling a subset of the population.
Everyone who crosses the boundaries of surveillance, without exception, gets surveilled.
When you point a camera at a crowd, it does not selectively exclude everyone but your chosen subject: a camera photographs all. People and systems behind the camera then manipulate and match that data to suit their objectives, and that's where it becomes completely unaccountable, because the data has already been collected on all.
Today, supposedly, it's dastardly men, the suggestion being that all others will be excluded and thus this extended surveillance of all public spaces must be benign for the rest. But in other places and times, it was runaway slaves, or homosexuals. Recently it has been women seeking abortions and trans people and immigrants. Tomorrow it will be those guilty of wrongthink.
And all are surveilled, because everyone is surveilled.
This surveillance WILL be used to the maximum of its capability, and very quickly, regardless of whatever guidelines or original purpose or its stated goals are said to be in the beginning.
These are nothing but lines in the sand that will be washed away almost immediately, because there's just no way to exclude specific groups from widespread surveillance, and our collective governments are far too corrupt and unstable to ever cut off their own access to it.
CCTV operator here. One thing people misunderstand is that cameras don't tell a story, they corroborate a narrative. In other words the footage is often open to multiple interpretations, not just one side of the story. (We've seen this play out with the recent ICE shootings)
One big difference between CCTV and these "smart lasers" is that CCTV is retroactive; Meanwhile this system appears to aim to prevent crimes. Anyone who has seen the movie Minority Report, knows where I'm going with this.
Basically this system, if not transparent, could easily be used to falsely accuse and oppress people. Not just men either. I'm sure Jim Crow would have installed lasers on the water fountains if they had them.
Exactly. This is a privacy issue, not a "men's" issue, otherwise I'd have found a "manosphere" forum for it (don't know if one actually exists on Lemmy). As you say, this is equivalent to "we must protect the children" as motivation for pretty much everything that takes away liberty, except it's the women who are the "children" in this version. It's just a means to getting the controls in place so it can be used freely to everybody's detriment.
Oh, yeah, it absolutely does belong here. And the "reasons" we absolutely need this or that new incursion on our privacy are always something that ends up being inflated to cartoonish proportions, while everyone else is supposed to feel reassured.
Lol, no. What surveillance ends up being used for primarily -- not even as an exception but as its primary goal -- is backwards criminalization, where a person or organization in power has someone in front of them now that they wish to see rendered powerless, or disregarded, or silenced, so they just go back through the data looking for the points where that troublesome person stepped over some invisible line, charge them retroactively for their "crime", and are done with them.
Even in the example of the article, surveillance doesn't prevent anything. It only ever looks back. In a world (especially in the UK) where cameras already abound but crime rates stay the same or go higher, and regular police forces that supposedly exist to serve the community remain strapped, understaffed and underfunded, it is unrealistic to believe there will be some magical space where this collected surveillance data is processed, rings some alarm as designed, and the good guys come pouring out of a nearby substation to save the damsel in distress.
And we know this because there are already countless criminal alarms, and data, and specific cries for help that get ignored as a matter of routine. This new alarm will simply be added to the pile of those already ignored, while the people in power -- who really want to just pre-emptively collect surveillance data on a supposedly free society -- use it at-will and unseen to create and keep their own power by any means possible.