Surely a society that has shown little care for women's safety would never pretend to care about women's safety to justify pushing their surveillance state forward.
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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The idea is, on that deserted railway platform, the lasers would spot the unnecessarily close choice of seat, registering it as unusual and a potential threat. Security teams would then be alerted and could either direct CCTV for a closer look or send staff in person if needed.
Me when I get arrested for sitting down in public. This is definitely not going to drive young men towards figures like andrew tate
Do you remember the social media panic over 'man spreading' or whatever? This whole thesis that men sit with their legs spread in public spaces to specifically deny women a place to sit?
It was so wild. And everyone ate it up. And if you pointed out how many women dump their bags on seats and take up 2-3 extra seats... you were a misogynist.
Yep. Same with man vs bear discourse. It's all scissor statements, and people eat it the fuck up because we all need an enemy
Thanks for the link. I never heard that term before. Super interesting.
Almost all assaults are done by people the victim knows, in private. This does nothing to prevent that.
A man arrives and sits right beside her, making her feel uncomfortable and unsafe.
It's time to patent public bench with gender taser.
What the fuck‽
Edit: this was meant as a firm and horrified disagreement as a feminist, not as actual confusion or surprise. The UK has been finding whatever justification they can pull out of their ass to increase surveillance and control
key premise of identify politics is that you are guilty of the sins of the group you belong to.
in this case, if you are a man, you are guilty of the crime of potentially raping women.
You are going to see al to more of this kind of crap, from 'progressive' people in the next decade.
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.
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." - William Blackstone ~1760
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.
If unusual behaviours are detected, for example a large group of people moves suddenly or in an unexpected way, security teams on the ground are alerted and can check if there is a problem.
Yes this will definitely be used only for its intended purpose
This article is using every trick in the dystopian playbook to try to emotionally appeal to people. Protecting women, especially the young girls!
"I think we have to develop solutions that put the responsibility back into other places like public authorities, owners of spaces, police forces," she says.
But she still comes out and says what she really wants: more power vested into private, wealthy owners of spaces, to the state, and to the police.
Surely nothing can go wrong. Surely this is about equality for everyone and it definitely won't disproportionately impact men of color. Surely this won't run afoul of any tricky edge cases like trans people. Surely this won't be used to deliscriminate against the poors while still allowing anyone in an expensive suit to do whatever the fuck they want.
The UK is a dystopian shithole. They took 1984 and used it as an instruction manual.
This is global. My town is installing Flock cameras to "stop dangerous speeding and red-light running". Never mind that it also is networked with every single other camera, reads license plates, and use AI to track people everywhere they go. There's no danger, though. That's just coincidence...
If it helps, a lot of these stories don't go anywhere in the end.
CCTV cameras are a lot more accepted, but it's not as extreme as the media often makes it out to be.
The article shows how this tech is already in use in places like King's Cross.
lol
We're talking the same AI systems that protect children from lethal bags of chips, and the same kind of premise that lead to vulnerable women getting their info stolen?
Wow, the Baltimore one I didn't know about and that's also beyond dystopian. Jeez, the response by authorities being "sorry, but it did the right thing, move along" reminds me of the movie "Brazil". If you read the article, you already know that yes, it's like that one, but in England, and every public place. Worse though, because it's judgment of where you stand, sit, walk or cast your eyes in relation to any woman in the area.
At one time, we were promised that having cameras in our faces wherever we go would make things safer. “This invasion of your privacy will make you safer.”
That’s clearly not been enough to completely stop this so now we need to take it one step further and use lasers.
That will be the end all, be all to put a stop to this.
But if and when it isn’t, it’ll just lead to the next victim feeling we didn’t go far enough.
Next is going to be requiring every citizen have a drone fly behind them and follow them wherever they go and they pay for this invasion of their privacy. The laser thing just wasn’t cutting it. Someone got assaulted and the people who were supposed to help her didn’t show up. But now having drones follow you and monitor your every movement is going to stop it once and for all. Of course it won’t follow you into your bathroom because that would be taking it too far…
…until someone gets assaulted in a bathroom, then we’ll move to now violating your privacy there as well and that will be the end to all of these evil people being evil, once and for all. We promise. That’ll be the last time we violate your privacy and the evil people will stop being evil for sure 👍
Or gets murdered… so lets add weapons to the drones, just in case you ‘look’ like you’re about to murder someone!
If students have to use AI in order to make it look like they're not using AI — what on earth will a system like this do to people? Quite how it will be able to read the intent of people's actions without throwing up a huge number of false-positives is something that I don't understand.
And quite what workers are supposed to do when they receive an 'alert' of this nature, I'm not sure. Go up to the individual and tell them that their behaviour has been flagged as suspicious? Way to make me feel more anxious in public.
No, it already does. Facial-ID stuff already throws hundreds of false positives.
This will end well.
Anything but force men to take accountability for their actions and to change our culture.
So your take-away from this article about a surveillance tool that seeks patterns of behavior and movement amongst hundreds of random people in a public space is "those privileged men will do anything to remain unaccountable" for... minding their business on in the tube, mall, or sidewalk? This is waaaayyy bigger than that level of bigotry, and in fact pandering to that very bigotry is exactly the tool used to get 51% of the population on board with implementing it without considering the very real consequences for them.
I think their point is that this technology will continue the trend of not making men take accountability for their actions. Expanding surveillance and preemptively arresting guys for being awkward does nothing to put guys like Brock Allen Turner (aka Brock Turner) (aka Allen Turner) in jail for raping people.
Definitely better ways to phrase it though. A lot of people think that "forcing men to take accountability for their actions" means "forcing all men to take accountability for all other men's actions," but that's not really what they said
What pragmatically can anyone do?
Am I suppose to stalk my female friends 24/7 like a vigilante to prevent them from being assaulted? Maybe put a webcam in their bedroom and watch every sexual encounter they have to make sure they aren't assaulted? At that point I am the sex criminal.
The very premise that other people are responsible for someone else's crimes is totally absurd. We don't do this with say... bank robberies. Most bank robberies are done by men, and yet I don't hear how it's every man's job to stop bank robberies from every happening. The people who are supposed to stop that are security guards and police. Are we supposed to have some sort of anti-SA police force that goes around policing every social interaction men and women have in public?
There are countries that do have that very thing...
It's a more complicated situation than any one person can have an answer to. That said, I think a large part of the problem is that we live in a society that normalizes sexual assault to an extent. Everyone knows that rape is bad, just like everyone knows that robbing banks is bad. The difference is that most bank robbers don't delude themselves into thinking that they're somehow innocent of any wrongdoing. They might offer personal circumstances as some sort of justification for having robbed a bank, but by and large when someone robs a bank, they know they've robbed a bank.
Contrast that with sexual assault, where by and large people who commit sexual assault rationalize their crimes to the point where they believe themselves to be fully innocent. Most people believe themselves to be "good people." Since I'm a good person and good people don't rape, that means the sex I had wasn't rape.
She was into it when we started. She never said no. Did you see what she was wearing? She was asleep, it was a victimless crime. I just couldn't control myself. He's 14, but he wasn't complaining. He's bigger and stronger than me, if he doesn't want it he can stop me any time.
All bank robbers know that they are bank robbers, but most rapists don't know that they are rapists. And you're right to ask what anyone can do, because that's a very hard question to answer. My friends don't tell me when they have sex, and they certainly don't tell me about the circumstances of the sex they have. If they're doing sexual assaults, there's literally no way for me to know.
That's why I think it has to be an enormous cultural shift. We have to instill in the minds of everyone that if a person can't and/or doesn't enthusiastically agree to sexual contact, then sexual contact is sexual assault. We also have to instill in everyone's minds that there is no such thing as a "good" or "bad" person, there's just people. Everyone is capable of doing good or bad things.
Yeah, but it's worse than that. Some people don't even know they were raped. Some people, think you not raping them is worse than raping them. For some being enthusiastic consent happens at the moment of the act, but then is revoked retroactively due to guilt and shame.
Rape and SA don't really have very clear cut and obvious cases, esp from the victim or the perpetuator's POV. It's easy to judge it from an external POV, naturally. But it's VERY gray. I have had so many sexual encounters that were so messy, including encounters where there was no sex, and the other party accused me SA for not raping them, because in their twisted mentality, my lack of overbearing sexual desire was somehow insulting and painful for them. Literally, I had a woman over, she was falling over drunk, so I put her to sleep on my couch, and the next morning she sent me a flurry of texts about how I had SA her and violated her by not sleeping with her and she was going to post my info all over the internet and make sure I was punished for being a good person because how DARE I not take advantage of her what is wrong with me, I must be gay, etc.
I didn't have sex with her because she barely conscious and it would be rape. And yet, her mind, I was still an evil-doing bad guy because it hurt her feelings for me to not rape her while she was semi-conscious. I can't say for certain, but I suspect his woman was clearly a previous victim of sexual abuse. I've also had similar encounters with women in the case of physical abuse, where the encounter was "be a man and hit me to prove to me you care."
Peoples mentalities around sex are not cut and dry. They are incredibly messy and fraught. Lots of people pressure other people into sex, or feel compelled to have sex because they know the relationship can't progress or be secured without it. When I first started dating, I quickly learned that most women expected me to be sexually aggressive ASAP and if I asking them for sex, I wasn't interested. So had to learn to fake an interest just so I had more opportunity to continue to see them. Lots of dates think I am a pussy if I don't try to force myself on them.
I've also had so many other encounters where people lectured me on safe sex, consent, etc. but then when we were in the sexual act, they demanded I sleep with them without a condom, and then retroactively decided that doing so was wrong/bad. Or, that I was a pussy for wanting to use a condom. Some of those encounters also result in physical/sexual assault on myself by the woman. I've also had horrible sexual encounters that I hated, where the other party thought it was AMAZING and vice versa.
I mean really, there is no 'solution' unless you're going to have some neutral third party observing all sexual relations between people. People themselves are not capable of that. They have zero objectivity about themselves the vast majority of the time and they their narrative in the heat of the moment is VERY different than it is before or after that moment. You can be VERY clear ahead of time about what you want and your boundaries... but that in no way means the other person cares or listens or they don't change those desires/boundaries during the act.
Not to mention that some people are very bitter when faced with rejection and will retroactively change the entire relationship's story post-breakup. During the relationship you are charming and wonderful and compassionate, but post-breakup you're a manipulative evil person who seduced and took advantage of them...
What is the solution to any of that? You require some sort of psychological assessment or licensing before you are allowed to give consent?
I don't think there is any 'solution.' I just think shitty people are shitty and it has nothing to do with culture. And shitty people will victimize others and make themselves out to be the victims, because yes, like you said, they are 'good people' and they can never do anything wrong. They are sex-positive and open minded and perfect! They could never assault anyone!
You're missing the point, it's mass population control. Over here in maga states we have women fearing period tracking apps coz abortion. Even Facebook will sell info on women to data buyers to track them.
Ah, of course, that's the fascist strategy these days.
You can’t force anyone to take accountability for their actions. Either they voluntarily take accountability for their actions, or you police their actions.
Why not sell it as a big laser quest game? #YesAllMen /jk
Women are slightly more than half the population (51%?) and experience the most harrassment. I think something needs to be done but maybe not a dystopian measure. How about a shared register of dangerous men made by competent devs (not outsourced) that don't leave the s3 bucket open to the intetnet unencrypted? Or - given that the police are useless - make the process of getting a restraining order more straight forward, require less evidence.
They already have sex offender lists. People duly convicted by a jury of their peers.
I don't know how available this is in every country but something like an enhanced version of that
Oh, you mean like the Spill the Tea app? That would never be used to infringe on privacy or destroy reputations of innocent people, right? Right?
I'm not going to go further and turn this into a discussion for a different forum, except to suggest a search on harassment and gender. Regardless of gender issues this and similar "protective" activities only serve to enhance control over populations.
I was referring to that app when mentioning the poor engineering choices that were made. My thinking is more along the lines of your co-commenter, sex offender++, or smth