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by shermantanktop 19 days ago
Lots of po-mo art-school language on this site about “encoding ways of seeing” and “gazes.”

The content itself is somewhat interesting but imo plain language would be more accessible.

3 comments

I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about statements like these which seem to assume the reader is incredibly uninformed and naive, to the point of condescension.

"sends the information to a central storing place (called a database)" TIL what the word database means?

"Amazon can use your purchases to know more about you using patterns." Is this news to someone? Condescending.

"It might be connected to a network (via Internet or radio frequency)" Radio frequency and Internet are not really directly comparable

Also don't like that the site hijacks the appearance of my mouse pointer, which feels similarly disrespectful of the reader.

The way it's written, I wouldn't be surprised if it was meant to be read by/to children (or at least used by a elementary/middle school teacher).
Who is the target audience? Obviously not HN. Is it right to criticise someone for not writing for HN?

Radio networks and Internet are both networks. That part is fine. It means surveillance devices either have SIM cards and connect to the cell network, or they have their own isolated radio network.

Honestly, a lot of critical theory enjoyers who can talk fluently and at length in that academic dialect are astonishingly clueless about non-abstract matters.
I think these criticisms are unjustified. The article could be aiming for less tech-savvy people. Remember the most tech-savvy people in the world are those who enabled the surveillance infrastructure in the first place. Also if you want any meaningful grassroot change, you need to appeal to the less knowledgeable cohorts. Politics is more or less "which informed people can convince the most uninformed ones."

> Is this news to someone?

Yes, many. xkcd 1053.

A bit of xkcd 2501 going on in this thread as well
It's a very strange mix of overexplaining basic concepts and in-depth details. I suspect AI.
I also suspected this to be partially AI, especially when it says the cameras can “change height”?? And the vague images, like the one with the red “hotspots”.
On one hand yeah it's a little over the top.

On the other hand I don't think this was written for our proto-techno-fascist forum...