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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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So have you noticed how Police Body Camera footage in controversial cases generally gets released within hours when the footage exonerates the cop, and when it looks bad for the cop it take days or weeks to see it?

Universal surveillance doesn't give "the public" access to the truth. It gives the people who control the panopticon access to the truth, and the power to present it to the public however they choose to present it. A group in which Larry Ellison imagines himself, controlling surveillance tech, not the subject of it. Ellison wants to be the man in the control room full of screens, not the man being surveilled.

When infinite evidence exists, the presentation of the evidence becomes the game. And there are always going to be differences in access to that evidence. We're doing the "don't invent the torture matrix" game here, Palantir is directly named for this concept! The Palantir drives Denethor mad, not by showing him falsehoods, but by showing him truths presented by Sauron, edited by the enemy. The Palantir is dangerous not because it doesn't work, but because unless you have tremendous Power, it will overtake your will by presenting things to you in a persuasive way. And that's the position of power that the tech lords want to be in: able to present evidence to us to prove whatever position they please.

Instant replay in sports has been a mixed blessing. For every obviously wrong call, we get truly ridiculous rules and arcane formulas for what constitutes "possession" of the football. True Crime podcasters with vocal fry, and their more respectable cousins in various Innocence Projects, have shown us why Finality is a fundamental value of the justice system, that when you throw infinite effort into researching a case or event you will always find stuff that looks weird. Infinite angles of truth are fundamentally indistinguishable from falsehood without guidance.

When you base truth on Rule of Law you empower lawyers to tell you what the truth is. When you base it on religion you empower priests. If we base truth on surveillance technology, we empower the owners and operators of the surveillance tech. Coincidentally, Larry Ellison has a close relationship with Palantir and similar companies.