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Notes -
Two screens, more literally than usual
There was a thread a few weeks back about Hasan Piker supposedly using a shock collar on his dog. I didn't think too much of it at the time, not knowing who Hasan Piker even was (I had heard the name, but couldn't tell you anything else). But a little later I ran across Taylor Lorenz's podcast episode on it "Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For" (link to YouTube and therefore auto-transcript, since I follow via podcast, I have not seen the video).
In the episode, she describes the shock collar claim as obvious nonsense that anyone watching the video can see for themselves, in addition to her having met Hasan and the dog in person and therefore she is sure the claim is false.
In comparison, in the Culture War thread post I linked above, /u/crushedoranages says
I have not gone down the rabbit hole of analysis of the video, so I'm not going to try to defend Taylor's interpretation. But I was struck by seeing a case where both sides are telling me to watch the exact same video clip since in it is plain to see the events transpired as they claim. The "two screens" concept comes up here a lot, but it's usually about seeing different subsets of a population, often whatever your social media algorithm surfaces, or different interpretations of the same utterance (see: taking Trump literally vs. seriously or, more recently, the Young Republicans group chat). This seems like a whole new level of disagreement about reality.
Taylor's thesis is mainly one of anti-surveillance (a major theme of her work), which is pretty well covered by this quote from the YouTube auto-transcript:
This is likely a hostile summary. I think that there is a steelman to be made on how video evidence can help establish a consensus. Think stuff like killings by the police. There will always be scissor cases, but if there is video evidence of a suspect pulling a gun or raising his hands in the air, then both sides of the culture war are somewhat more likely to agree on what really happened compared to when they just have to rely on eyewitness testimony.
Of course, video evidence will not always show the full context of an interaction, but it is generally better than nothing to find out what happened. And with gen-AI, video evidence will probably become less trustworthy. AI-generated videos can already fool members of the public (such as me), in the future they might also fool a forensic expert. At that point, you need to rely on a chain of custody, and in CW contexts, you generally can not trust the other side not to tamper with the evidence. Half the police departments would probably happily edit body cam footage if it lets them avoid a few weeks of BLM riots, and half the SJ people would happily use AI to "improve" their videos to drive home the point of racial injustice.
Or it could be that Ellison was really voicing a pro-panopticon sentiment, where video analysis AI will punish every tiny infraction anyone commits a la Demolition Man. I think such a society will slide into totalitarianism, because dissent begins in private.
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.
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