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Anyone else feel like this Flock hate is manufactured? (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
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I have a feeling that Flock will eventually go out of business, everyone will cheer and go home, then a new company will take its place behind closed doors and without the media attention

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[–] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

That seems pretty backwards to me honestly

for the average person the datacenter hate is pretty abstract:

"maybe a company will build a life-ruining industrial facility in my backyard just to power their slop and surveillance systems and my local government will do nothing to protect my health and quiet enjoyment rights"

vs with mass video surveillance it's more like: "I was already being watched in public most of the time but now it's being expanded into my very neighborhood and streamlined with AI and cops are using it to more effectively do petty harassment, stalking, etc." which people are already familiar with and at least know someone it's happened to, not to mention all the big brother fantasies it evokes.

Both struggles are closely linked and more powerful together, but in my area I haven't seen the causal relationship go that way.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    People are more concerned with the direct material impacts of datacenters than more abstract things like slop and surveillance, those are actually afterthoughts. The more pressing problems are jacking up the price of water and electricity, generating noxious fumes and noise pollution, causing computing shortages, and all being done without paying taxes and with government subsidies.

    Oh and it's being done to power machines that they constantly claim will take everyone's jobs and might end human civilization.

    If datacenters were not a direct economic threat to communities I am skeptical that there'd be as much broad opposition to them.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    I'm not saying you don't have correct analysis or anything, but that just hasn't been my experience in my local area and telling me otherwise won't change that.

    People I've met do hate AI, at least the people that aren't like, PMC bootlickers (and as you say, it's more because of the economic threat or concerns about water, than just abt slop, that was reductive), and consequently many hate datacenters, for enabling AI and causing the water threat.

    They hate them in theory at least... But the one actual datacenter proposal in my immediate area I'm aware of has not yet seen anywhere near the kind of pushback that the large scale datacenters in other areas have.

    And I haven't seen it flow the other way yet, where someone is radicalized about datacenters and then learns about AI or Flock and hates it because it caused the datacenters. That may be just because there haven't been any widely publicized datacenter buildouts in my local area since this started to become a widely known issue, but that's what I mean about it being abstract. Datacenters two states away can be used to harm people here in my neighborhood. Flock cameras are right there on the pole, feeding data to the cop down the road. AI is shitting up our feeds and our workplaces.

    Police repression based on mass surveillance is not an abstract issue here. I've been observed by police drones personally more than once, many people I know are harassed by the police based on surveillance cameras in targeted and overpoliced areas, and ALPR is clearly being used to make that all worse. And that's not to mention corporate and quasi-public entities also harnessing mass surveillance to police people.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago

    Well, let's look at numbers.

    Based on the Flock Camera Bans Tracker, 17 communities have banned Flock cameras.

    Meanwhile 500 have enacted datacenter moratoriums

    I just see more energy in anti-datacenter action than anti-Flock action, which I think implies that anti-Flock is downstream. That might be an oversimplification, though, and they're actually just feeding into each other. People who oppose datacenters oppose Flock cameras, people who oppose Flock cameras oppose datacenters, and they're radicalizing each other.

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