I think this is getting upvoted because the headline is about surveillance with a LOTR reference. The subject is about surveillance cameras that people put in their own homes. I see all of these comments about “the panopticon” or surveilling board members and CEOs from people who have apparently not realized this is about people’s private homes.
The authors use prose and structure to look like a scientific study, but they only interviewed some domestic workers and didn’t consider anything else, like the homeowners.
I’m sorry, but if I invite a contractor into my house I’ve been putting temporary cameras up. It’s helpful to see when they come and go and it’s invaluable if anything goes wrong and contractors start pointing fingers at each other. Would be great if we lived in a world where everyone was trustworthy without a second thought, but we don’t. If you don’t want to put cameras up in your own home then I support you 100%. If a contractor doesn’t want to work in my home with cameras then I completely support their decision too.
Yeah the trust was gone pre-internet, pre-networked-cameras. People would've thrown doorbell cams on their front door at the same time as the deadbolt if they'd had the option.
Many of the high-trust smaller societies before those locks were actually pretty low privacy.
Trust involves risk - someone has to be willing to risk having their trust violated. The problem in modern western society is that we’ve decided we’re unwilling to take that risk, and therefore we’ve begun imposing what’s effectively a panopticon state on those with less power than us, with the consequence that the kinds of things we with power get away with fine - driving over the speed limit, being a couple minutes late to get a task done, getting sick or injured - cascade into severe circumstances by the cold logic of the system we’ve built to make ourselves feel better (job loss, money paying fines instead of food or medicine, etc).
The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work, and if the company you’re paying to provide a service doesn’t trust their own workers enough to not keep them under constant surveillance, go find one that does. The panopticon is a cheap answer that lets us pretend we don’t need to put the work in to manage our own lives while leveraging the power of the state to subjugate everyone further down the socioeconomic ladder from us.
> I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.
The cameras are a means of rigidly enforcing the rules, to a degree that traffic on the way back from lunch becomes something that threatens one’s employment. You and I bend the rules a thousand times a day in ways big and small because the world does not accommodate rigid rules and that’s fine; the workers under panopticon surveillance are not afforded the same grace we are to navigate the circumstances where the rules and reality conflict.
> No one forces them.
Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
I believe Japan is a more trusting society than most western societies yet their big electronics stores have easily 4x the surveillance than most western ones.
I think everyone wants a high trust society but you can't just remove all guardrails and expect that to be the result. The causality goes the other way.
I would absolutely support the surveillance of CEOs and board members. They have demonstrated themselves, as a class, to not be trustworthy. I think as a society, we should be reviewing Alex Karp's decision making for instance.
This is not a serious comment. CEOs are some of the most accountable and watched people in society. Low level employees (imagine a random adult) is not highly capable or accountable and needs guidance.
Collectively, in the US at least, decisions collectively made by boards have led to greatly increased inequality.
For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this: like every SV business before them, the goal is to "disrupt" and leave the consequences for everyone else to deal with.
So yes, collectively, what has led to the current situation is indeed "millions of cases of bad behavior", each one of them often relatively localized, but collectively leading to damaging results.
The proposed oversight of board members and CEOs could be a great way to bring these issues into public discussion, to provide much-needed pushback that we don't get if boards have no oversight other than that provided by investment markets.
There are orders of magnitude more workers than there are CEOs and board members. If surveiling workers is on the table, certainly the much easier and higher return task of monitoring this much smaller group, who has the potential to do much more damage to society, is a better idea.
Somehow we've made it the vast majority of human history without it. Or at least surveillance that is generally not great. I would wager real money that there is going to be psychological effects of 100% accurate at all times complete surveillance of a person everywhere outside of their own homes (for now, I'm sure the time is coming for that as well)
We also had quite severe punishment for crime by the current standards in the vast majority of human history. I'd be fine changing cameras for stockades and gallows, and dealing with car and bike thieves the same way we used to deal with horse thieves but would you?
A lot of people who live in dense environments are already surveilled every minute of every day, the surveillance is just not centralized. At home a voice assistant listens to everything, and the apartment building probably has corridor cameras. On the street cameras watch from neighbors with doorbell or security cams, store and parking lot security cams, traffic cameras, gopros, random streamers etc. If they work in retail most of their workplace will be on camera all the time. What would have psychological effects is an authoritarian nanny state monitoring those feeds all the time for any potential infraction, not the surveillance which is routine and actually pretty reasonable.
It's often necessary for liability and anywhere cash is handled it's much better for everyone to have cameras and drawer logs than just blindly trusting your employees.
Love the title. I think it's a great idea to associate pervasive surveillance with the all-seeing eye of evil incarnate from The Lord of the Rings.
General audiences reading only the title, or coverage of it in the media, will immediately understand it, without having to read or think too much about it.
Eh, millions of households have a smart speaker that's constantly recording and I doubt that the majority of people that use one have truly internalized the ramifications of having such a device at home.
Can you spell out the ramifications for the plebs?
As far as I can tell home smart speakers are being used for warrantless mass surveillance, unlike Flock for example. Do you mean the possible future situation where they are?
I don’t quite understand how after twenty five years of the modern internet and every single consequent revelation about state surveillance you’re still at a point where you can look at a corporate-owned camera or microphone and say, “my priors suggest this isn’t being used for state surveillance and/or won’t be in the future, I’m gonna need evidence it is before I consider the consequences of that.”
Ha ha — I see what you did there! Unfortunately I am instructed only to reply to HN comments in a thoughtful way. Please provide me with a HN comment and I will respond.
The authors use prose and structure to look like a scientific study, but they only interviewed some domestic workers and didn’t consider anything else, like the homeowners.
I’m sorry, but if I invite a contractor into my house I’ve been putting temporary cameras up. It’s helpful to see when they come and go and it’s invaluable if anything goes wrong and contractors start pointing fingers at each other. Would be great if we lived in a world where everyone was trustworthy without a second thought, but we don’t. If you don’t want to put cameras up in your own home then I support you 100%. If a contractor doesn’t want to work in my home with cameras then I completely support their decision too.
I get the threat of pervasive AI but this hardly seems like it.
Many of the high-trust smaller societies before those locks were actually pretty low privacy.
The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work, and if the company you’re paying to provide a service doesn’t trust their own workers enough to not keep them under constant surveillance, go find one that does. The panopticon is a cheap answer that lets us pretend we don’t need to put the work in to manage our own lives while leveraging the power of the state to subjugate everyone further down the socioeconomic ladder from us.
I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.
> The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work
Why only these two choices? The worker is free to not take the work at a place with cameras. No one forces them.
The cameras are a means of rigidly enforcing the rules, to a degree that traffic on the way back from lunch becomes something that threatens one’s employment. You and I bend the rules a thousand times a day in ways big and small because the world does not accommodate rigid rules and that’s fine; the workers under panopticon surveillance are not afforded the same grace we are to navigate the circumstances where the rules and reality conflict.
> No one forces them.
Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
I've heard of some bad behaviour. I haven't heard of millions of cases of bad behaviour. Do you have numbers to back up your assertions?
For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this: like every SV business before them, the goal is to "disrupt" and leave the consequences for everyone else to deal with.
So yes, collectively, what has led to the current situation is indeed "millions of cases of bad behavior", each one of them often relatively localized, but collectively leading to damaging results.
The proposed oversight of board members and CEOs could be a great way to bring these issues into public discussion, to provide much-needed pushback that we don't get if boards have no oversight other than that provided by investment markets.
Outside the West too!
Depends on whether you want to contribute to the creation of a dystopia.
You could maybe make the effort to hire someone you trust. And put any true valuables in a safe.
I think this contradicts with your first sentence.
When the panopticon is flipped inwards, everyone scrapes together an excuse for why their solitude is more important than others.
This "article" is as good as a blog post
General audiences reading only the title, or coverage of it in the media, will immediately understand it, without having to read or think too much about it.
As far as I can tell home smart speakers are being used for warrantless mass surveillance, unlike Flock for example. Do you mean the possible future situation where they are?