I’m calling it. The political debate over Flock is over. They lost.
They lost so quickly that it’s actually astonishing. To witness a company valued at over $8 Billion become so politically toxic in both parties at such speed is a rarity, unless you’re guilty of an oil spill, poisoning dogs, or strangling babies.
Scratch that last one. Lindsay Clancy probably has a bigger political constituency than Flock at this point.
The decision by the CEOs of the mass surveillance cameras unit of our economy to no-show for the Senate hearing chaired by Josh Hawley and Dick Durbin – not exactly a common political alliance – was an act of surrender. Maybe the surveillance bros thought that if they didn’t show, the scene would get less attention. Instead Fox News made the rare decision to run a huge chunk of a subcommittee hearing. That’s what you do when people are watching.
“The numbers are crazy. They’re worse than data centers,” one consultant told me. And it seems like they know it.
The big news today is that Flock is actively weighing a selloff, either to Motorola or Axon, as its public profile takes hit after hit – likely with the knowledge that more is coming. The number of states and citiies taking down cameras and ending contracts is only accelerating. And then there’s the legal ramifications — add the five cops charged in Indiana yesterday to the pile for the future class action. “Were you stalked by Flock? Sign up here.”
It isn’t hard to see why. The testimony from those innocents wrongly targeted or identified through the use of Flock, thrown into jail in the middle of the night, is the stuff of nightmares right out of Fargo: “This is a problem, you understand, because for you to be right the state would have to be wrong. Is that what you’re saying? That the state is wrong?”
The handwaving solutions Flock offers – changing a dropdown menu, shortening data retention times – aren’t going to satisfy any of these basic objections. It reads as dismissive, a series of tweaks to a product people just plain do not want.
The big mistake Flock seemed to make was assuming that their utility for law enforcement, and promises to greedy local officials eager for potential income, would win out over an American populace with a decidedly different attitude toward mass surveillance than citizens of other nations. The second mistake they made was recruiting a bunch of advocates who seem to think mass surveillance the second you leave your house is something Americans would accept. And the third was treating their critics as if they were a bunch of loud dumb cranks who don’t know what’s good for them – something Flock CEO Garrett Langley did repeatedly.
What I’ve come to agree with is the notion of a horseshoe mentality, that it’s just a very very small number of people, incredibly small, that tend to be really loud.
I imagine you’ve never been to a city council meeting.
Interviewer: I never have.
And I imagine you never will, because generally, I hope you vote, you should vote, and then you trust that the system works, that the person you voted for as generally aligned views, and like they’re going to go do the hard work, because that’s what you elect them to do.
As a general rule, “trust the government, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear” hasn’t had much purchase in the American mindset – and in the post-Covid era, it has even less. The left already doesn’t trust cops. And while the right is generally pro-cop, they are extremely uncomfortable with the idea they’re being constantly watched.
The tolerance Americans have for being constantly watched is an odd thing. Your phone, your television, your car – they’re all listening to you pretty much all the time now. But that ubiquity serves to make many Americans more on edge about intrusion into their privacy, not less. Americans don’t actually want to live in a world where privacy is reserved for the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
In the wake of sacrificing so many of our liberties in recent years, that’s a heartening thing to see.
✍️ Feature
🌍 Foreign
Times of Israel: A Month From Elections, UN Speech Is an Opportunity for Netanyahu, But Trump Isn’t Helping Him
MSN: Burnham Has No Idea What He’s Doing and It’s Starting to Show
🏛️ Domestic
Semafor: Tim Scott to Senate Republicans: We’re Still in This
Washington Examiner: Peltola Campaign Defends Claims of Mistreated Staffers, Burden of Grief
WSJ: Democrats Backed an Independent in Nebraska. Leaked Tapes Make Him a Risky Bet
Politico: NJ Sherrill Struggles With Lieutenant Governor Investigation
New York Post: Kyrsten Sinema’s Ex-Bodyguard Trashes Her Arizona Home, Causes $200K in Damage
New York Post: Medal of Honor Heroes Take Sides as Trump’s Army Secretary Decision Becomes Pentagon Knife Fight
Daily Wire: The Hidden Reality Behind NY’s Declining Murder Rates
🗳️ 2028
📰 Media
Washington Examiner: Peter Navarro Calls for Admin Boycott of Fox News
New York Post: Speculation About Bari Weiss’s CNN Future Is Coming to a Head
💻 Tech
Semafor: Some Republicans Push to Prioritize Husted Data Center Bill
Daily Wire: America’s Next China Dependency Could Be Artificial Intelligence
WSJ: Mark Zuckerberg Lays Out His Vision: Muse AI Agent Fused With Smartglasses
WSJ: The AI Build-Out Is Becoming the Biggest Economic Bet in U.S. History
🧬 Health
🏈 Sports
Daily Wire: Jennifer Sey: My Stand With Sophie Cunningham for Women and Girls in the Fight for Women’s Sports
🎭 Culture & Hollywood
Semafor: Paramount Weighs Tapping Musk for Equity Investment
Variety: You Can See Everything Trailer: Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes
Hollywood Reporter: Elizabeth Holmes Prison Release to Halfway House in 2027
Hollywood Reporter: Transformers: The Movie 40th Rerelease Extended
Daily Wire: Taylor Swift Apparently Committed the Ultimate Modern Marriage Sin
🪶 Quote
“And then the Internet happened: and the panopticon society, cameras everywhere and augmented-reality tools gobbling up your peripheral vision and greedily indexing your every spoken word on duty.”
— Charles Stros