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It’s pretty depressing to see every ostensibly American value be replaced by profit-driven utilitarianism. “It improves X problem marginally and it makes money, so why not?” seems to be the reasoning for just about everything anymore. No discussion of values, of the society we want to build, or anything else. That’s the world the tech industry is building.
> by profit-driven utilitarianism.
That's generous. To me it's just felonious corruption possibly bordering on treason.
> and it makes money
It doesn't make money. Which is why these rent seeking entities attach themselves to the federal and state budgets with onerous contracts that they will defend to the death. If they had to actually compete for private business they would be out of money by end of year.
> of the society we want to build
This isn't directionless either. The people doing this have a vision for your society and they're willing to do almost anything to secure that.
> That’s the world the tech industry is building.
Which is why I find monopoly law enforcement so important. "Too big to fail" has become the norm and it seems to me is a required ingredient in order to achieve these outcomes.
Reminds me of the school 'vape detectors' that can also be programmed to listen for "loud noises" and "keywords" but basically handwave away the fact it violates wiretapping laws because they're claiming they're basically doing pattern matching on RAM buffered audio then dumping it.
It really feels like there is no debate anymore when it comes to things actually being implemented, they are just thrust upon us and maybe discussed later after there have already been consequences
> It’s pretty depressing to see every ostensibly American value be replaced by profit-driven utilitarianism
That's the difference between mythos and ethos - they were never the actual values to begin with (profit-driven utilitarianism is exactly American ethos)
Have you read The Technological Republic recently? What you said is an echo of the Palantir CEO's thesis there. In the book he calls for discussion of what "the good life" is. I found it a bit ironic that you seem to come to different conclusions about surveillance.
This country literally had a civil war to prevent rich capitalists from owning other human beings. America’s “values” have always been rooted in profit-driven utilitarianism.
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance
> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
— Garry Tan, Sept 03, 2025, YC CEO while defending Flock on X.
https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
I admire Garry but not sure why there can’t be a line that we all agree not to cross. No weapon has ever been made that was not used to harm humanity.
I spent several years doing a bunch of work in my local muni that drastically restricted, and eventually booted (I'm not happy about this; long story) Flock. I feel like my Flock bona fides are pretty strong. I understand people not being comfortable with Flock. I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line.
People disagree about this technology. I live in what I believe to be one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the United States† and I can tell you from recent experience that our community is sharply divided on it.
† (we're a small inner-ring suburb of Chicago; I'm "cheating" in that Chicago as a whole is not one of the most progressive cities in the country, but our 50k person muni is up there with Berkeley and represented by the oldest DSA member in Congress)
"Flock safety currently solves ... %10 of the crime Nation Wide"
Pretty bold statement without citing data to back that up. I have already received a speeding warning letter from one of these things. Does that count as a crime Flock solved?
I tire of all this binary thinking. It is true that surveillance helps victims. It is also true that the same surveillance can endanger civil liberties. We should have some say in how much we will allow our liberties to be endangered.
Sounds like someone watched too much Person of Interest
I don't know and DNGAF about Garry, but that argument is specious and reflects the conflict his business fundamentally creates for him. The smart move would be to be silent, not sure what you "admire".
> I admire Garry
Isn't it getting harder to say this, hearing this kind of rhetoric? "My bombs only kill the bad guys" is either hopelessly ignorant, or willfully malicious.
The logic here works both ways. The number of wars prevented by mutually assured destruction, and the number of lives saved is beyond nontrivial, and likely outnumbers the lives lost.
I don't want to get into an argument about the dangers involved, I agree with Taleb about the fat tails of violence, and how standard statistics breaks down when there is infinite variance. My point is just that Tan's point is reasonable, even if there is risk. You need only look at the CCTV usage in the UK to see how you can have a reasonable society with strong surveillance.
Why do you admire him? Him and his ilk are responsible for the dystopia we're barreling towards.
What's to prevent US-based surveillance from becoming Chinese surveillance?
Also, what reason do you think China gives for its surveillance? It's the same: "protecting victims", "protecting citizens", "public safety".
> I admire Garry
Why?
Irrespective of how you feel about this, its very strange to throw China under the bus here. If Chinese surveillance is so dystopian, don't you think China uses the same exact rhetoric for protecting their police state? After all China went from a bunch of farms to the second largest economy in 30 years.
Either you think mass surveillance is wrong or not.
The slide into hell is steep and slippery. I’m afraid we’re in a dark period of history that’s only going to get darker.
I want proponents of this tech to explain something to me. Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us? Isn’t the whole point of this to preempt those kinds of things?
What is the counterfactual? Without knowing the number of attacks prevented by these tools, we don't know what the baseline would be.
> Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us?
…is this true? What timespan are we looking at? My understanding was that crime has been on the decline pretty much from the 90s up until 2020. And in 2020 the world changed in a way that kind of made everyone go nuts.
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. That includes being recorded on video, or audio.
That should be Flock (YC 2017)
“Human distress” today, and “human everything” tomorrow. They probably just don't currently have the processing capability or upload bandwidth for all the passersby talking, the only issue is technical and not moral. Flock is in this for money, all morals are turned off --corporations are not really people-- and will sell cops and the government anything they are willing to pay for, including listening for wrongthink. Every time I read a story like this I send EFF or the ACLU another $20
1984 was a pretty mild vision of the surveillance state. If tech continues to improve we will not too far into the future have full surveillance around the clock of everybody. No way around it and it will not even cost a lot. The big question is who will have access to the data.
The logical next step is replace the microphones with the ones we carry around in our pockets every day: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IRELLH86Edo
Surely this will never be used for evil
"We will all be on our best behaviour because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on"
And then they'll start proactively reporting to law enforcement when their AI model thinks what you're saying is "suspicious", just like they do now when it thinks the movement patterns of behavior of your car is suspicious.
Flock's CEO openly says the he intends that "Flock will help eliminate ALL crime", and has shown he has no concerns about how dystopian or Minority Report-esque Flock would need to be to accomplish that mission.
I'm going to go around these things all day screaming, "help, rape!"
It's like that old prank where you order pizzas to someone's house that didn't order them. That's how we used to fight against the man. Now we scream, "rape" randomly in public.
What a time to be alive.
They film us on the street. They film us at traffic signals, from law enforcement vehicles, and drones, parks and even through our doorbell cameras. I don't mean this glibly, or in its entirety, but the big screen watching your every move in 1984 seems not too far off..
Looking beyond the obvious surveillance issues, how long until all the location are made public and people start in with the pranks/activism/etc diverting responders away from real emergencies?
"officers we're just rehearsing a play in a public space ... " or something like that
Is there an audio stream that tends to ruin speech recognition?
1. This is illegal eavesdropping
2. I will start screaming at the Flock cameras
Seems we are not far away from full-on 1984.
How's this different than shotspotter?
Don't worry. If LEOs are dispatched reacting to a Flock event, they will be using Carbyne, a company founded by Epstein and Ehud Barak.
Disgusting.
It is now fair game to destroy their illegal surveillance devices. Please do.
It's a problem entirely made up from America's insistence on guns. IMHO that's like when you have a website that serves a few requests per second, and then someone has the bright idea of using Kafka and Kubernetes because reasons, and now you have a horrible mess that requires multiple developers to support and, instead of questioning the original technical decision, everybody instead piles up technical "solutions."
At least nobody actually says "The founding engineers knew everything, our job is protect their original technical decisions, because otherwise our great company will fall."
Regulate guns and all these problems go away. As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.