We’re all in this race, whether we realize it or not. We’d better pick up the pace.
Reading by Tim Foley:
John F Kennedy was correct when he said “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
That’s why police robots are being aggressively normalized today. The empire managers want to make sure violent revolution is impossible, too.
The New York Times’ sports department The Athletic has a creepy new article out titled “The ‘Robodogs’ on World Cup patrol in Mexico” about how wonderful and awesome it is that the international soccer tournament is being patrolled by surveillance robots.
The article is functionally a PR piece for police robots, gushing about how “cute” and “cool” onlookers find the dystopian technology.
The piece opens with the cheery paragraph, “A group of police officers patrolling a stadium with three dogs on a World Cup matchday wouldn’t usually raise eyebrows. But when those three dogs are high-tech robots equipped with video cameras that can sustain speeds of 20kmph, you can understand the fuss.”
“The K9-Xs are made of aluminium and high-strength plastic,” The Athletic writes. “They have facial recognition and behavioural analysis systems installed, which means they detect when a group of people become agitated and send video to the police force’s centre for command, control, communication and computers.”
In a video segment accompanying the article, The Athletic’s Tomás Hill López-Menchero refers to the robots as “creatures” and says the robots “went down a treat with the public” in the World Cup audience.
It’s little things like this that help normalize police robots in public consciousness. Calling them “dogs”, giving them the name “K9”, calling them “creatures” instead of machines. It’s pretty clearly designed to evoke the image of something normal that westerners are familiar and comfortable with.
But westerners should not feel familiar and comfortable with these things, and we should not see them as normal. The fact that we’re seeing more and more use of police robots around the world should frighten us all, and the fact that popular institutions like the World Cup and the New York Times are being used to normalize them should freak us the hell out.
Our rulers are always acutely aware that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that we could turn on them at any time. This has been the case for as long as there have been rulers. History is full of examples of the masses turning against their government and establishing a new order, and the oligarchs and empire managers have long been preoccupied with the task of ensuring that this never happens to them.
Autonomous killing machines nullify many of the problems presented by human security forces. You don’t have to worry about the robot army siding with the people, or refusing to fire upon their fellow citizens. An army of militarized police robots would provide the oligarchs and empire managers of the western empire with a perpetually obedient force of bulletproof trigger-pullers who can shut down any uprising when the time comes.
The increasing ubiquitousness of police robots is not separate from the exploding prevalence of surveillance cameras and AI facial recognition, the push for digital IDs and the eradication of online anonymity, or the increasing instances of online censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. A technological cage is being constructed around the public to ensure that we can be stopped from turning against our masters.
The story of humanity in the 21st century is the story of a race between revolution and the technologies designed to prevent it. A race between the awakening of collective consciousness to the urgent need for revolutionary change on one hand, and the technological ability to quash a people’s rebellion on the other.
We’re all in this race, whether we realize it or not. We’d better pick up the pace.
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