A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
So would you rather I assume they just don’t know any better, that they lack agency and enough insight to recognize that calling it “self-expression” is internalizing an imposed identity? Or are you going to care-troll that I’m calling them stupid and helpless then?
Yes, I think most people get that’s all it is, and they do it anyway. I think the impulse to ignore external imposition is pretty deeply conditioned in people and I think that’s unfortunate. Do I think it’s their fault, not entirely, but do I also think they have a choice in it, I certainly do. Even when it’s a matter of practical necessity, we should always be aware of identity imposed externally, because it can and often is used against you. I do think that offering customized plates is kind of gross because it’s a way of dulling that awareness, and I think it’s morbid that people have been conditioned to accept it, even fully cognizant of what it represents.
And you can keep your red herring, I’m not interested.