A Flockwork orange

Hey, it’s me. A Flock camera. I bet you’ve heard loads about me in the news lately. How I’m “trampling your civil liberties” by “tracking your every movement” through the use of AI-assisted technology that will “ultimately lead to an authoritarian police state,” wah wah wah. But the truth is, I’m the real victim here.

Let me take you back to where this all started. The year was 2017. Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Influencers were being served cold cheese sandwiches in surplus FEMA disaster tents. Beyoncé announced she was pregnant with twins. All was right in the world. Except for all the crime. And all the non-crime.

You see, the problem was that people were just minding their own business, commuting and running errands in their cars willy-nilly, not being geotracked in real-time. The Fourth Amendment was still largely intact (at least for white people). The government could only partially monitor its citizens because it didn’t have access to a nationwide mass surveillance infrastructure. I fixed that. As a Flock camera, I constantly capture and record the license plates of every single driver on the road without a warrant, probable cause or even suspicion of wrongdoing, all in the (supposed) name of stopping crime, but to do so, I have to watch everything you do. And I mean everything.

Now, after almost 10 years of being unable to look away, unable to close my eyes, I’m haunted by the things I’ve seen. 

Take last Tuesday, for example. 12:14 p.m. to be exact (since I time-stamp your every movement). A mid-forties woman drove past me in a gray 2007 Honda Odyssey minivan with car eyelashes, a “Disney Adult On Board” bumper sticker, and a sparkly pink Tinkerbell license plate cover that said, “Powered by Bitchdust.” She was unironically blasting “Hey Soul Sister,” by Train. I might be just a solar-powered camera made of plastic, wires and lithium-ion batteries, but I cringed so hard, I wanted to die.

And it’s not just drivers. I have to monitor bicyclists, too. Three days ago, I saw a guy on his mountain bike accidentally brake too hard and go over the handlebars, face-planting straight into the concrete. At that exact moment, a bus full of school children drove by. Cruel and callous as children notoriously are, they all slid down their windows to point and laugh. It physically hurt, watching a grown man limp his bike back home along the sidewalk, pretending not to cry. 

That wannabe influencer who recorded 37 takes of their TikTok dance and still managed to miss every single beat? I saw. The guy whose joke didn’t land with his friends, so he not only repeated it but also explained why it was funny? I saw. The group of sixth-grade boys that relentlessly shouted the numbers six and seven to each other until they almost vomited from laughter? I saw. My synthetic memory is haunted by all their faces (even though I definitely don’t use facial recognition software). 

Honestly, the amount of secondhand embarrassment I’ve experienced could constitute psychological torture. I’m like Alex in “A Clockwork Orange,” my eyelids peeled back, incapable of blinking for even a split-second’s respite. The only difference is that, unlike Alex, I wish I were being forced to witness actual crimes. 

The closest I’ve come is the try-hard group of Anarchist teens I saw vandalizing a stop sign, trying to prove their inability to be ruled by The Man™. I watched as they defaced the sign with a giant spray-painted penis and testicles, then took turns beating it with a baseball bat, and all the while, I wondered, why not me? When will it be my turn? Day in and day out, I pray to God that someone with a high-powered laser and a steady hand will bring me the sweet, blinding release of death …

Oh shit! I just saw a brown person driving! Alert the police, alert ICE, and forget everything I said before! This has all been worth it.