I find it alarming that to “protect” women, men have to be surveilled secretly in all public places. This is way beyond dystopian.
AI and remote security personnel get to decide if someone is “a predator” and take 'em down preemptively if they look suspicious.
What could possibly go wrong?
Rosie Richardson is working to develop a technology to help keep women and girls safe in public spaces
Not another Elizabeth Holmes clone, ffs.
Just stop with the black turtleneck She-E-O bullshit. What a maroon you’d have to be to invest in this
This will end well.
We’re talking the same AI systems that protect children from lethal bags of chips, and the same kind of premise that lead to vulnerable women getting their info stolen?
Wow, the Baltimore one I didn’t know about and that’s also beyond dystopian. Jeez, the response by authorities being “sorry, but it did the right thing, move along” reminds me of the movie “Brazil”. If you read the article, you already know that yes, it’s like that one, but in England, and every public place. Worse though, because it’s judgment of where you stand, sit, walk or cast your eyes in relation to any woman in the area.
The idea is, on that deserted railway platform, the lasers would spot the unnecessarily close choice of seat, registering it as unusual and a potential threat. Security teams would then be alerted and could either direct CCTV for a closer look or send staff in person if needed.
Me when I get arrested for sitting down in public. This is definitely not going to drive young men towards figures like andrew tate
Do you remember the social media panic over ‘man spreading’ or whatever? This whole thesis that men sit with their legs spread in public spaces to specifically deny women a place to sit?
It was so wild. And everyone ate it up. And if you pointed out how many women dump their bags on seats and take up 2-3 extra seats… you were a misogynist attacking hard working women who were just trying to bring their shopping home.
It can’t just be that people who take up extra space are the jerks.
Yep. Same with man vs bear discourse. It’s all scissor statements, and people eat it the fuck up because we all need an enemy
Thanks for the link. I never heard that term before. Super interesting. But very common rhetorical device these days.
Almost all assaults are done by people the victim knows, in private. This does nothing to prevent that.
Insane the sort of shit people propose. At this rate they’ll ask to install cameras in our homes to “detect domestic violence events” or to detect “terrorist activities”
Hah! They don’t have to. Many have “assistants” listening constantly, door cameras linked to central surveillance hubs, security cameras also linked to those hubs. It’s too late for most people - they took the bait. Hell, even the televisions record audio and send it back to the hub, and I’ve heard now that cameras are the new rage for them so we can “control the TV with motion”. Yeah, most are already cooked. I had to replace my old LG, bought a new one. I didn’t give it access to the internet. Even so, who knows if it’s still secretly doing it? And then there are our phones in which they swear they’re not tracking us. Yet, plenty of proof they are in fact recording our conversations and tracking our locations.
What the fuck‽
key premise of identify politics is that you are guilty of the sins of the group you belong to.
in this case, if you are a man, you are guilty of the crime of potentially raping women.
You are going to see al to more of this kind of crap, from ‘progressive’ people in the next decade.
The UK is a dystopian shithole
This is global. My town is installing Flock cameras to “stop dangerous speeding and red-light running”. Never mind that it also is networked with every single other camera, reads license plates, and use AI to track people everywhere they go. There’s no danger, though. That’s just coincidence…
If it helps, a lot of these stories don’t go anywhere in the end.
CCTV cameras are a lot more accepted, but it’s not as extreme as the media often makes it out to be.
The article shows how this tech is already in use in places like King’s Cross.
lol
At one time, we were promised that having cameras in our faces wherever we go would make things safer. “This invasion of your privacy will make you safer.”
That’s clearly not been enough to completely stop this so now we need to take it one step further and use lasers.
That will be the end all, be all to put a stop to this.
But if and when it isn’t, it’ll just lead to the next victim feeling we didn’t go far enough.
Next is going to be requiring every citizen have a drone fly behind them and follow them wherever they go and they pay for this invasion of their privacy. The laser thing just wasn’t cutting it. Someone got assaulted and the people who were supposed to help her didn’t show up. But now having drones follow you and monitor your every movement is going to stop it once and for all. Of course it won’t follow you into your bathroom because that would be taking it too far…
…until someone gets assaulted in a bathroom, then we’ll move to now violating your privacy there as well and that will be the end to all of these evil people being evil, once and for all. We promise. That’ll be the last time we violate your privacy and the evil people will stop being evil for sure 👍
Or gets murdered… so lets add weapons to the drones, just in case you ‘look’ like you’re about to murder someone!
If students have to use AI in order to make it look like they’re not using AI — what on earth will a system like this do to people? Quite how it will be able to read the intent of people’s actions without throwing up a huge number of false-positives is something that I don’t understand.
And quite what workers are supposed to do when they receive an ‘alert’ of this nature, I’m not sure. Go up to the individual and tell them that their behaviour has been flagged as suspicious? Way to make me feel more anxious in public.
No, it already does. Facial-ID stuff already throws hundreds of false positives.
This article is using every trick in the dystopian playbook to try to emotionally appeal to people. Protecting women, especially the young girls!
“I think we have to develop solutions that put the responsibility back into other places like public authorities, owners of spaces, police forces,” she says.
But she still comes out and says what she really wants: more power vested into private, wealthy owners of spaces, to the state, and to the police.
Surely nothing can go wrong. Surely this is about equality for everyone and it definitely won’t disproportionately impact men of color. Surely this won’t run afoul of any tricky edge cases like trans people. Surely this won’t be used to deliscriminate against the poors while still allowing anyone in an expensive suit to do whatever the fuck they want.
This article is using every trick in the dystopian playbook to try to emotionally appeal to people. Protecting women, especially the young girls!
Oh man, PhilosophyTube has an character-devoted bit to this lol
Why not sell it as a big laser quest game? #YesAllMen /jk
Women are slightly more than half the population (51%?) and experience the most harrassment. I think something needs to be done but maybe not a dystopian measure. How about a shared register of dangerous men made by competent devs (not outsourced) that don’t leave the s3 bucket open to the intetnet unencrypted? Or - given that the police are useless - make the process of getting a restraining order more straight forward, require less evidence.
Oh, you mean like the Spill the Tea app? That would never be used to infringe on privacy or destroy reputations of innocent people, right? Right?
I’m not going to go further and turn this into a discussion for a different forum, except to suggest a search on harassment and gender. Regardless of gender issues this and similar “protective” activities only serve to enhance control over populations.
I was referring to that app when mentioning the poor engineering choices that were made. My thinking is more along the lines of your co-commenter, sex offender++, or smth
They already have sex offender lists. People duly convicted by a jury of their peers.
We’ll do anything but force men to take accountability for their actions and to change our culture.
You’re missing the point, it’s mass population control. Over here in maga states we have women fearing period tracking apps coz abortion. Even Facebook will sell info on women to data buyers to track them.
Ah, of course, that’s the fascist strategy these days.
So your take-away from this article about a surveillance tool that seeks patterns of behavior and movement amongst hundreds of random people in a public space is “those privileged men will do anything to remain unaccountable” for… minding their business on in the tube, mall, or sidewalk? This is waaaayyy bigger than that level of bigotry, and in fact pandering to that very bigotry is exactly the tool used to get 51% of the population on board with implementing it without considering the very real consequences for them.
I misread the situation. Ignore what I said.
I think their point is that this technology will continue the trend of not making men take accountability for their actions. Expanding surveillance and preemptively arresting guys for being awkward does nothing to put guys like Brock Allen Turner (aka Brock Turner) (aka Allen Turner) in jail for raping people.
Definitely better ways to phrase it though. A lot of people think that “forcing men to take accountability for their actions” means “forcing all men to take accountability for all other men’s actions,” but that’s not really what they said
What pragmatically can anyone do?
Am I suppose to stalk my female friends 24/7 like a vigilante to prevent them from being assaulted? Maybe put a webcam in their bedroom and watch every sexual encounter they have to make sure they aren’t assaulted? At that point I am the sex criminal.
The very premise that other people are responsible for someone else’s crimes is totally absurd. We don’t do this with say… bank robberies. Most bank robberies are done by men, and yet I don’t hear how it’s every man’s job to stop bank robberies from every happening. The people who are supposed to stop that are security guards and police. Are we supposed to have some sort of anti-SA police force that goes around policing every social interaction men and women have in public?
There are countries that do have that very thing…
It’s a more complicated situation than any one person can have an answer to. That said, I think a large part of the problem is that we live in a society that normalizes sexual assault to an extent. Everyone knows that rape is bad, just like everyone knows that robbing banks is bad. The difference is that most bank robbers don’t delude themselves into thinking that they’re somehow innocent of any wrongdoing. They might offer personal circumstances as some sort of justification for having robbed a bank, but by and large when someone robs a bank, they know they’ve robbed a bank.
Contrast that with sexual assault, where by and large people who commit sexual assault rationalize their crimes to the point where they believe themselves to be fully innocent. Most people believe themselves to be “good people.” Since I’m a good person and good people don’t rape, that means the sex I had wasn’t rape.
She was into it when we started. She never said no. Did you see what she was wearing? She was asleep, it was a victimless crime. I just couldn’t control myself. He’s 14, but he wasn’t complaining. He’s bigger and stronger than me, if he doesn’t want it he can stop me any time.
All bank robbers know that they are bank robbers, but most rapists don’t know that they are rapists. And you’re right to ask what anyone can do, because that’s a very hard question to answer. My friends don’t tell me when they have sex, and they certainly don’t tell me about the circumstances of the sex they have. If they’re doing sexual assaults, there’s literally no way for me to know.
That’s why I think it has to be an enormous cultural shift. We have to instill in the minds of everyone that if a person can’t and/or doesn’t enthusiastically agree to sexual contact, then sexual contact is sexual assault. We also have to instill in everyone’s minds that there is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” person, there’s just people. Everyone is capable of doing good or bad things.
Rationalizing the mass surveillance by claiming people rationalize their bad behavior (no way to really know that) is a very bad approach.
Rule of law is concrete. If one thinks they’re a good person while both taking someone else’s agency and breaking a felony-level law, that is on them. Taking away everybody else’s freedom and privacy because some people are narcissistic sociopaths is the kind of thing authoritarian narcissistic sociopaths do to get and maintain control.
We don’t have to instill in the minds of anyone anything other than basic human empathy and an understanding of the Golden Rule as a starting point of social interaction.
People forget that the surveilling party can be narcissistic sociopaths like anybody else. The difference is the scale of damage they can do.
When did I rationalize mass surveillance?
You did it when you spent a considerable amount of space explaining how sexual abuse is different because these abusers don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, so society needs a way to police them.
This was the bulk of your response to being against total public surveilance. You also didn’t explicitly agree or disagree with my assertion.
Instead you gave an explanation of the problems of criminality in society, asserted that something had to be done, and presented a huge cultural shift as the solution.
This neatly leaves the uncareful reader to potentially conclude that the surveilance is a reasonable approach to deal with an intractable social problem.
However, it really is not an intractable problem. it is a hypersensitivity to a horrific behavior that gets eyeballs in our truly fucked up profit-driven media system that thrives on manipulating our often morbid curiosity.
It is the constant airing of these events twenty four hours a day. If there are only 24 cases of such behavior on the planet in a single day, you will hear about it. That is 24 out of 9 billion people. Clearly evidence of the horrific cruelty of most humans, and particularly men, right? We have to do something to protect the innocent (insert women, children depending on the nature of the intractable problem).
Our history is littered with authoritarian movements making people believe the reality of a few bad actors is rampant cross society and is due to the “other”. They rally the weak willed foolish into destroying freedom, individuality, and life for their dear leaders’ enrichment, all while believing their moral certainty is unassailable.
Yeah, but it’s worse than that. Some people don’t even know they were raped. Some people, think you not raping them is worse than raping them. For some being enthusiastic consent happens at the moment of the act, but then is revoked retroactively due to guilt and shame.
Rape and SA don’t really have very clear cut and obvious cases, esp from the victim or the perpetuator’s POV. It’s easy to judge it from an external POV, naturally. But it’s VERY gray. I have had so many sexual encounters that were so messy, including encounters where there was no sex, and the other party accused me SA for not raping them, because in their twisted mentality, my lack of overbearing sexual desire was somehow insulting and painful for them. Literally, I had a woman over, she was falling over drunk, so I put her to sleep on my couch, and the next morning she sent me a flurry of texts about how I had SA her and violated her by not sleeping with her and she was going to post my info all over the internet and make sure I was punished for being a good person because how DARE I not take advantage of her what is wrong with me, I must be gay, etc.
I didn’t have sex with her because she barely conscious and it would be rape. And yet, her mind, I was still an evil-doing bad guy because it hurt her feelings for me to not rape her while she was semi-conscious. I can’t say for certain, but I suspect his woman was clearly a previous victim of sexual abuse. I’ve also had similar encounters with women in the case of physical abuse, where the encounter was “be a man and hit me to prove to me you care.”
Peoples mentalities around sex are not cut and dry. They are incredibly messy and fraught. Lots of people pressure other people into sex, or feel compelled to have sex because they know the relationship can’t progress or be secured without it. When I first started dating, I quickly learned that most women expected me to be sexually aggressive ASAP and if I asking them for sex, I wasn’t interested. So had to learn to fake an interest just so I had more opportunity to continue to see them. Lots of dates think I am a pussy if I don’t try to force myself on them.
I’ve also had so many other encounters where people lectured me on safe sex, consent, etc. but then when we were in the sexual act, they demanded I sleep with them without a condom, and then retroactively decided that doing so was wrong/bad. Or, that I was a pussy for wanting to use a condom. Some of those encounters also result in physical/sexual assault on myself by the woman. I’ve also had horrible sexual encounters that I hated, where the other party thought it was AMAZING and vice versa.
I mean really, there is no ‘solution’ unless you’re going to have some neutral third party observing all sexual relations between people. People themselves are not capable of that. They have zero objectivity about themselves the vast majority of the time and they their narrative in the heat of the moment is VERY different than it is before or after that moment. You can be VERY clear ahead of time about what you want and your boundaries… but that in no way means the other person cares or listens or they don’t change those desires/boundaries during the act.
Not to mention that some people are very bitter when faced with rejection and will retroactively change the entire relationship’s story post-breakup. During the relationship you are charming and wonderful and compassionate, but post-breakup you’re a manipulative evil person who seduced and took advantage of them…
What is the solution to any of that? You require some sort of psychological assessment or licensing before you are allowed to give consent?
Yes there are. Perhaps the “between the lines” of all this is that to protect women, they should be confined to the home and when out (with permission and escort of course) they should be covered head to toe in garments that hide everything but the eyes!
Oh, wait…
You can’t force anyone to take accountability for their actions. Either they voluntarily take accountability for their actions, or you police their actions.
Surely a society that has shown little care for women’s safety would never pretend to care about women’s safety to justify pushing their surveillance state forward.
Except those most likely to victimize women LOVE projection and taking undeserved credit
But the system she is developing does not use cameras and, instead, monitors crowds as anonymous dots on a map. Only when it spots a potential issue are CCTV cameras directed on the individuals, or security personnel sent to the scene.
“Our aim there is to respect public privacy - so really understand that people don’t want to be continually monitored when there’s no need to be - but also make spaces safe,” she says. The process has undergone simulated trials and will soon move to tests in real-life scenarios.
Either none of the commenters read the article or they’re all the type confused by women choosing the bear.
Nothing but fragile male egos on display.
Collecting data to allocate limited resources and you’re all acting like it’s a personal attack on your manhood with some are as an reason to lean in on their toxic masculinity.
And people like you and the other men in this thread are why women won’t support anarchy.
LOL. What are your problems?
Do you not see the contradiction between centralised surveillance like this and anarchy? Or are you just a troll?
What I see is a complete lack of sympathy for why women feel this is needing. Instead it’s men feeling attacked and it’s done with a level of hysteria that prevents a rational discussion.
We can get to a decentralized system by ignoring why people feel they need a centralized system. But we’re not able to talk about that because male fragile egos dominate the conversations.
What I see is a complete lack of sympathy for why women feel this is needing. Instead it’s men feeling attacked and it’s done with a level of hysteria that prevents a rational discussion.
It could be argued that you’re demonstrating the mirror of what you’re describing.
When you come to a discussion with notions of how people are going to respond to you, it can be quite easy to trigger exactly the behaviour that you’re expecting to see. Come expecting rancour, and rancour may well be what you find.
But we’re not able to talk about that because male fragile egos dominate the conversations.
You know I would take a different perspective on this. It’s common for men to believe that expressing emotional vulnerability is a weakness; it’s something that should be stamped out. Think of the Stoic male stereotype. And I think your idea of ‘male fragile egos’ plays into this trope; to me, it’s only a step removed from telling all these men to stop whining because their feelings don’t matter. I personally don’t think you can be a legitimate feminist and reinforce toxic gender stereotypes like this at the same time.
What I see in this thread is men, sometimes indirectly, expressing feelings of vulnerability. To tell these people that what they’re feeling doesn’t matter because women have it worse, and worse tell them that they should have show sympathy, means that everyone sees a degree of hypocrisy.
So why would they be likely to take you arguments seriously?
Ratio’d on god lolol
I knew it would. These systems are needed because of the men making these comments. The irony is lost on them but I find it quite hilarious.
Either none of the commenters read the article or they’re all the type confused by women choosing the bear.
Nothing but fragile male egos on display.
Take your lazy gendered stereotypes away with you please.
Stop being a stereotype.
