alt Hacker NewsI wonder what they mean by this?
> The camera can have different ways of seeing encoded in it, including kinds of gazes that enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”
The phrase "kinds of gazes" strikes me as the sort of thing that's only going to make sense to people trained in a very particular and idiosyncratic flavor of ethical critique. What a normal person sees here is, "These cameras can detect if people are acting bizarre and dangerous," which is probably something most people would appreciate. In Seattle, the problem, of course, is that the streets are full of people acting bizarre and dangerous, it doesn't take a camera network to find them, and the police seem to be under strict orders not to do anything about it.
Replies
> acting bizarre and dangerous
The problem with surveillance like this becomes "who gets to decide what is bizarre and dangerous?"
I think it's clear what it means but indeed it's formulated in a critical theory framework (see also "male gaze" in feminist theory) that makes it seem more complicated.
Yes, they take camera images and videos and there is value judgment regarding the behaviors.
Reading between the lines, the authors criticize the approach of law enforcement around drug use and dealing, living on the street in tents etc.
But the language makes it sound like special academic expert language and hence automatically right and high prestige.
Agreed. I have a read a lot of social/political theory and I am sick of this language. These are academic/philosophical tropes presented as if they were scientific findings. Even when the ideas are interesting, the Theoretical baggage gets in the way and the result is at best clumsy and at worst insufferably pompous.
I try to make a habit of gently reminding academics I know how badly this gets in the way of communication with non-academic people and ends up hindering the transmission of their ideas. To be honest, I think quite a lot of academics wind up communicating this way because they're subconsciously looking for positive feedback from their colleagues and so slip into the abstruse language of the classroom without realizing it.
There's a PG essay related to this: https://paulgraham.com/orth.html
What came to mind is a camera pointed at the cash register tells a very different story than the camera pointed at the ATM, or pointing from the ATM for that matter. Placement and the stories behind them offer interesting perspectives on what the observers are trying to catch or deter.
I miss when every second comment on hn didn't sound like a cop
Gaze language needed to be fleshed out perhaps
>> enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”
> What a normal person sees here
The post is talking about you.
My best guess would be
[[Surveillance cameras normalize/denormalize behavior in a way that is easily biased and undemocratic.]]
It might e.g. direct the full force of law against a drunk urinating on a tree (easy to spot/classify), while tolerating vicious verbal attacks disguised by somewhat subdued body language (missing data/difficult to detect).
Letting automated surveillance systems judge people will inevitably influence our own collective judgement.