The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work, and if the company you’re paying to provide a service doesn’t trust their own workers enough to not keep them under constant surveillance, go find one that does. The panopticon is a cheap answer that lets us pretend we don’t need to put the work in to manage our own lives while leveraging the power of the state to subjugate everyone further down the socioeconomic ladder from us.
I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.
> The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work
Why only these two choices? The worker is free to not take the work at a place with cameras. No one forces them.
The cameras are a means of rigidly enforcing the rules, to a degree that traffic on the way back from lunch becomes something that threatens one’s employment. You and I bend the rules a thousand times a day in ways big and small because the world does not accommodate rigid rules and that’s fine; the workers under panopticon surveillance are not afforded the same grace we are to navigate the circumstances where the rules and reality conflict.
> No one forces them.
Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
Cameras provide alibi to those who may be suspects, saving time and money.
And so on.
You are only seeing the negative side of cameras, but there are positives as well.
> Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
Nope, they are free to walk away, rent without cameras, etc, etc.
Many of the high-trust smaller societies before those locks were actually pretty low privacy.
Can you acknowledge this gap in your analysis?
I've heard of some bad behaviour. I haven't heard of millions of cases of bad behaviour. Do you have numbers to back up your assertions?
Outside the West too!
For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this: like every SV business before them, the goal is to "disrupt" and leave the consequences for everyone else to deal with.
So yes, collectively, what has led to the current situation is indeed "millions of cases of bad behavior", each one of them often relatively localized, but collectively leading to damaging results.
The proposed oversight of board members and CEOs could be a great way to bring these issues into public discussion, to provide much-needed pushback that we don't get if boards have no oversight other than that provided by investment markets.
Almost everyone has an explicit goal of spending less money for equivalent goods and services. People prefer to stores that prioritize lowering prices over paying for more staff.
I think this contradicts with your first sentence.
Depends on whether you want to contribute to the creation of a dystopia.
You could maybe make the effort to hire someone you trust. And put any true valuables in a safe.
That isn’t a high bar. It’s only recently that the greater accessibility of cameras and recording devices that we get insight into just how much abuse there is, such as that experienced by women or by police towards minorities.
When the panopticon is flipped inwards, everyone scrapes together an excuse for why their solitude is more important than others.