Hello, friends and enemies. You know I love a little internet game and my new favorite is Outlier! The point of the game is to find the “rarest” words out of a set of 25 letters that changes daily. There’s a bit of meta-game guesswork in finding words and considering how rare they may be. I thought “scrying” wouldn’t be that rare, but it got me a good amount of points yesterday. My rarest words so far (from various days) have been balkanize, khalifate, and vomitoria. As usual for a word game, I find that pulling loan words and obscure declensions of historical terms gets me where I’m trying to go. I hope you all come play with me. You can connect with me on Outlier here!
Current Events
The DeFlock/anti-ALPR (automated license plate reader) campaign here in Elk Grove is continuing. After all the press for the community audit (discussed in my last post), we showed up at the city council meeting to let them know they’re doing a bad job and we don’t want this surveillance garbage in our city. We had 21 comments and collectively spent 45 minutes telling the city council to get its shit together. You can see my comment online here. I was very satisfied to hit the three-minute time limit exactly and end right on the buzzer. We got some good coverage from Elk Grove News, which summarized all the comments and then reported on the campaign more broadly.
If you don’t want to watch a video (I usually don’t), here’s the full text of my comment:
I am once again asking that the City end its contract with Flock Safety and that Elk Grove end its use of Automated License Plate Readers entirely, not seeking an alternative vendor after canceling Flock.
Putting everyone under constant surveillance is an inversion of how our justice system is meant to work: innocent until proven guilty. Identify a suspect, get a warrant, conduct an investigation. Using AI cameras to track everyone’s movements is the opposite of this process. There is no probable cause to surveil everyone all the time, but that’s what using ALPRs like Flock amounts to. By continuing to use these systems, the city is letting us know that we’re all in a state of perpetual guilt, just waiting for the police to decide on our crimes, which Flock’s AI system can generate using pre-written prompts provided by Flock itself.
In April, the mayor said she was open to an audit of the city’s Flock data. Several weeks ago, DeFlock Elk Grove published a community audit based on data obtained from public records act requests. The data indicate that the City of Elk Grove has violated state law by sharing our data with other states and federal agencies. The city has claimed our data are secure and not shared on Flock’s national network. Do the mayor, city counselors, and chief of police not understand how Flock works? Or are they lying about what happens to the data collected from constant surveillance
While the city and the police department have stated that our data are secure, it is clear they have no way to enforce that themselves or even confirm its truth. Two weeks ago, Flock announced updates to its privacy safeguards, recommending a seven-day retention period unless there is an active investigation. Yet a week later, a Flock representative let slip in a public meeting in Marietta, Oklahoma that they retain data indefinitely. Flock’s terms and conditions state that, even if the Elk Grove Police Department owns the data, Flock has the right to “non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to (a) use and disclose Customer Data to provide the Flock Services; and (b) use Customer Data to support and improve Flock’s products and services.” While the City may claim it can keep our data safe, these terms make it clear that the City does not have the power or authority to do any such thing. There is no responsible, secure way to maintain an active contract with Flock and there is no reason to believe that a company that makes its money from spying on everyone is telling the truth about what it does with the information it collects.
We deserve better than living in a city where we are constantly treated as suspects of crimes not yet committed. We should not have to be observed by a system that makes it not only possible, but trivially easy, for police officers to stalk and harass women, for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to monitor activists, or for the federal government to observe the movements of political opponents. Whether the city believes it’s aiding and abetting the surveillance state is irrelevant; the purpose of this system is objectively to make it easier for those with power to maintain it by collecting an inordinate amount of data on all of us. The only responsible thing for the City of Elk Grove to do is end its relationship with Flock immediately and start treating us as citizens, rather than suspects.
After the meeting, I approached a Telemundo reporter who was on the scene and I did an interview! In Spanish! I do wish I had come across a little more fluidly but considering I went in with no preparation, I’m not mad. The next one will be better, I’m certain. You can watch it online here.
To everyone’s great annoyance, the city has been ignoring our group’s requests to meet and discuss the community audit. Instead, they have an item on next week’s city council meeting agenda for a “presentation of the Elk Grove Police Department’s Automated License Plate Reader technology.” I have to assume this will be a bunch of Flock corporate propaganda, especially given recent reporting from 404 Media about a leaked guide from Flock about how police can “own the narrative.” My favorite quotation from the guide is “Don’t avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you’re not going to convince opponents that it’s not” (page 4 per document numbering, page 7 per DocumentCloud numbering). I’m not sure what they think it is if it’s not mass surveillance, but it’s telling that the guide doesn’t go as far as to say “Flock is not mass surveillance.” Presumably, their legal team cut that part. The fact that the police department is doing this after DeFlock Elk Grove has repeatedly provided information about ALPRs, requested meetings, and demonstrated that this technology cannot be trusted suggests to me that the cops are, instead of facing the issues, initiating a narrative war. I have often said that, if I were evil, I would have gone into marketing because I think I’m very good at framing a narrative. Perhaps this is my time to shine in a non-evil capacity. Although I guess from a certain perspective, I’m being evil right now. Welcome to my Joker era?
DeFlock Elk Grove is asking for everyone to come out and comment at the city council meeting this Wednesday, September 9. You can comment during the open comment period at the beginning of the meeting AND after the police presentation. Of course, it’s much harder to prepare remarks for a presentation that we haven’t seen yet, but if you love the challenge of speaking extemporaneously, this is your moment. For full details, check out the post on the DeFlock Elk Grove website.
Books and Other Words
The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott is the follow-up to The Witch Roads, which I talked about in my last post. The magical entity that possessed the obnoxious prince in the first book returns in this book (obviously), but in a more consensual way (love that for him) and manifests through another character, which means the reader gets to know the obnoxious prince and how having someone else’s perspective forced upon him has made him into a little less of a prat. It also means that protagonist Elen gets to spend half of the book crushing on the magical entity in a sapphic way (love that for her). I will refrain from trying to explain this story any more than that, but I did really like this book and found the ending satisfying.
Radiant Star is the latest in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, which began with Ancillary Justice in 2013 (and which I wrote a review about when this blog was new and I thought it was going to be a book review blog! How far we have come). Although it wasn’t my most favorite of the series, it was still very good, as all Leckie’s books are, and gave me plenty to metaphorically gnaw on. I like that now, having established the terms of the Radchaai empire, Leckie is taking us outside of the empire to see how other groups view these so-called “civilized” people. She is talented at fleshing out all these little nooks in her universe and I, personally, will read every book she publishes without hesitation.
Media
I fancy myself as the kind of person who will listen to any music and I am endlessly delighted by memes on instagram to the tune of “playing my Walmart dubstep mix for the friend who ‘listens to anything.'” I know I won’t really listen to anything because I am no great fan of country or death metal or emo music, but I am finding increasingly off-the-wall things to listen to that I want to share. Two YouTube music channels I have been appreciating lately are L’atelier de Musique, which as far as I can tell is broadcasting from an alternate universe where the USSR is still going strong, and The Lounge Club, which is gathering music from many alternate universes. I listened to a set on L’atelier recently that was done on grammaphones of all things. It was great and I would like to see more of this because it’s ridiculous but also just fucking good. I also really enjoyed The Lounge Club’s cosmic grooves of the space balkans mix. So, like, Balkan music, but from the future where they’ve gone to space. Obviously. I am not sure how this DJ’s mind is working but I am enjoying the results and I invite you to join me.
Spanish
My quest for giving myself a masters’ degree in Spanish is well and truly begun now that I have read my first selection from my very long reading list: Los Combatientes, a novela by Cristina Morales. The story focuses on the University of Granada theater troupe and their particular brand of theater of the absurd (Waiting for Godot being referenced told me all I needed to know). Seething through the novel is a commentary on the shit that Spanish youth are going through, i.e., a massive lack of economic opportunities. The story is narrated through the troupe’s performance, which is absurd, includes a lot of sex, and involves singing songs by Franz Ferdinand and Plastic Bertrand. You know, basic theater kid stuff. If you find theater antics charming, you will probably enjoy this book. However, theater antics are insufferable to many. Potential readers, you have been forewarned. One of the lines I highlighted that exemplifies the author’s ethos (and my own) was, “De verdad que es injusto el mundo, caballero, pero tenemos la posibilidad y la obligación de cambiarlo.” (The truth is that the world is unjust, sir, but we have the possibility of and the obligation to change it.)
Corporeal Form
I had to get a new CPAP and it was a trial. I really resent that the health care system kind of just treats everyone like a criminal. Sorry, I am trying to get a machine that helps me breathe while I sleep so I don’t inadvertently stop breathing and die. I am aware this is very inconvenient for everyone involved. The latch on the humidifier of my old CPAP wore out to the point that it was popping open under the pressure (you know because CPAP is continuous positive airway pressure) and I was holding it closed at night with duct tape. I do not recommend this. My original plan was to simply get a new humidifier (since that model of CPAP has the humidifier as a separate attachment), but I learned that, for some reason, it’s no longer available in the U.S. It took me multiple phone calls to get approved for a new CPAP. Despite sending me CPAP equipment regularly, the medical equipment company claimed they did not have a prescription on file and my doctor would have to supply a new one. When I emailed my doctor, she very helpfully said “Call the sleep clinic” and nothing else. I also had to take half a day off work to schlep to the medical equipment office to get the new CPAP. An ordeal! It took a couple of nights to get dialed in with all the settings, but I am sleeping well again now, thankfully. I hope I don’t have to do this again any time soon.
Tip: if you are American, try to avoid disabilities at any cost.
Moving It
The last two weeks were rough because we did not have water aerobics and many things were happening, but this week went better. I am starting to see some more definition in my arms after prioritizing my upper body and that’s pretty cool. Here are my stickers including two weeks of a shameful single sticker each (the stickers themselves aren’t shameful of course. They rule).
Kitchen Witchery
I made a few good meals recently. We had some kung pao tofu (from Bean by Bean) and the sauce came out with a satisfyingly glossy finish. On Friday, I made tri tip along with mashed potatoes, green beans, and cornbread. Finally, because I realized I’d gone nearly the whole summer with nary a rice krispie treat, I made a batch of those, which we have been enjoying.
Cat Therapy
Fritz has been on a crime spree of escalating severity. He simply won’t stop peeing on the floor. Yes, he has a vet appointment this week. No, he is not marking. This has been going on for a while but over the last month he’s really ramped up and, I gotta tell you, we’re fucking losing it over here. We have tried many things. Fritz will often go pee in the box if I go with him to the bathroom, but just as often he will purposely wait until he is not being observed then race off to pee on the floor. We are willing to try any potential solution. Kirk just bought some cat litter made out of tofu (please do not ask me for information because I have none) and I bought a fake grass pad that people use for potty training dogs. We also tried just leaving an empty litter box out in case he is having sensory issues with cat litter on the whole (my autistic son) and he has peed in there but is still using the floor as an all-purpose toilet. Everyone needs to send cosmic emanations of support because we cannot continue like this.
Finally, here are some photos of a cat that is getting on my nerves (alas I still love him unconditionally).
