When I was a child, I used to dream of growing up to live in a magical world where my every move would be monitored by cameras tracking my identity, behaviour, and emotions.
Just kidding. But that reality is exactly where we are headed.
Welcome to the age of total surveillance and the extinction of the concept of privacy - the latest efforts by the global politico-corporate elite to render existence as oppressive as possible before the planet combusts in a climate catastrophe.
One pillar of the surveillance industry is facial recognition technology, which has been making waves as of late with headlineslike The FBI Has Access to Over 640 Million Photos of Us Through Its Facial Recognition Database and Facial recognition smart glasses could make public surveillance discreet and ubiquitous.
Of course, there are plenty of dedicated cheerleaders as well. In June, the New York Times ran an op-edtitled How Facial Recognition Makes You Safer, in which New York police commissioner James O'Neill swears on behalf of the technology's "worth as a crime-fighting resource".
But how can anyone be made safer by something that is so often frighteningly inaccurate?
Last year, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) conducted a test of Rekognition, Amazon's facial recognition software, which compared images of all the members of the US Congress with a database of mugshots.
The results, according to Rekognition: 28 US Congresspeople were identified as criminals. And what do you know: the false matches pertained disproportionately to people of colour.
Now imagine the complications that might arise when you have such technology in the hands of US law enforcement officials who have already proven themselves predisposed to shooting black people for no reason.
In addition to marketing its product to officials from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other notoriously abusive entities, Amazon has also pushed for Rekognition's use in police body cameras - which would presumably only increase the chances of pre-emptive misidentification by trigger-happy forces of law and order.
Despite pushback from Amazon employees and others alarmed by the implications of surveillance collaboration with the state, the company remains committed. A recent Vox article quotes Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy as arguing that "just because tech could be misused doesn't mean we should ban it and condemn it" since other things like email and knives can also be misused: "You could use a knife in a surreptitious way."
Fair enough, but knives at least serve a wide variety of useful purposes for the average human, as opposed to simply sustaining a dystopian landscape built for the enrichment of a tyrannical elite minority. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.