resist the feed

China Tianying built and funded it; grid interconnection came in December 2023. Nine more towers are planned across China, totaling over 3.7 gigawatt-hours. Unlike pumped hydro, a gravity tower needs only flat ground.

The machine Owen encountered is called a Patronscan Guard+, a biometric and personal data collection device made by Servall Data Systems, a surveillance tech company headquartered in Alberta, Canada. Mix is one of at least three bars in the Castro, including Badlands and Toad Hall on 18th Street, that wheel out the Patronscan kiosk each night to collect the personal data of every customer that comes through the door, including names, addresses, genders, and even how they behave inside the bar. [...]Management from Mix, Badlands, and Toad Hall did not respond to requests for comment about when or why they first started using the surveillance tech in their businesses, so I stopped by Mix last Thursday night to check things out for myself.Like most private surveillance cameras, the Patronscan kiosk at Mix hides in plain sight. In the dim light of the bar, the black machine is easy to miss. I was also not instructed to face the camera when I handed my ID to the bouncer; when I asked if I would be photographed, the bouncer told me the camera had in fact already taken my picture. They said Mix bouncers are not required to verbally tell each patron that they're being photographed by the Patronscan device. Instead, they rely on a small informational plaque posted to the kiosk below eye level to inform customers what data is being collected and how it will be used."It's posted signage," the bouncer shrugged on Thursday, when I suggested tipsy customers might not read the fine print on their way inside. [...]Owen, however, sees potential for serious privacy risks. In today's political climate, she said, "it's really not great to have lists of gay people."(Gee, ya think?)In 2023, Illinois residents filed a class action lawsuit against Patronscan for violating an Illinois biometrics privacy law by collecting biometric data from eventgoers without first obtaining their consent, calling the technology "Orwellian."In 2019, when the Board of Supervisors banned the use of facial recognition software by city agencies, including the police, the measure was widely supported by locals and inspired similar policies nationwide. That policy does not apply to private businesses like the Castro bars, but the reception at the time signaled widespread distrust toward surveillance tech companies. But now as the technology grows more normalized and a new generation of AI boomers flood San Francisco, the attitude toward Big Brother is shifting in the city.The morning after we chatted in the Castro, Gonzalez told me over Instagram DM that he was unaware Mix could share patron data with neighboring businesses but did not see a problem with it. "I think it's cute that they share it amongst other bars," he wrote. "It's like a little cybersecurity community."Oh, how cute!As George Orwell famously wrote, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a shrug emoji stamping on a human face -- forever."This is so much worse than the usual techbro "disruption" of bars that features here so often; it's even worse than the company that tried to sell bars' security cameras back to them.If you think these photos, videos and dossiers of personally-identifiable information won't be turned over to ICE at the drop of a hat by this Servall Data Systems, you have not been paying attention. ICE, I must remind you, now has a budget exceeding the entire military budgets of all but 15 countries. Bigger than Israel; almost as big as Canada and South Korea.The Brownshirts will be in the Castro soon enough.

As data collection becomes ubiquitous, its consequences permeate our everyday lives in research, study and science administration as well. The business of education is thus becoming a data-driven one, which can be observed prominently in scientific information infrastructures. What is described by the term surveillance publishing outlines a development in which major scholarly publishers, but also other suppliers like database providers are mutating into data cartels that are not satisfied with the exploitation of the publication as data model but are expanding into ever more areas of the research life cycle as well as service and administration processes. Higher education is becoming more and more blind to its very own mission, instead the Merchants of Doubt are gaining momentum and science is slowly moving closer to the fantasy-industrial complex, where tech oligopolies and authoritarian disseminators of alternative facts are increasingly converging. As a result, both researchers and employees are gradually coming under a regime of people farming, and education and employment are becoming more and more similar to the low wage sector and ghost work.

The review, conducted by researchers from four UK universities known as the Action on Digital Device Immersive Conditions Team, did not establish causal links between screen use and specific developmental conditions. However, it was emphatic that “no under-twos should receive regular intentional screen time. Passive exposure is societally unavoidable, so adding deliberate use compounds risk without any meaningful benefit.”