terminally millennial

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Cɾσυƈԋιɳɠ Tιɠҽɾ, Hιԃԃҽɳ Dɾαɠσɳ

Hello, if you haven't heard yet, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake hit Western Colombia this morning. The death toll so far is at least 111. I'm lucky that my family living there was safe and unaffected from what I've heard so far, but many are suffering right now from loss of family, friends, homes, work, transportation and pets.

I've gathered links to donate to verified relief in the area. My heart goes out to anyone suffering in Colombia right now.

Bogotá Food Bank - I believe mercado pago allows non-Colombian payments via card

World Central Kitchen

Direct Relief

GEM Latam

Plan International

But the fact that I turned on the TV and I counted more than 5 painfully obvious AI generated ads made me turn it off soon after.

A new chapter posted on Wattpad and AO3