the truman audience

A sort of surreal situation arose last week.

In San Francisco they're trying to implement this thing where the police can tap into private cameras as live surveillance feeds. One in a long line of encroachments on a free life. The board of supervisors was holding a meeting to discuss this and other pending legislation and they have a period for public comment. So me and some friends went last monday to voice our futile opinions in person. I went through the metal detector at the grand old city hall building and wended my way through the tour groups and wedding photo entourages and actual live wedding ceremonies into the main chambers where the invisible surveillance infrastructure of our lives and and a bunch of other topics are gummed over and settled upon.

Only 3 of the 11 supervisors were there in person and public section was totally empty aside from me, my three friends, and some guy bent over passed-out in the back row. The rest I guess were watching through their computer screens. Another one of the sort of things that covid hysteria has apparently locked in place, all in all a bewildering acceleration of generalized atomization.

The police chief called in from his car like it was some idiot right-winger vlog, providing a fascinating 5th-grader take on the subject and me and one friend got up to talk for a minute or so, just for fun? just to flail? dunno.

But the surreal thing happened after we sat down and the call-ins started. There were a heartening amount of disembodied voices ringing out into the chamber against the proposed surveillance ramp-up, but they slowly started getting overwhelmed by disembodied Mandarin. Call after call was all Mandarin except for their final 'yes yes yes' coda. So the 8 of us, the supervisors, me and my friends, and the passed-out guy were sitting quietly as a language no one understood played over the speakers. The calls alternated with a 'thank you, next caller' and we eventually got up and left.

There's a weird thing going on here, kinda akin to the new thing of pro-cop black mayors in big cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. I'm too much of a dummy to fully get it, but the school resegregation efforts, the DA recall, and this surveillance stuff seems to share in common some anti-black effect, if not animus, and imo astro-turf asian support. There's clearly more going on, but this is equally clearly a component.