Bedazzled campus surveillance

Over summer break, MIT installed over 500 AI-enabled surveillance cameras around campus. In an act of defiance celebration, professors started a group to bedazzle the cameras.

That said, if any students, staff, or faculty still have pesky concerns about this unprecedented ratcheting-up of campus surveillance, now you know that there’s a committee to contact with complaints. Or, you could join us, the cheerful bedazzlers, by celebrating the beauty of our beholdenness to Big Brother Tech. Do you feel proud to be involved in the capitalist project of improving Ambient.ai’s services and enriching surveillance for all people, everywhere? Do you patriotically embrace the fact that Ambient.ai shares the data they collect with government and law enforcement when they receive subpoenas, without needing to ask or tell the institutions from whom they collected it? If so, there are hundreds of white plastic eyelids out there awaiting artistic adornment to enhance their visibility even as they enhance ours!

In sum, we thank our glorious administration for their brilliant technical solution to a social problem. This is how it should be, because all social and political problems definitely have a technical solution, and usually we just need to pay for something involving AI rather than have an open discussion as a community (what a waste of time that would be!).