Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“But it also involves the continual design of the scene—the building of prisons to hold convicts is scenic design, but so is the establishment of police and other security forces, fences and other ways of protecting houses, other buildings and neighborhoods, habits of scrutinizing others and reading situations which themselves get built into the scene. With the emergence of planetary scale computation scenic design has now come to include extensive surveillance, recording, data collecting and algorithmic-driven machine learning which, as I’ve been speculating in recent posts, will likely render certain kinds of cases obsolete while creating new ones—cases, though, that will center on modulations of the stack at one or another of its levels just as much as upon measuring the proper degree of retribution or reparation. Humans will still resent, and massive reserves of potential violence will still “power” the system, but deferral will increasingly be referred to learning to navigate designed scenes.”

— Adam Katz, The Same Sentence · May 09, 2024 · Bouvard Substack