I hate this

But does it matter? — I don’t usually say that sort of thing here. I try to be more measured, less personal. I’m talking about the police face recognition1 vans obviously. Photo from the Metropolitan Police’s 2025 Annual Report on Facial Recognition. This might not surprise you: I mean that I don’t like them. I’m an old git after all, a man who’s written here before about the erosion of elementary freedoms, commodification, dehumanisation. The cameras make me uncomfortable and unhappy (and I haven’t even met one yet). I think they do damage to the public realm, chip away at our autonomy and subjectivity and diminish us as human beings. They’re a really bad thing. At the moment these things have to be driven up and parked somewhere prominent, surrounded by coppers giving out leaflets, but the technology will, we already know, soon be passively present almost everywhere. In body-worn cameras, doorbell cameras, dashcams and High Street surveillance systems. Every camera everywhere will…