Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Trust involves risk - someone has to be willing to risk having their trust violated. The problem in modern western society is that we’ve decided we’re unwilling to take that risk, and therefore we’ve begun imposing what’s effectively a panopticon state on those with less power than us, with the consequence that the kinds of things we with power get away with fine - driving over the speed limit, being a couple minutes late to get a task done, getting sick or injured - cascade into severe circumstances by the cold logic of the system we’ve built to make ourselves feel better (job loss, money paying fines instead of food or medicine, etc).

The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work, and if the company you’re paying to provide a service doesn’t trust their own workers enough to not keep them under constant surveillance, go find one that does. The panopticon is a cheap answer that lets us pretend we don’t need to put the work in to manage our own lives while leveraging the power of the state to subjugate everyone further down the socioeconomic ladder from us.

> imposing what’s effectively a panopticon state on those with less power than us

I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.

> The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work

Why only these two choices? The worker is free to not take the work at a place with cameras. No one forces them.

> I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.

The cameras are a means of rigidly enforcing the rules, to a degree that traffic on the way back from lunch becomes something that threatens one’s employment. You and I bend the rules a thousand times a day in ways big and small because the world does not accommodate rigid rules and that’s fine; the workers under panopticon surveillance are not afforded the same grace we are to navigate the circumstances where the rules and reality conflict.

> No one forces them.

Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.

This is extremely once-sided view. Cameras protect employees from unfounded accusations.

Cameras provide alibi to those who may be suspects, saving time and money.

And so on.

You are only seeing the negative side of cameras, but there are positives as well.

> Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.

Nope, they are free to walk away, rent without cameras, etc, etc.

They are indeed free to go live under a bridge, until the police tell them to move on.

There are a lot of choices between “under the bridge” and “cameras are evil”.

There are indeed a lot of choices for you. Others have fewer choices.

Just look up how cameras give uber drivers protection against wrongful accusations and go off your high horse.

Until everywhere has cameras. It eventually becomes a false choice.

in this case you can always start a business without cameras and sell it as a feature of your workspace. If workers really want no cameras, they will come.

I’ve had plenty of uber drivers with a camera inside the car. I was not offended by their seeming lack of trust. They had stories to tell that made me realize these cameras were very much needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com