Towards better discourse
I’ve written a lot recently about what I see as a gross overexpansion of the surveillance state. It is difficult for me simply to go to work, or church, or the grocery store, without being monitored and tracked by my county government and the private spy company it contracts with to implement its cameras, drones, and the AI systems that link them all. It is difficult for me to express how much it angers and offends me to be subject to a level of surveillance in my daily life that rivals, if not exceeds, that of Eastern Bloc citizens during the Cold War. We were the good guys then, precisely because we didn’t do that to our own citizens the way “they” did.
And so, when a Republican gubernatorial candidate posted on social media in support of this system, I was already primed for battle. The facts I wrote about in my recent post are correct – two GOP gubernatorial candidates have accepted four-figure donations from Flock executives, and the one who made the post in question did and does support continuing and expanding Flock’s network.
But I was rhetorically lazy, and used a technique that I generally abhor in political writing: the Maximally Hostile Interpretation. You see it everywhere. If someone disagrees with you, their motives must be evil, and their desired outcome must be the worst possible extrapolation of whatever that issue is. It’s great for algorithm maximizing, because you get far more clicks by making people mad (whether they’re mad at you, or mad with you at someone else) than by calmly laying out a rational case for your position.
What it almost never is, is accurate. And I was reminded of that when the candidate in question, Chris Carr, reached out to me about my column. He called me, and gave me frankly more time than is probably reasonable for someone who’s both serving in a statewide office and running for another one. He didn’t call to browbeat me for a post he didn’t like, or even to try to change my mind about Flock – just to have a normal discussion between two reasonable adults about a hot-button political issue. And, of course, his reasons for supporting these systems are not the Maximally Hostile Interpretation.
I still entirely disagree with Mr. Carr’s position on the issue. I think what Flock and similar companies do is completely un-American, and I do not want to be stalked by them, even in a scenario in which I might accrue some personal benefit. I will continue to work politically for the removal of those systems, and should those efforts not be successful, I fully intend to leave DeKalb and move myself and my family somewhere we can be free of such surveillance.
But I’m old enough to remember the political saying “we can disagree without being disagreeable”. That concept may be antiquated, but if it is, that’s just because we choose not to follow it anymore. The easiest thing for Mr. Carr to have done would be to ignore me, or to reply that I’m a criminal-loving anarchist; the typical response when one is accused of the Maximally Hostile Interpretation is to to apply your own Maximally Hostile Interpretation to the accuser.
Instead, he reached out to me and we talked about it. (I can contrast this to when I did reach out to my county commissioners on the issue, and got boilerplate copy-paste responses from a few of them and radio silence from the rest.) This is not an endorsement – I haven’t publicly endorsed anyone at this point, or even listed any order of preference among the candidates. And I should be clear that at no point did Mr. Carr suggest I make any change to my previous post or to write another one; I chose to write this entirely of my own accord.
If I want better political discourse, which I do, I should hold my own contributions to the same standards I want others to meet. Even when – especially when – it’s an important issue on which I have extremely strong views. The alternative to discussion is rhetorical combat where the loudest, angriest people get what they want and everyone else gets nothing. How’s that working out for us?
