Defund The Police Killing Machines

As we inch towards another episode of Black Mirror becoming reality...

I’m sure quite a few of you dystopia-observing types have watched the predictive programming series that is Netflix’s Black Mirror. At a certain point, this series became very hard to watch. Remember Metal Head, that harrowing episode with the robot dogs?

A lone woman runs around a futuristic hell-scape trying to outrun and outsmart a killer robot dog. (Still from Netflix)

If you want to get the gist of the horror that goes down, but don’t want to watch the visuals, you can read the Parents Guide on IMDB (yikes, but written horror is also terrifying).

Screenshot from IMDB

Well, last week another grim episode becomes more likely to go from fiction to fact.

Alison McDowell, excellent researcher and writer that she is, in her technocracy watch blog Wrench In The Gears, goes into the history of these killer machines and of how robots now — the mostly cute kind (“Aw, look at these amazing gadgets delivering food to students in their dorms…”) — have been slowly but surely creeping into our everyday lives.

You can read her article, Remote Killing Comes Home To Silicon Valley, here.

In it, she also shares a seven-minute clip pulled from the November 29 meeting of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in which board member Hillary Ronen opposes giving official authorization to the police department to use bomb carrying robots to kill humans with government approval.

Alison writes:

Hillary Ronen was correct in saying we are opening a Pandora’s box. For the sake of “safety” and “convenience” we are bringing remote killing to our own back yards. The US war machine’s drone strikes have come home to roost. The fact that in that room the vast majority of supposed liberals were emphatic in their embrace of advanced weaponry shows how flimsy their facade of social care is. I guess we can thank them for making it so very clear for us.

(I’d like to thank Sup. Hillary Ronen for being sane enough to, at least, recognize and warn against the hazards of this being allowed to pass.)

But sadly, after several hours of debate, the authorization eventually passed with eight in favor and three opposed.

8 to 3?! Only 3 of our public servants have the necessary foresight to see the dangers of these machines?

The full 2.5 hour debate can be watched here.

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I am appalled but I guess not surprised.

Most people do not understand what a dangerous move it is to allow these machines to become law enforcement tools because most people cannot see three steps ahead, let alone fifteen.

This lack of foresight, the inability to comprehend how gradualism is the strategy cleverly employed to bring about unthinkable societal changes (think of the frog in the slowly boiling pot analogy), and forgetting — or not even knowing — history… all of the above failings in human thinking are what has brought us from 2020 to where we are today in 2022 in the first place.

The general public will no doubt have these machines marketed to them as innovative (and there’s no denying they are) and therefore “cool”; the robots will be hailed both as “time-savers” and “safety-increasing technology”.

The masses will be propagandized to accept them, as they have been propagandized to accept every humanity-destroying law of the past 3 years.

A 3-D modeling artist built the Black Mirror Killer Dog to 1/4 scale… Oh, how very cool! (Click image for link)

But these robots are essentially killing machines, devices that do not possess a heart and soul, and are programmed to carry out their oath, First Do Harm.

As one Saner asked, albeit rhetorically, in our Telegram group, followed by the video clip below:

“What could go wrong?”

I have a question too: Sane Francisco, how can we stop this?

I propose an action, a movement:

DEFUND THE POLICE KILLING MACHINES

Heck, let’s just go crazy and make it a hashtag!

#DEFUNDTHEPOLICEKILLINGMACHINES

Let’s talk about how we stop this insanity!