Festival rockers told to take off smartwatches, moshpits spark emergency alerts
theguardian.com16 points by vinnyglennon 3 days ago
16 points by vinnyglennon 3 days ago
One of the most broken aspects of the internet is on display here:
Apparently 700 devices concluded that their operators were in distress, in a crowd of many thousands more. And whom did those devices alert? The people around them? Or perhaps a select group of people around them known to be connected via a social graph?
No. They notified the cops. 700 accidental / inadvertent contacts with the state.
The internet has lost most of its sense of the geographical distribution of its nodes, and picked in the stead of this information, the authority structure of the legacy state.
Fortunately in this case the response from the cops appears to have been mature and responsible. But imagine if this wasn't a festival but a resistance action, and it wasn't in a place with legally restrained cops but a place where this information can be and is used to retaliate against the accidental informers?
This is perhaps one of the biggest problems facing deployments of real toolchains designed to facilitate the deprecation of tyrannical states: its users need to leverage their geographic closeness as a strength, and need assurance that a more real and local graph of authority underwrites the logic of emergency responses.
saftey third, which in Canada is actualy written into our constitution, but not followed, in that we have a constitutional right to "take our own risks", and therefor must be allowed a means to switch off any automatic alerts and alarms I just leave the fucking thing behind, and would realy like one that has no gps or gyro's, and physical switch on the radio transmitter/reciever to turn it into a local only device, ie: camera, screen, tunes, notes.
Typically it’s the fire department. They are pretty awesome.
I don't know how typical it is for these sorts of alerts to trigger messages that do not go to police, and I doubt that metric is closely tracked or even understand.
But in the case at hand, the message did go to the police.
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