The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence.
While some recent (and ongoing) protests have turned violent, many didn't. In the coming months we'll have time to do a postmortem. I strongly suspect spontaneous protests without organization will be found to have the most potential for violence, while those with organizers committed to self-policing and, ideally, cooperating with police will be found to have fared much better.
Individual people may be intelligent and responsible, but crowds have their own rules of behaviour and need to be managed. Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing.
There will always be organizers who want violence because it reliably brings press coverage and attention to their protests, but social media is also creating new problems. Coordinating a large number of people to show up at the same time and place used to take considerable planning and effort. When you have to work hard just to get the even to happen, why wouldn't you plan how it will unfold as well? Now a couple of tweets or posts on the right reddit subs will suffice. How can police meet with the organizer of a protest when it's really just some dude who had a lot of social media followers and might not even bother showing up himself?
I find it very odd that the police still cannot after all these years and with all development in surveillance tech distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and rioters. One could almost believe that they have no interest in making that distinction.
It’s already happening in India and China. I’m sure it’s happening here too, with an added startup component with the example of Clearview AI. The big companies get in on the action too:
‘There are many companies that offer facial recognition products and services, including Amazon, Microsoft and FaceFirst. Those companies all need access to enormous databases of photos to improve the accuracy of their matching technology. But while most facial recognition algorithms are trained on well-established, publicly circulating datasets — some of which have also faced criticism for taking people’s photos without their explicit consent — Ever is different in using its own customers’ photos to improve its commercial technology.‘[2]
'In the 1998 Hollywood thriller Enemy of the State, an innocent man (played by Will Smith) is pursued by a rogue spy agency that uses the advanced satellite “Big Daddy” to monitor his every move. The film — released 15 years before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a global surveillance complex — has achieved a cult following.'
It was, however, much more than just prescient: it was also an inspiration, even a blueprint, for one of the most powerful surveillance technologies ever created. So contends technology writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel in his compelling book Eyes in the Sky. He notes that a researcher (unnamed) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who saw the movie at its debut decided to “explore — theoretically, at first — how emerging digital-imaging technology could be affixed to a satellite” to craft something like Big Daddy, despite the “nightmare scenario” it unleashes in the film. Holland Michel repeatedly notes this contradiction between military scientists’ good intentions and a technology based on a dystopian Hollywood plot.'
'In 2006, the cinematically inspired research was picked up by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is tasked with US military innovation (D. Kaiser Nature 543, 176–177; 2017). DARPA funded the building of an aircraft-mounted camera with a capacity of almost two billion pixels. The Air Force had dubbed the project Gorgon Stare, after the monsters of penetrating gaze from classical Greek mythology, whose horrifying appearance turned observers to stone. (DARPA called its programme Argus, after another mythical creature: a giant with 100 eyes.)'[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/millions-people-upload...