Wired.com

I used to be a loyal subscriber to Wired. I loved the technology stories, futuristic predictions and all the other computer and tech information.

They now look to be joining Sport Illustrated and other publications in the dust bin of history.

But knowing how perilous journalism is today, why would they go about publishing this nonsense.

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There’s a well-known story among surveillance studies scholars and students of Black innovation: that of Marie Van Brittan Brown, a Black woman from Jamaica, Queens, New York who is now recognized as having invented the home security system in 1966. Brown worked long hours as a nurse and often came home late at night. Her husband also worked “irregular hours,” and Brown worried about who might knock on her door if she were home alone at night.

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Brown’s inventor origin story is quite different from that of a similar technology’s creator—Jamie Siminoff, founder of DoorBot, which eventually became the Ring Doorbell. Siminoff started DoorBot in a garage in 2012, after he grew annoyed by people constantly ringing his doorbell. “I was like, how the frick can there not be a doorbell that goes to your phone?” Siminoff told Digital Trends.

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A Black woman who feared for her safety creates a system. A white guy develops an iteration of this system later because he is annoyed that people are ringing his doorbell too often. This becomes a tool to manage Amazon’s loss prevention. Eventually, it leads to a boom not only in home security products like the Amazon suite and Google’s security cameras, along with a variety of others, but increasing measures to make the home, the neighborhood, and all public and private spaces a 24/7 watched fortress, complete with cameras, drones, security robots, and automated license plate readers. But amid this escalation, one urgent question arises: What are we defending ourselves against?

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While the progression from Brown’s invention to Siminoff’s may seem unlikely or even paradoxical, it isn't: Surveillance technology always “finds its level.” Its gaze is always going to wind up focused on Black folks—even if that was not the “intent” of the inventor. Surveillance, first and foremost, performs a carceral function by attempting the capture and control of marginalized populations. That it may serve additional functions is somewhat beside the point. Surveillance systems, no matter their origin, will always exist to serve power.

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In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne, professor of Black Studies in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, suggests that anti-Black racism is fundamentally coded into all our systems of vision, oversight, observation, and surveillance. She argues that there is no such thing as a system of surveillance, at least when human beings are involved, that does not add to anti-Blackness. According to Browne, “The historical formation of surveillance is not outside the historical formation of slavery.”