Surveillance Technology Won’t Solve South Africanization. It'll Make It Worse
On Flock and Anarchotyranny
I recently spoke with a friend from South Africa, Ernst van Zyl, and we discussed the ongoing relevance of “South Africanization” to the West through the lens of the fact that there are still white liberals in South Africa, something that he and I both think shows “accelerationism” to be nothing more than a dangerous and counterproductive pipe dream.1
I would recommend watching that show, if you are interested in accelerationism and the problems with it. I think it was an interesting discussion, and it seems to have been well received by his audience. What I want to discuss here is a related matter: how the process of “South Africanization” is continuing to impact our lives, and why surveillance technology like Flock cameras will probably exacerbate rather than fix it.
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What Is South Africanization?
I’ve written some about this before, but for those who have joined us since, South Africanization is the process by which a state is hollowed out by a mixture of declining state capacity, anarchotyranny, and race communism.
Declining state capacity means the inability of the state or closely related regulated entities to provide governmental services, such as police forces, or other amenities of civilized life, such as clean drinking water, reliable electricity, and the like.
Anarchotyranny, a term coined by Sam Francis, is a system in which the state ruthlessly regulates, taxes, and punishes generally law-abiding and normal people for minor or imaginary transgressions against the state at the same time as it utterly fails to—whether as a result of low state capacity or outright refusal—perform its main duty of stopping violent crime, theft, and public disorder, which generally means that criminals go free and face no significant punishment when caught.
Finally, race communism is the blending of general communist attitudes regarding the expropriation of property, common ownership, and hatred of the most able with an anti-white racialist lens. Importantly, the focus is not on making life better for those who are supposedly oppressed by the able. It is instead on punishing and inflicting gratuitous economic and perhaps physical pain on those able people because they are more competent than average, and that competence is deemed a transgression against equality.
Zimbabwe under Mugabe is the clearest distillation of this: expropriated land generally went fallow and nearly everyone starved while suffering hyper-inflation, and this was deemed a good thing because the whites suffered seeing their family farms destroyed and had to generally flee the country.
Sometimes those things take place independently, but they are closely related. South Africanization is the process by which all three are combined into one country-destroying force. This process is typically characterized by the state punishing success or excellence exhibited by the “oppressors”, letting infrastructure fall apart, crime raging out of control and going unchecked, and those who pay all the taxes receiving next to nothing in terms of state services in exchange for them.
What is particularly deleterious about South Africanization is the way in which the various issues combine to form a situation much closer to a predicament than a problem.2
If you are interested in reading about this in more detail, here are two in-depth works on it:
South Africanization in America
In America, we have seen this to varying degrees, particularly in relatively non-prosperous, “diverse” cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and so on, but it is present across the country. Generally, it takes the form of degraded infrastructure,3 high taxes4 that are used to pay for various Dewayne Geld racial wealth redistribution schemes from which net taxpayers gain next to no benefit, war zone-tier murder rates and generally high property crime in urban zones, a heavy dose of anti-white policies targeting companies and schools for particularly intensive disparate impact-style regulation, and a generally inept bureaucratic regime.
In short, the state is either incapable or unwilling to do much other than find various ways of squeezing the increasingly small base of net taxpayers for the benefit of the welfare-dependent underclass.
Things have gotten somewhat better in that regard since Trump’s election, but the basic problem of an anti-white attitude intersecting with an inept bureaucratic state and generally anarchic conditions in urban zones remains.
Take, for example, the case of Shiloh Hendrix: a Somali kid was stealing from her, so she used a mean word, which an adult Somali caught on tape.5 In a case of anti-white bureaucratic tyranny seemingly out of Britain,6 she was just found guilty of “disorderly conduct” for being upset about being harassed and stolen from by invaders from Africa. Such a situation could only occur in a South Africanizing world; imagine telling George Washington that the law provided he had to let Gambians steal from him whenever they wanted, that insulting them was illegal, and that the whole system would go along with such a law and verdict!
Similarly, there is the problem of crime. A few select jurisdictions like Memphis and DC have been cleaned up because Trump deployed the National Guard to keep a lid on out-of-control crime. But that solution is only temporary; crime will return as soon as the Guard departs, as the criminals are being suppressed rather than hanged.
Meanwhile, everywhere else the problem remains: criminals are emboldened to do as they please, blue cities are actively encouraging them by enacting policies such as no cash bail or decriminalizing property offenses like theft, and the police are punished rather than praised for dealing effectively with criminals. The result is that large swathes of cities remain effective no-go zones for normal, law-abiding Americans, much to our detriment.7
Even as the crime problem remains out of control, much of the bureaucratic structure used to enforce race communism remains intact. California, for example, is trying to punish AI companies for producing programs that produce disparate impact answers,8 which is to say that it is punishing reality for not being anti-white.
This leads us to Flock cameras.
Flock Cameras and South Africanization
Though they’ve been used around the country since 2018, Flock cameras—license plate readers—have recently become a subject of intense online discussion, particularly as a way of discussing the general AI-enabled panopticon that seems to be rising around us. What we say online (and probably what we think) is tracked by Big Tech and the government/NGO partners with whom it works, where we go is tracked by Flock cameras, what we do is intensively regulated by the bureaucratic state…on and on it goes. As Flock cameras are a particularly visible symbol of that panopticon and create a sense of visceral disgust in many, they’ve become a shorthand way of discussing it.
On one hand, many call for them to be banned because they record and catalog vehicle movements—including license plates, make, model, bumper stickers, and travel times—into a searchable database, doing so without a warrant or cause. That’s the sort of outdoor prison9 of a society the Soviets or Red Chinese would build, not America! Or so we like to think. Yet the cameras rise regardless. That Flock is hiding the cameras10 just makes them seem even more nefarious.
Some on the right have taken to justify the cameras by arguing that they make fighting crime easy. They can be used to track “teens” who have stolen vehicles,11 or even track Antifa and aid the police in cracking down on that awful organization!12 They will catch bad people, or so we are told, and so we ought to support putting them up everywhere.13 Fewer cars will be stolen, fewer violent crimes will go unpunished, etc.
To argue as much completely misses the point of why crime is a problem in America. It is not that we don’t know who the criminals are. We do, often by name. There are 1000 people in Atlanta who commit 40 percent of the crime in the city.14 The police know them by name, and know what crimes they commit.
They are out of jail, free to commit more crimes because of the South Africanization of America, particularly the “anarcho” part of anarchotyranny.
That Daquaivius Washington is free to commit his twelvethousandth property offense on MARTA is not because Atlanta needs Flock cameras, but because every member of the ruling regime supports letting him steal, particularly if he’s stealing from (overtaxed) white residents of Buckhead. The Mayor, DA, police leadership, NGOs, and voters all want him to be able to “get his” at the cost of those nasty “oppressors” who need to be punished for slavery, and so he is free to do so, again and again. That he generally preys on other blacks rather than whites is of no real concern to those in charge; the fact that he’s making life worse by inflicting anarchy and its costs upon the city is all that really matters.
The same state of things is true in pretty much every city. It was not that Decarlos Brown Jr. was on the run from a motivated police force when he stabbed Iryna Zarutska in the neck in Charlotte, and would have been stopped if only another hundred license plate readers had been put up on street corners. No, he was out on the streets after his fourteenth arrest because the anti-white, pro-crime political system wanted him to commit more crimes. He upheld his end of that bargain, and now the system is trying to help him get away with it by declaring him unfit for trial.
So, Flock cameras would not end the anarcho part of anarchotyranny. The cameras have been put up since 2018, after all, and crime only got worse over that period. Meanwhile, we all know they would make the tyranny part far worse. The cameras are already being misused by police, after all.15
For what will all those spiteful bureaucrats use the data harvested by them? To inflict more race-communism-motivated pain and suffering upon normal, generally law-abiding white people, after all! And just wait till they add microphones to them, and that recording informs some spiteful bureaucrat in a windowless cubicle that you uttered hate speech…then there’ll be more hell to pay! That’s how anarcho-tyranny works. As Scott Greer put it16:
They’re meant to stop crime, but everyone knows what they’re going to be actually used for: catching people for going a few miles over the speed limit and other petty offenses.
Tons of cities have made it a burden to drive as cameras send tickets for every petty traffic offense. People are sick of it. That’s why Flock cameras represent to many the nagging nanny state rather than a force for public safety.
If we lived in a sane country, Flock cameras would probably be a fine tool when temporarily erected in certain places, namely “high crime neighborhoods” in need of pacification. Still, if we simply refused to tolerate crime and hanged criminals as our ancestors did, they would be mostly unnecessary.
It is not that we don’t know who the criminals are. We do know. The supermajority of them have been caught before. It is that we don’t punish them, for reasons of national temperament and ideology; subways are unsafe for the same Civil Rights reason houses in “nice neighborhoods” with “good schools” are extortionately expensive. It is not, as one Atlanta legislator claimed, that we need to ban guns from public transport.17 It’s that we let criminals live, and inflict themselves upon us. Flock cameras will do nothing to fix that.
The Importance of Being Honest
It’s important to be honest about what is happening. That America has a crime problem is to say that America is drowning in a puddle. Yes, it might prove existential; drowning in a puddle is no different than drowning in the Pacific, in the end. But we could also just stand up, shake off the yoke of race communism, anarchotyranny, and all the rest. The problem is easily fixable, and requires nothing more than the will to reintroduce the criminal underclass to the consequences of its actions.
We need not build a vast surveillance state to do that. We ought not build a vast surveillance state to do that, in fact. The digital panopticon would only make our lives worse. Even if it is used to catch teens stealing cars, after all, that won’t matter: they’ll simply be released as soon as possible by the pro-crime authorities, as is the case with every other crime.
The way to end crime is to stop tolerating it. Our ancestors fixed crime centuries ago by simply hanging criminals. They did so without a bureaucracy, without a surveillance state, while expanding rather than contracting liberty, and without any real downsides. The solution, and the way to effect it, is neither in doubt nor particularly difficult to achieve.
But to get there, we must first shake off the burden of South Africanization. We must stop drowning in the puddle. The anti-white bureaucracy, the race communist policies, the rampant anarchy, the omnipresent tyranny directed at law-abiding citizens…all of it must be done away with, turned to ash. Once that is done, we’ll find the cameras were never necessary. Until it is done, we’ll find they did nothing to fix crime, and much to make our lives worse.
Watch the show here:
A problem can be solved, a predicament can only be ameliorated
This is a major problem: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/
Bennett's Phylactery has a good article on this:
Your post on capital punishment is surely the best essay I've read on the subject.
All this is true, but we cannot fix it unless the Right reaches a consensus that a thorough ethnic cleansing of some kind is necessary. It's clear that liberal democracy in the presence of Jews and foreigners devolves naturally into this race-dystopian state, so merely rolling the clock back to a "color-blind egalitarianism with robust criminal law" (but accepting favela-like demographics) is no solution at all. We would be like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill. And merely the knowledge that under the constraints of liberalism there is no win condition for our side is utterly dispiriting. We need to smash the boulder, not just roll it uphill a little bit.