Flock camera vs army of men in lawn chairs with notebooks

Our Take

There's something refreshing about seeing surveillance mocked instead of marketed. Mullins Media Co.'s bit — a lone Flock camera squared off against a row of dudes in lawn chairs with notebooks — works because it exposes the absurdity by inversion. Manually copying down plate numbers looks creepy and labor-intensive when you watch humans do it. Automate the exact same task, bolt it to a pole, and run it 24/7 against every car that passes, and suddenly it's branded as 'public safety infrastructure.' The joke only lands because we've all quietly accepted that the automated version is somehow less invasive, when in fact it's far more thorough, far more permanent, and far harder to opt out of.

That's the core problem DeFlock keeps hammering on: scale changes the nature of the thing. A guy in a lawn chair can't cross-reference your plate against a year of travel history in half a second, can't share it instantly with hundreds of other agencies, and definitely can't do it to every single driver in town without anyone voting on it. Flock's network does all of that by design. Comedy videos like this one are doing real work by making that gap visible to people who've never thought twice about the camera on the corner.

Credit to Mullins Media Co. for the laugh and the reminder. If you want to know where these systems are actually watching near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just laugh about it, there's a real path to doing something at take action.