there is gold in the flock cameras

Our Take

This one's a curveball for us: not a documentary or a council meeting rant, but a song. "crockk - Topic" is YouTube's auto-generated artist channel for the musician crockk, and the track "there is gold in the flock cameras" is exactly what it sounds like — someone turning the ambient dread of automated license plate readers into art. We don't know the lyrics' full intent, and we're not going to pretend we do, but the title alone says something: Flock Safety has become enough of a cultural fixture that it's showing up in song titles, not just city council agendas.

That matters because surveillance normalization doesn't just happen through policy memos and press releases — it happens when the thing becomes background noise, something people reference, joke about, or make music about without a second thought. When a network of cameras logging your plate, your location, and your movement patterns becomes casual cultural shorthand, that's a sign the infrastructure has already won a battle most residents didn't know was being fought.

We credit crockk for putting a weird, unexpected spotlight on this. Whether the song is satire, lament, or something else entirely, it's a reminder that these cameras aren't an abstraction — they're embedded enough in daily life to inspire art. If you want to see how embedded they are in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just sing about it, head to our take-action page.