Flock Cameras Explained: Foucault and the Marketing of the Surveillance State | Marketing Philosophy

Our Take

Credit to Jason McDonald for pulling a 1970s French philosophy seminar into a conversation about license plate readers on your street corner. His core point lands hard: the Panopticon was never really about the guard in the tower seeing everything — it was about the prisoner never knowing when they're being watched, so they start watching themselves. Flock Safety's pitch to city councils is marketing, sure, but the effect on the public is exactly the disciplinary mechanism Foucault described. You don't need a cop reviewing your plate in real time for the camera to change how you drive, where you go, and whether you feel free to show up somewhere without a record of it existing.

What makes this framing useful is that it cuts through the "nothing to hide" deflection Flock and its police department partners lean on constantly. The harm isn't only that your data might be misused someday — though it often is — it's that blanket plate-reading infrastructure quietly reshapes behavior for everyone in range, whether or not they ever get flagged. That's the surveillance state's real product: compliance by default, sold as public safety.

If this video makes you want to know whether that invisible tower has already gone up in your neighborhood, check our camera map to see documented Flock locations near you, and visit our take-action page for concrete steps to push back at the city council level before the cameras become permanent furniture.