Merger: becoming the flock, witnessing loss
The short version: A poetic-sounding piece titled 'Merger' uses flock imagery and loss as a lens we can't fully verify, so we keep our take high-level.
Our Take
Details on this one are thin — Unsolicited Press gave us a title, "Merger: becoming the flock, witnessing loss," and little else. That kind of language reads like art or literary commentary more than a hard-news investigation, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Credit to the creator for putting something out there that gets people thinking about collective identity, loss, and what it means to become part of a "flock" — whether that's meant literally, metaphorically, or as a sly nod to the surveillance network that shares its name.
Whether or not this video is actually about Flock Safety's ALPR cameras, the title lands on something real: once you're folded into a networked system — birds in formation, plates in a database — your individual movements start to belong to the pattern, not to you. That's the quiet trade-off at the heart of automated license plate readers. You don't opt in, you don't get a vote, and the "loss" being witnessed might just be the loss of anonymous movement through your own town.
If this video has you thinking about what it means to be tracked without consent, that's a good instinct to follow up on with facts. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your routes, and visit take action if you want to push back on the systems doing the watching.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Unsolicited Press, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.