Scale is real, but I want to suggest that we can be more optimistic than to regard it as dispositive on this matter.
As a thought experiment: imagine that in the next 20 years, a device or procedure is developed which allows a human to copy, from their visual memory, anything that they've seen (or at least seen recently) onto a digital medium, which some sort of verifiability of its veracity. This obviously presents the same scale challenges to which you're pointing - it will be impossible to walk around in public without being seen and identified in a way that's digitally verifiable.
But does it make police states and surveillance more likely, in the same way that Flock does? I think we can probably all agree that it does not.
And that tells us that it's not the vision or the memory of the vision that is the threat.
When the entirety of the commons is recorded, and the recordings made available for analysis by all, it's perfectly possible (and I think, inevitable) that police brutality (and even police legitimacy) will decrease.
We need to develop the bravery to say out loud that, as vision (meaning, better and smaller cameras, cheaper storage, etc) continues to improve, our need for police (and perhaps for states) decreases.
In this way, the problem of scale to which you correctly point is naturally counterbalanced.
As a thought experiment: imagine that in the next 20 years, a device or procedure is developed which allows a human to copy, from their visual memory, anything that they've seen (or at least seen recently) onto a digital medium, which some sort of verifiability of its veracity. This obviously presents the same scale challenges to which you're pointing - it will be impossible to walk around in public without being seen and identified in a way that's digitally verifiable.
But does it make police states and surveillance more likely, in the same way that Flock does? I think we can probably all agree that it does not.
And that tells us that it's not the vision or the memory of the vision that is the threat.
When the entirety of the commons is recorded, and the recordings made available for analysis by all, it's perfectly possible (and I think, inevitable) that police brutality (and even police legitimacy) will decrease.
We need to develop the bravery to say out loud that, as vision (meaning, better and smaller cameras, cheaper storage, etc) continues to improve, our need for police (and perhaps for states) decreases.
In this way, the problem of scale to which you correctly point is naturally counterbalanced.