Big brother is watching you.

Orwell gave us that line in 1984, his 1949 nightmare about a state with a telescreen in every room and an informant behind every wall. For decades it was the thing you muttered as a joke when a webcam blinked.

The joke's getting less funny, and now it's bolted to a pole on your street.

Flock Safety is an Atlanta company that makes AI license-plate cameras. Small, solar-powered, bolted to ordinary poles on ordinary streets.

They are not small in number.

Somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 of them are up across the country, in more than 5,000 communities, scanning over 20 billi0n cars a month.

Most people under that surveillance never voted, paid for, or even knew this was happening. And it’s even more frustrating that this lack of personal privacy was actually WORKING to keep the people safe.

In San Francisco, police say Flock helped cut auto theft 41% and pushed related arrests up 46%. Stolen cars recovered. Missing kids found. Real good, at real scale.

Can you feel that icky tension?

There's a famous line everyone hangs on Henry Ford (the guy who helped bring about the automobile as we know it today) that says,"If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses." (He almost certainly never said it. File that away, it matters in a minute.)

Steve Jobs did say the real version out loud: "People don't know what they want until you show it to them."

The point is, they're not wrong.

You can't run a focus group on a thing nobody can picture yet. Ask a neighborhood in 2018 whether they want AI cameras reading every plate on the block, and you get a flat no and a lot more stolen Hondas.

Some of the best things ever built would have died in a survey. Vision sees what the vote can't. We need visionaries to continue pushing us forward….

….so the Flock defenders have a real point. Wait for permission to build what people can't yet imagine, and you'll never build it.

But they smuggle in something extra with that point.

There is a canyon between "you don't have to ask permission" and "you don't have to persuade."

Flock drove straight into it.

They built the product and skipped the story. The neighborhood's first encounter with the thing was finding out it had already been watching them for a year.

And when you skip good storytelling, you don't get to choose which story gets told. Somebody else makes the choice for you, and in this case, it was a neighborhood that felt violated.

So in 2026 the bill came due. More than 50 cities have canceled or killed their Flock contracts in a single stretch. Dayton found over 7,000 times its camera data was pulled for immigration enforcement, against its own policy. After Flock's Super Bowl ad showed the whole country its scale, Amazon's Ring cut ties within days.

🤿 Dive Deeper: the Washington Times report on the Flock backlash, and the ACLU's "Get the Flock Out" campaign.

The bottom line: We've gotten so good at building fast that we treat friction like a bug. It has become the thing to route around. Ship it, patch it, apologize later.

I’d argue the friction is usually the point.

The slow work of persuading people is what forces you to answer the hard questions out loud. What does this see? Who gets the data? What happens when it's abused? You don't imagine the farthest implications of your build until you have to make the case to someone who's allowed to say no.

Remember that Ford quote he never said? It stuck for a hundred years because it's a great story. Stories travel whether they're true or not. So if you've built something genuinely good and you refuse to tell its story, don't worry.

A worse story is already on the way.

That's the power of storytelling. A good story is a pressure-test. To sell the thing, you have to understand it well enough to defend it. Flock had a good story sitting right there, but decided they were too far ahead to bother telling it.

Scripture is strangely consistent here.

God holds all the power and still refuses to steamroll. "Come, let us reason together." He persuades. He invites. He tells stories, and He lets people like the rich young ruler turn around and walk away.

We're image-bearers with real agency, and the God who could override that keeps asking for our yes instead. If the maker of everything works by persuasion, the bar for the rest of us, building our cameras and apps and companies, is not lower than His.

Build boldly. You don't always have to ask permission.

But you always have to persuade. Name what your tool sees, stores, and touches in one plain sentence, and make the case before you ship it, not after you're caught in it.

Do it because the argument you'd be forced to make out loud is the same argument that makes the thing good in the first place.

Nobody resents the camera. They resent not being told they are being filmed.

—Payton ✌️