A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
But you don’t own the art you watch/listen to. You don’t own the message on the bumper sticker. There is no difference.
That’s a very legalistic interpretation of art. From a psychosocial perspective, all art is participatory. Each token is more than simply a construction of the artist. Who and how it’s shared with and interacted with is an active participant in creating its meaning. The act of choosing is in itself an internalizing behavior. There does remain some externalized imposition, but as an act of voluntary community building, not a function of practical necessity in the service of ends not entirely your own; and importantly if the terms of that voluntary association change you can remove the symbol.