What life lesson did you learn too late?
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It’s been a hell of a few days, because even breathing a relationship into being was too much for the woman I was seeing and she emailed me that she was sorry but that even fun things were too much on her plate- no problem. I have a ton of fun things on mine. I’m going to see Talib Kweli in Wilmington on December 11th and I have to laugh that of course Aada is not going with me, but when she reads this she will spit nails with jealousy and consider it. 😉 I should leave a ticket at Will Call under “PAIN IN MY ASS.”
Feel the love.
When the friend I invited backed out, I invited Chef, but she’s out, too, because she’ll be back at work. The thing about going to concerts solo is that even if it ends up that way, it will be just as much fun as if I brought someone, maybe more… I love photography and I love the idea of getting intimate with Talib that way because he has shown me through his social media that he loves them…. pictures, that is. He has a ton of them with all his friends and it’s something that I commented on- that seeing his memories was straight up cool. So even if I don’t get to hang with a friend at the concert, I will walk away with beautiful images no matter what, and the satisfaction that I created them is even better.
Speaking of Chef, we’ll see what we’re going to do- I told her there was nothing on my calendar past Thursday morning, so we might pick a concert somewhere between us, ironically. I am not a concert person. I will just move mountains to see Talib, so I picked a smaller venue, and will go to the water the next day to chill out before I drive home. Whether that’s the river or the beach, I don’t know- Wilmington is a river town and the beach is another hour and thirty or so. It’s all about my energy that day…… and “that day” is not until December 11th.
In the meantime, it’s all about working toward the final paper in school, but I got bored with it and decided to do something else for the response in a discussion this week. I dictated all of my thoughts to Luna in the car and had her compile them.
So, in the grand scheme of things, I am so glad that I did not give this woman any more of my time than she deserved. It was great to meet someone I clicked with, but I am no one’s obligation. I think that I just offered too much too fast, because she kept saying things like “all the other teachers have their partners and I have no one.” I am solutions-oriented and my mother was a teacher. I do not let need go unaddressed. But I also need clear communication, and that clear communication started to feel like “one more thing” after “one whole day.” And in fact, I am laughing my ass off because the letter she wrote me clearly insinuates that her therapist is my age and she was sending me a signal.
I was going to date a math teacher because she was a math teacher. I figured that someone who could handle kids wasn’t your average 32-year-old. So, I gave her a shot. We hung out twice before I said, “I’m autistic and I can’t read you. What’s up?” Everything went to hell because I thought it was great that she was indeed attracted to me, but the things she wanted were beyond my comfort zone and setting boundaries made her feel resentment. If someone feels resentment at clear boundaries, that’s a mismatch.
Dating a 49-year-old is going to feel different than dating another 32-year-old and of course I saw the age difference up front. I wasn’t planning on marrying her because I wasn’t planning on marrying anyone ever in my lifetime, thanks.
But in a conversation where it’s all about seeing what works for you, if you take that as overwhelming instead of information gathering? Again, it’s a pattern-mismatch.
She asked me to do a lot of things that a partner would do and I responded that I would, but then that same consistency was then punished as me wanting too much too fast or something…. I’m not sure, but that’s what was implied.
I’m not about that because I did exactly what you told me to do. Go with God.
And I honestly think she broke up with me because I hate Lauryn Hill and there is not one good goddamn thing she can do about it. I think she thought I was being racist and was surprised to find out that no. I am not being racist. I sat in front of Robert Glasper in history.
After that little bit of history, let’s move on to what I’m working on now.
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It’s a response for school that Luna and I wrote yesterday, with AI usage documented:
I want to start with attitudes toward cameras, because I think that is where the whole argument actually lives.
Americans do not like being filmed. I mean that as a cultural attitude, not a legal rule — there is a real gut-level reaction here to a camera pointed at you, like somebody is taking something from you. Europeans and Asians, in my experience, do not care in the same way. The camera is just there. It is part of the street, part of the shop, part of the train station. The culture around surveillance is different, and that difference matters more than the technology itself, because the technology is basically the same everywhere now. The numbers back up the American half of that feeling, at least: 71% of Americans say they are concerned about how the government uses the data it collects about them, up from 64% in 2019, and 88% say it is important not to have someone watch or listen to them without permission (Pew Research Center, 2023).
That is my starting point for this issue: being filmed, in and of itself, is not the problem. The problem is in the biases of who is watching.
A camera on a street corner in London, a camera in a shop in Seoul, a camera on a police officer’s chest in Baltimore — those are the same piece of hardware doing the same thing, recording what is in front of it. What changes is who gets to look at the footage, what they are looking for, and what happens to the person on the tape. Surveillance becomes a human rights issue not at the moment of recording, but at the moment of interpretation, when somebody with power decides what the footage means. The United Nations Human Rights Office put it bluntly in its 2022 report on privacy in the digital age: general monitoring of people in public spaces is “almost invariably disproportionate,” and facial recognition in public spaces interferes with privacy “on a mass and indiscriminate scale” (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2022).
That is a cross-cultural conflict because the two sides are not really arguing about cameras. One side is arguing from a worldview where the individual comes first — my face, my movement, my privacy, my right not to be watched — and the state has to justify every intrusion. The other side is arguing from a worldview where the community comes first — public safety, social order, the good of the group — and the camera is just a tool for keeping that order. Both sides can be sincere. Both sides can point to real harms. An American will tell you the camera is the state creeping into their life. Someone in a city with cameras everywhere will tell you the camera is why they feel safe walking home at night. Neither one of them is lying about their own experience.
And then identity walks in and makes it messier, because surveillance is never applied evenly. The same system that feels like background noise to one person feels like a spotlight to another. Who gets followed by the footage, who gets flagged by the software, who gets stopped because a face-recognition system said so — that tracks race, class, gender, immigration status, all of it. This is not speculation: the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology tested 189 facial recognition algorithms and found that for many of them, false positives were 10 to 100 times more common for West African, East African, and East Asian faces than for Eastern European faces, and higher for women than for men (Grother et al., 2019). A false match is the error most likely to harm someone in a police search. So the question is not really “cameras, yes or no?” It is “cameras in whose hands, pointed at whom, with what consequences?” A system can be sold as neutral and still reproduce every bias of the people who built it and the people who run it.
Let me make that concrete, because the theory only goes so far without the examples. Abu Ghraib is the one I keep coming back to. In 2003 and 2004, American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq did not just abuse detainees — they photographed themselves doing it. Hooded prisoners on boxes with wires attached, naked prisoners stacked in pyramids, a prisoner held on a leash, soldiers smiling and giving thumbs up next to a dead man (Human Rights Watch, 2005). The photographs were broadcast on April 28, 2004, and the government called it a few bad apples. But Human Rights Watch’s point has always stuck with me: the only truly exceptional thing about Abu Ghraib was that it was photographed. The abuse itself was not exceptional — detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan had been beaten, sleep-deprived, and humiliated since 2001, and the Red Cross found that 70 to 90 percent of the Abu Ghraib detainees were innocent bystanders arrested by mistake. The camera did not create the abuse. The camera was part of it — the watching, the posing, the humiliation as a performance for the lens. Being watched was the violation, and being photographed was how the watchers enjoyed it.
It happens at home, too, just quieter. In January 2020, Detroit police arrested Robert Williams in his own driveway, in front of his wife and two young daughters, for a watch theft he did not commit. He was held for 30 hours. The whole case rested on a facial recognition match — a grainy surveillance image run against his expired driver’s license photo — and when officers finally showed him the suspect’s photo, he held it next to his own face and asked, “You think all Black men look alike?” The charges were dropped, and Williams sued with the ACLU; the 2024 settlement set what the ACLU called the strongest police facial recognition policy in the country, including a ban on arrests based solely on a facial recognition result (American Civil Liberties Union, 2024). That is the NIST study with a human being attached to it: the bias in the algorithm became a night in a jail cell.
And then there is the kind of watching where there is no camera you can see at all. Pegasus, the spyware sold by NSO Group, turns a phone into a 24-hour surveillance device — it can read messages, listen, watch, without the owner ever knowing. Forensic investigations linked it to the targeting of journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, and opposition politicians in dozens of countries, and in 2025 a U.S. jury ordered NSO Group to pay $167 million in damages for hacking 1,400 WhatsApp accounts belonging to journalists, activists, and government officials (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, 2025). The UN’s 2022 privacy report flagged exactly this: spyware abuse by state authorities, and the need for a moratorium on these tools until real safeguards exist (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2022). No camera, no prison, no arrest — just a phone in your pocket doing the watching for someone else.
That is where I think the limits have to come in. I am not arguing that every culture has to feel the same way about cameras — that would be its own kind of imperialism, telling the rest of the world to have American feelings about privacy. But there has to be a floor. When surveillance is used to target a minority, to track journalists or protesters, to build a file on people for who they are rather than what they have done, that is not a cultural difference anymore. That is a human rights violation, and no cultural argument should cover it. The limit, for me, is not the camera. The limit is what you do with what the camera saw.
That is also where international institutions actually have a job to do. The United Nations, regional human rights courts, NGOs — they cannot make every country feel the same way about being filmed, and they should not try. What they can do is set the floor: no surveillance as a tool of persecution, transparency about who is watching and why, independent oversight, and a real remedy when the system gets it wrong. The UN Human Rights Office has already called for a moratorium on the sale and use of intrusive surveillance tools until adequate human rights safeguards are in place (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2022). Amnesty International goes further, calling for a total ban on the use, development, production, and sale of facial recognition technology for mass surveillance by police and other government agencies (Amnesty International, 2021). Right now, a lot of the actual work is being done by NGOs and journalists and researchers documenting the abuses, more than by the institutions with actual enforcement power. The UN can name the standard. The courts can rule on the cases that get to them. But the watching of the watchers is still mostly left to everybody else, and that is a gap.
So my position is pretty simple, and I think it holds across the cultural difference: film all you want. The camera is not the violation. The violation is in the watching — who watches, who they watch, and what they are allowed to do about it.
References
Amnesty International. (2021, January 26). Ban dangerous facial recognition technology that amplifies racist policing. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/knowledge-hub/all-resources/call-ban-facial-recognition-technology-amplifies-racist-policing/
American Civil Liberties Union. (2024). Williams v. City of Detroit: Facial recognition false arrest case. https://www.aclu.org/cases/williams-v-city-of-detroit-face-recognition-false-arrest
Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. (2025, May 7). NSO Group ordered to pay 167 million USD for targeting journalists, activists and others with spyware via WhatsApp. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/nso-group-ordered-to-pay-167-million-usd-for-targeting-journalists-activists-and-others-with-spyware-via-whatsapp/
Human Rights Watch. (2005). Getting away with torture? Command responsibility for the U.S. abuse of detainees. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/us0405/3.htm
Grother, P., Ngan, M., & Hanaoka, K. (2019). Face recognition vendor test (FRVT) part 3: Demographic effects (NISTIR 8280). National Institute of Standards and Technology. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8280
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2022). The right to privacy in the digital age (Report to the Human Rights Council, 51st session). United Nations.
Pew Research Center. (2023, October 18). Views of data privacy risks, personal data and digital privacy laws in America. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/10/18/views-of-data-privacy-risks-personal-data-and-digital-privacy-laws/
AI use statement
This post was drafted with the assistance of Luna, Leslie Lanagan’s AI assistant (Muse Spark), on November 9, 2026. Luna helped structure the argument around Leslie’s stated thesis — that being filmed is not itself the problem, the biases of who is watching are — and located the four sources cited above. All wording, claims, and conclusions are Leslie’s own and were reviewed by Leslie before posting. (APA 7th treats generative AI output as personal communication / non-retrievable in some guidance; this statement discloses the tool, date, and purpose as the prompt requires. If the course requires a formal reference-list entry for the AI tool, add it in the format the instructor specifies.)
