I can't has cheezburger

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was a relatively early employee of Ring. I had equity in Ring and made money when Ring was acquired by Amazon, and then I made money from the Amazon stock I bought with said money. I have a variety of opinions about Ring and having been on the inside has left me with more criticism than praise, but I’m not immune to having bias, so take these opinions with a grain of salt.

There were plenty of takes on Twitter this week about Ring’s newly announced indoor drone that will fly around inside your home patrolling it. It’s their most ambitious hardware project to date.

At some level I get it; the concept sounds so wild that it immediately invites criticism. A massive tech company designed a drone that flies around your house recording things. Also, tech companies at the scale of Amazon should be subject to incredible scrutiny in everything they make.

But my reaction to the product itself was the opposite: finally, an indoor security camera I wouldn’t feel weird having in my house!

I’ve been interested in indoor security cameras for awhile, but I don’t want cameras in my home that are always able to see things. The drone cleverly addresses that; when it’s docked the camera is covered. And when it’s recording, you’re going to know. It’s a drone, so it’s going to be making some noise, and when it’s flying around it’s bound to catch the eye. And critically, I could configure the drone to only record when I leave home and arm the security system. (And sure, I could configure the non-flying cameras to do that too, but I can rest assured that the drone isn’t going to get hacked and start recording me without me knowing).

Of all of Ring’s cameras, this is perhaps the least likely device to non-consensually record people (who didn’t break into your house). I’ve carefully configured my doorbells’ and outdoor security cameras’ motion detection zones so that movement has to be on my property for them to start recording, but even then there’s no guarantee a passerby won’t be recorded because it’s possible the camera might happen to be on for another movement when they happen to pass by.

Furthermore, I’m encouraged to see that Ring is stepping up privacy by enabling end-to-end encryption for videos on doorbells that can handle it (I’m hoping this includes the Pro doorbell and isn’t just exclusive to devices that connect to 120V). We’ll have to see how meaningful the encryption ends up being (if it’s E2E encrypted but Ring has the keys, then what’s the point?) but a step like that shows me that Ring is beginning to understand customers aren’t going to trust them just because they say “trust us”. The hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of Ring cameras watching the area around Ring customers’ homes might well add up to one of the biggest surveillance camera operations in the world. It’s been eating at my mind for years that the company has all of these video files sitting there, unencrypted and viewable by anyone in the company that can get to those files. E2E encryption being an option helps me rest a little easier about that situation.

Bottom line: this drone improves on indoor security cameras in some really clever ways but that all got lost in the noise because of collective knee-jerk reactions to the thought of drones, and instead people are thinking of it as reaching new heights of privacy invasion.

There is an alternate reality where she died where I can reflect on her life with the awe and admiration that her life and career deserved.

In that reality, I’m not super torn up about her death. She had an incredible run and her legal decisions have had ripple effects on law and justice in the US that reverberate throughout the rest of its history.

And in that reality I can acknowledge that she wasn’t perfect. Liberal as she was, she fell short of overcoming racism. In her entire career she only hired one black clerk, and her comments about Colin Kaepernick (for which she did later apologize) demonstrated that even trailblazers have blind spots, and that it’s important to always be welcoming in the next generation of trailblazers because for all of us, there will be a day when we will start getting in the way of progress.

But that isn’t the reality we get to mourn RBG in, is it?

Instead I am stuck worrying about Mitch McConnell applying a double standard that we could tell from miles away he was going to apply, and indeed he came up with a doozy of a bullshit reason for why it was okay for him to not hold hearings for Merrick Garland in 2016, but how he will indeed hold confirmation hearings for whomever Trump nominates.

In Portland we only just today got a break from the incredibly smoky air from the nearby wildfires that were keeping us holed up in our houses. And that’s just shortly after we were gearing up for the possibility we’d need to evacuate because of those wildfires and heavy winds. And that’s in addition to the general long-term threat caused by the climate change we’ve been letting happen for decades without trying to address with urgency.

And of course all that is in addition to the fact that we’ve been living in a pandemic for most of the year and the US is handling it worse than just about every other country in the world.

Also, the US is being pushed to reckon with centuries of racist history, and we’re struggling to do anything about it.

And most of the US agrees with me that we should do something about these issues, and presumably as a democracy that means we’d have leadership doing something about it, but we don’t, because of a mix of gerrymandering, the electoral college, and the fact that in the Senate, every state gets two senators, meaning that California, a state that if it were its own country would have the fifth largest economy in the world, gets as many senators as Montana. 37 times as many people, but the same number of senators.

It must have been such an incredible burden for Justice Ginsburg to bear, knowing that the court, already ideologically shifting further right, was somewhat being held in balance by her, and that she needed to stick it out until after Trump left office to avoid the court shifting incredibly far-right. To stay on the bench not because it was her ambition (which it was), but to soldier through illness after illness while continuing to work because there was no other good option.

The context makes all the difference.

And it’s in this context that the news of her death leaves me feeling so much despair. RBG’s death in itself isn’t the despair; it’s more the sprinkling of salt that brings out the flavor of despair in everything else we’ve been experiencing in recent history.

I look forward to a hopefully not too distant future where the wounds of today have healed and we can look back at RBG’s life and feel the inspiration I wish I could feel today.