1.
The Amazon Ring Always Home Cam is an indoor security drone for your home.
Introduced with this video in 2020: Yeah, it’s a camera that flies.
Sadly not yet on the market.
Ok Judge Dredd had Spy-in-the-Sky drone surveillance cameras in 1978 and Mega-City One is not an aspirational template for domestic life but hear me out:
Because I would love to be able to text my house “oh did I leave the stove on?” from the bus. And “darn can you find my keys?” in the morning. And “uh there’s that book about 1970s social computing somewhere it has an orange spine I can’t remember exactly” at literally anytime.
And do that without having to blanket my home in cameras. A drone seems like a good solution?
2.
Surveillance: systematic observation. Often institutional. From “above.”
Sousveillance, coined by cyborg Steve Mann in 2002: watchful vigilance from underneath.
I am suggesting that the cameras be mounted on people in low places, rather than upon buildings and establishments in high places.
e.g.
a taxicab passenger photographs the driver, or taxicab passengers keep tabs on driver’s behaviour
It is such a positively-framed paper.
We swim in this world now. What does it do to us?
(I wonder if here’s a word like auto-sousveillance? We do it to ourselves.)
3.
The Nor (2014) by artist James Bridle.
The sense of being watched is a classic symptom of paranoia, often a sign of deeper psychosis, or dismissed as illusory. In the mirror city, which exists at the juncture of the street and CCTV, of bodily space and the electromagnetic spectrum, one is always being watched. So who’s paranoid now?
(As previously discussed, briefly.)
Exactly midway between Mann coining sousveillance in 2002 and today, 2026, Bridle put his finger on this paranoia background radiation, slowing increasing like population levels, like CO2 ppm, like sea level, like the frog’s bath.
4.
Robot Exclusion Protocol (2002) by blogger Paul Ford: A story about the Google of the future.
I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal, with bright camera-lens eyes and a few dozen gripping arms. Worse than the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“Hi! I’m from Google. I’m a Googlebot! I will not kill you.”
“I know what you are.”
“I’m indexing your apartment.”
I feel like we are 24 months off this point?
Only they’ll be indexing drones that we vibe code for ourselves.
5.
Back in 2024, engineer Simon Willison realised that the killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video, and:
I took this seven second video of one of my bookshelves:
It understood the video and gave him back a machine-readable list of the titles and authors. That’s handy!
I am still waiting for this as an app so that I can index and search my overflowing bookshelves by not-even-that-carefully waving my phone at them.
Please, I’m too lazy to type in the prompts to vibe this.
The meta-point is that auto-sousveillance is inevitable because I can’t find my books.
6.
Man accidentally vibe codes a robovac army (2026).
The DJI Romo is a $2000 behemoth that mops and vacuums using LIDAR and AI.
Sammy Azdoufal wanted to control his roomba with his Playstation controller.
However, the scanner his [Claude Code agent] created not only gave him access to his device; it gave him access and control over almost 7000. He was able to see home layouts and IP addresses, and control the devices’ cameras and microphones.
Uh oh.
Whereas the point of institutional surveillance is that the CCTV cameras are conspicuous (and, originally, you didn’t know if anyone was watching, but now the AI processes all),
the characteristic of auto-sousveillance seems to be that you don’t know whether you are privately querying for a lost book or live streaming your bathroom to the internet.
Forget about control, how do you even relate to such a capricious system?
7.
The ancient Romans had two types of gods.
There are the gods on Olympus who look after nature, cities, the state.
And then there are Lares (Wikipedia), guardian deities of a place, believed to observe, protect, and influence all that happened within the boundaries of their location or function.
In particular, household gods, Lares Familiares, with a household shrine:
The Lar Familiaris cared for the welfare and prosperity of a Roman household. A household’s lararium, a shrine to the Lar Familiaris and other domestic divinities, usually stood near the dining hearth or, in a larger dwelling, the semi-public atrium or reception area of the dwelling. A lararium could be a wall-cupboard with doors, an open niche with small-scale statuary, a projecting tile, a small freestanding shrine, or simply the painted image of a shrine …
The Lar’s statue could be moved from the lararium to wherever its presence was needed. It could be placed on a dining table during feasts or be a witness at weddings and other important family events.
RELATED:
Lares: our 2 minute pitch for an AI-powered slightly-smart home (2023) – you can see a demo video.
And here’s a paper about Lares showing emergent AI agent behaviour, which was surprising in 2024.
1.
The Amazon Ring Always Home Cam is an indoor security drone for your home.
Introduced with this video in 2020:
Sadly not yet on the market.
Ok Judge Dredd had Spy-in-the-Sky drone surveillance cameras in 1978 and Mega-City One is not an aspirational template for domestic life but hear me out:
Because I would love to be able to text my house “oh did I leave the stove on?” from the bus. And “darn can you find my keys?” in the morning. And “uh there’s that book about 1970s social computing somewhere it has an orange spine I can’t remember exactly” at literally anytime.
And do that without having to blanket my home in cameras. A drone seems like a good solution?
2.
Surveillance: systematic observation. Often institutional. From “above.”
Sousveillance, coined by cyborg Steve Mann in 2002:
e.g.
It is such a positively-framed paper.
We swim in this world now. What does it do to us?
(I wonder if here’s a word like auto-sousveillance? We do it to ourselves.)
3.
The Nor (2014) by artist James Bridle.
(As previously discussed, briefly.)
Exactly midway between Mann coining sousveillance in 2002 and today, 2026, Bridle put his finger on this paranoia background radiation, slowing increasing like population levels, like CO2 ppm, like sea level, like the frog’s bath.
4.
Robot Exclusion Protocol (2002) by blogger Paul Ford:
I feel like we are 24 months off this point?
Only they’ll be indexing drones that we vibe code for ourselves.
5.
Back in 2024, engineer Simon Willison realised that the killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video, and:
It understood the video and gave him back a machine-readable list of the titles and authors. That’s handy!
I am still waiting for this as an app so that I can index and search my overflowing bookshelves by not-even-that-carefully waving my phone at them.
Please, I’m too lazy to type in the prompts to vibe this.
The meta-point is that auto-sousveillance is inevitable because I can’t find my books.
6.
Man accidentally vibe codes a robovac army (2026).
Sammy Azdoufal wanted to control his roomba with his Playstation controller.
Uh oh.
Whereas the point of institutional surveillance is that the CCTV cameras are conspicuous (and, originally, you didn’t know if anyone was watching, but now the AI processes all),
the characteristic of auto-sousveillance seems to be that you don’t know whether you are privately querying for a lost book or live streaming your bathroom to the internet.
Forget about control, how do you even relate to such a capricious system?
7.
The ancient Romans had two types of gods.
There are the gods on Olympus who look after nature, cities, the state.
And then there are Lares (Wikipedia), guardian deities of a place,
In particular, household gods, Lares Familiares, with a household shrine:
RELATED:
Lares: our 2 minute pitch for an AI-powered slightly-smart home (2023) – you can see a demo video.
And here’s a paper about Lares showing emergent AI agent behaviour, which was surprising in 2024.