Tag: Surveillance

Cop In Your Pocket – 5th June 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 1 Comment

You’ll never walk alone
with a cop in your pocket,
surveilling from your phone.

Everything uploaded,
now, it’s too late to stop it;
analysed, decoded.

Each decision reviewed
may forfeit your deposit;
so check your attitude.

Black mirrors being held
to ransom for a profit;
so, suitably compelled.

Surveilling for your phone,
with a cop in your pocket.

You’ll never walk alone.

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

Blow Your Own Nose

The world is unfair; this may be true
Practically speaking, what good is that to you?
Oh woe is you! You still have hands
Get active and do it while you can

The Greco – 10th March 2026

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

The foundations laid,
as inquisitive children
built the systems of their own
Inquisition.

~~

Now they’ve got our third lives
from logging information.
Stackdriver instrumentation
monitors our drunken exhibitions.

Every interaction, generic and mundane,
but the tracking libraries are all the same.
Tick the box to improve services.
These illusions are encrypted.

Secure is just a promise
guarded by tall fences,
a mere annoyance to a human
but integrated automation
collated all the pieces,
quietly building its own system
with algorithm manipulation.

Dumping memories into a mind palace,
a million monkeys get to work
sifting through pictures of our pets
to welcome the white-collar apocalypse.

This write was inspired by the Substack article ‘The banality of surveillance’ by Benn Stancil. There were many new ideas and phrases to me in the article so I’ve added the links that I followed here too. The Greco is the name of the AI used in Ocean’s Thirteen.

From the notes in the article, consider this:
The United States Department of War….uses Claude to bomb Iran. It uses Claude to bomb Iran “at machine speed rather than human speed.”

Today’s Daily Stoic poem:

Find Yourself A Cato

Stand outside yourself as you are about to sin
Do you see the person that you want to let in?
Between an angel and a devil, there is you
Your witness can keep you honest and true

The Chiang Rai Alternative Hour #11 – 9th November 2019

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Music from The Misunderstood, Angelic Upstarts, Passage, Surveillance, 13th Floor Elevators, Lozenge, Vaz, Hard-Ons, The Damned, Queen, Captain Beefheart, Melt Banana, Crass, Hitler SS, Meat Puppets, I Am Above and on the Left, Thee Headcoats, Party Diktator, Supertramp.

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful to be living in this part of the world. There are many times in a week when I marvel at the views of the rice fields and the mountains. Their depth changes depending on the weather conditions and time of day. There are good and bad points about every place to live but I certainly feel grateful for my time living here.