A circuit of mutual services and complicity

More juice! LVT surveillance trailers, Candy goes negative, worms on hooks

Where does the time go? Serious question. It was very difficult to find the solid chunk of sitting time required to get this thing from an assemblage of scraps to a cohesive piece. Just because of normal responsibilities, nothing crazy. But the time is just hoovered by those simple things. Was it always so? I can’t remember.

I used to think the timing of a post mattered, the time of day and the day of the week all having unique characteristics that helped or hurt. Like the right key or chord voicing.

Maybe a decade ago that was true but now... time has gone somewhere. Hasn’t it? It has collapsed in on itself. The internet became everything, everything became the internet. And the purveyors of the internet made, continue to make, time less real.

I think we need to spend more time reckoning with the long-term effects of that moment in Web 2.0 when our feeds shifted from primarily time-based (posts appear in the order they were posted, newest to oldest) to predictively generated by algorithms and more recently algorithms we’re made to believe are sentient. The posts appeared with no expectation of a linear time relation. You’re getting something from Friday next to Monday next to two weeks ago next to BREAKING next to ads so many ads bereft of any chronological context. The only real constant: that contextlessness. The only thing the internet really cares if you see. You’re getting the reaction or counter reaction before you get the event itself. Discourse built on disjointed shadows. Just keep looking it’ll make sense eventua—Real Men Wear Ridge Wallets.

No one pretends anymore to not be actively gaming the attention system. It’s just what “posting” is now. Gaming it successfully is a success in its own right. Failure to game it is a personal failure. This plays a larger role in our uniquely American lone gunman problem than perhaps even the guns. It is the ‘One Weird Trick’ of last resort, but it hasn’t failed yet for anyone desperate enough to try it.

Something fundamental broke, I think, when all the apps did that shift at once, in like... 2018ish? Maybe? Suddenly all the posts all over were just messed up, appearing in front of us seemingly at random. Different for everyone. The linear chronology of events was tampered with in a way that seems hard to compare to other times or inventions. A shared reality immediately thrown into question.

There’s a PHD in there somewhere... late capital and the exponential collapse of time-space and everyone going crazy and all the loneliness and the multi-level marketing and the gunmen.

Woof! Catch me out here getting straight up evangelical about time. Suppose it beats the current evangelical concerns, “the family” and/or racial purity and/or heterodoxy. Tomàto tòmato tomatò. Same soup, different label.

All’s to say fuck it I’m posting at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. Why not. Who has the time to care? This is when I could get it done.

The council meeting Tuesday (freakin six hours!) nearly broke me but unfortunately for the haters and the losers I simply cannot, will not, couldn’t if I wanted to and I often do want to stop writing about this wretched little place we call home.

An interesting week! The convergence of

• a new anti-homeless weaponized music/surveillance trailer to streamline routine encampment sweeps

• Candy Mero-Carlson deciding to go 100 percent negative on Rob Bilotta in a mailer that’s wet to the touch it’s so desperate

• the old guard wriggling and squirming to get out of voting on a safeguard against further ICE-WPD collaboration.

Off in the distance the smoke rises from the capital. We watch our Nero on our myriad screens and he’s playing his lyre capably as ever.

I’m setting out to be pragmatic and business-minded in today’s edition, knowing full well I’m simply incapable of either one of those things. Wishcasting, I think is what they call it.

The week in >400 words

City Manager Batista denies having privately considered a 287g partnership agreement with ICE. On Tuesday night, councilors the most likely to support a 287g agreement claimed to not know about the program. 𝄪 Drone monitoring of sound levels produced by RVs idling as unhoused people sleep in them gained some traction. The city used a free trial for a video surveillance / AI voice security trailer to blast loud classical music at an encampment by the Green Street bridge, effectively sweeping it. 𝄪 Plumley Village was acquired by New York non-profit housing developer Jonathan Rose Companies. The new owners got the HUD contract extended 20 years. 𝄪 Plans announced to turn the Redemption Rock building (RIP) into a birthing center with an “outdoor birthing garden.” 𝄪 Digital Credit Union (DCU) got approval for an almost $30 billion merger with First Tech Federal Credit Union, of California. The DCU Center also getting a name change, likely in 2026. 𝄪 Between Hannah Kane, Peter Durant and David Muradian, Central Mass is overrepresented on the list of six state legislators who took a vacation to Israel in September as part of the “50 States 1 Israel” conference. 𝄪 The Worcester Urban Planning Partnership released council candidate responses to its election questionnaire. 𝄪 State Rep. David LeBoeuf was profiled in the Boston Globe, frankly discussing alcoholism, recovery, and sobriety. 𝄪 Federal assault charges pressed against four Massachusetts residents, more promised. The Trump Administration defunded police in Massachusetts to the tune of $7 million. DEI mention on a grant application leads to a federal shutdown of the Worcester nonprofit MassEdCo. 𝄪 World Smiley Day, a global holiday celebrated only in Worcester, took place Friday. 𝄪 The parade formerly known as Columbus Day takes place today. Columbus Statue at Union Station still standing, unfortunately, as of my writing this.

𝄪

Some business:

Election Squad #3 is on for Oct. 16! We might be able to squeeze in one more before the election but if not this will be the last one!

Luke O’Neil of Welcome To Hell World, the cooler older brother of this newsletter, put a book out that rocks. He’s having a book launch party/reading and asked me to read for it! Very honored and excited. The bill is stacked: Luke of course, Dave Wedge, Eoin Higgins, Evan Greer and myself. (Higgins’ book on Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi doing... what they both did... is one of my favorites of the year.) In this situation I’m the first opener with the huge horseshoe ring around ‘em at the VFW. It would be nice to see some of you there! 4-6 p.m. November 8 at the Sinclair out in Cambridge.

Thirdly, I’m looking for some volunteers for an arduous data project I’d like to complete before the end of next week. The work is combing through minutes. Hit me up at billshaner@substack.com if interested.

Fourth, everyone who pre-ordered Bad Brains ripoff second run should have them and there are just a few extras left on the merch store! Only two larges, four XLs, one XXL. Considering these took like three months to print I don’t know if I’ll ever do another run.

Fifthly and lastly, I put a new song up the other day on the Worcester Sucks bandcamp. It’s a change in tone and subject matter while maintaining the “found footage” approach. Inspired by The Fire This Time—ripping it off, if we’re being honest—I combined audio from newscasts of the Gaza City invasion, Steve Miller and JD Vance’s post-Kirk podcast, and Moe Bergman and Kate Toomey’s comments on the sprinkler ordinance they shot down the other week to the benefit of landlords, and perhaps just one particular landlord... one who’s also a police union official.

The idea was to sift through the current events for three specific points in the circuitry of empire, demonstrating how it boomerangs around and around and around, a self-oscillating machine. If I had the time to make a full album on the idea, I’d call it “The Cost Of Human Life.” I don’t know if I got close to executing on that idea, but it is my most ambitious and difficult piece of music to date. Also FYI it sounds like crap on small speakers compared to big speakers. Still have much to learn about mastering. But since these songs are very much just a hobby for me, I’m comfortable sharing stuff that’s not 100 percent there yet. A process-over-product approach, opposite to the lengths I’ll go with writing to satisfy the unreasonable expectations imposed by my ego. Speaking of which this Cost of Human Life principle is a good place to start the real writing portion of the post.

First please subscribe!! I like writing this newsletter very much and need a certain number of you paying so I can continue!

In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire wrote, “They talk to me about local tyrants brought to reason; but I note that in general the old tyrants get on very well with the new ones, and that there has been established between them, to the detriment of the people, a circuit of mutual services and complicity.”

I think it’s important, this idea of a circuit of mutual services and complicity between tyrants—large, small, near, far, contemporary and historical. There is a rhizomatic relationship¹ at work, in which the transgressions of one beget transgressions of all, not so much by a linear command but by a diffuse transference of vibes. More juice for the circuit Césaire describes, the components of which stretch across a global empire in a way Césaire couldn’t have dreamed back in 1950.

In this way the genocide of Gaza is a power overload—the circuit can barely handle the influx of new transgressive energy and it spills out everywhere across the empire in myriad forms. It spills out as Hegseth and Trump’s soft declaration of a new Civil War On Terror. It spills out as a city willing to use music as violence against an indigent population it sees as less than human. It spills out as a degradation of the overall truth. Our local tyrants, following the example set by the international tyrants, lie with less subtly, less effort to cover tracks, and the lies are more sweeping in nature. And for the most part they get away with it, taking their people with them. One thing we didn’t get taught in school about the fascism of the last century is that the circuitry fractures consensus reality as it heats up. And that the more broken consensus reality becomes, the harder it becomes to cool the circuit down. The more able the circuit becomes to smash the shards of reality that remain. The more supercharged the diodes and capacitors along that circuit feel. And our board in 2025 is a lot more complicated, a lot faster than that available to the ascendant tyrants of 1925. It’s more nuanced, more intoxicating...

The intoxication of righteous prosecutory violence is something I’ve been thinking about. How else to see the rhetoric and behavior of a Pete Hegseth or Steven Miller right now than high on that supply? Amphetamine rush of the highest order. You can see it in the way they move their faces. By now the bugs under their skin are taken for granted. Of course the bugs are there. They’re a step further along: they believe they possess the ability to pick the bugs out. They are scratching and scratching and scratching at it. That one spot with the bugs—see em? Right here. Do you see em?! And it’s getting infected. But to them the pain is proof of efficacy. They are making themselves clean and they are killing the bugs and the bugs will be gone if they just keep scratching... and then, once the bugs have been eradicated, they will become pure, and then they can get back to business as usual.

A Nice Guy

With a month to go in the municipal election, Candy Meo-Carlson has gone full negative on Rob Bilotta. In a mailer blasted out to a large list of District 2 residents, Mero-Carlson gave Bilotta the black-and-white treatment, “anti-police” and “chaos” and “divisive” appear next to and on top of a group photo of Bilotta, King, Haxhiaj, Nguyen. She calls him “a nice kid from a good family” who has “joined the progressive bloc”— implying, in a way that leans on an ableist trope, that Bilotta has been duped by a capable band of tricksters. They took a nice boy and corrupted him.

Jeeeeeesus. Someone check OCPF and see if she’s retained Glenn Beck as a consultant. It was the second Mero-Carlson mailer in recent memory notable for its weird tone and strange claims. The last one was centered on Alta On The Row, and it was bizarre. We picked clean through it on the last episode of the podcast. Also, I regret to inform we may have willed this second mailer into being. At the 1:05:00 mark...

Bill: Like, (Mero-Carlson) is not a popular politician. This is somebody that can be easily beaten. And Rob Biloitta as a first-time candidate, which is extremely hard in the city, almost did it. So if I were Candy, I’d be extremely nervous. And I would definitely, please, definitely, I would hate it personally if you put out another mailer that was as good as this one.

Chris: Yeah, or, I mean, it’s a high bar, Candy, but try to do even better. Try to put out something maybe even more, a little... edgy, let’s say. Let’s up the ante. You know, November’s coming quick.

Up the ante she did. Thank you, Candy, for taking our advice. Nice of you!

To anyone who knows Rob, the mailer is laughable. To people who don’t know Rob but aren’t fervent conservatives, the mailer just looks icky. Candy’s playing to a base of reactionary supporters that isn’t getting any bigger, in a district that is getting bigger every day. A desperation move. With any luck we’ll look back on it as the moment she knew she was going to lose.

Last time Rob was 160 votes shy.

Candy’s not adding any votes this time. Since she first ran in 2015, she’s ranged from 1,164 votes (2021) to 1,597 votes in (2019). (Interesting and a little hilarious that her highest vote total came when she ran unopposed, and “blank” still did well, at about 800.) She will likely get ~1,550 votes this election. Most voters don’t vote in city elections (80-90 percent depending on the year) and the ones that do are still predominantly low- to no-information voters. If they voted for her last time and they haven’t moved to Florida, they will vote for her again.

So the question becomes, how do we get 161 people in District 2 to vote for the first time in a city election. If you’re reading this and you live anywhere within these boundaries... you can take personal responsibility for having toppled a local tyrant if you convince just one neighbor to go vote. Same goes for anyone reading this who knows someone who lives here. Beg, plead, cajole, bully, bargain. If you get one person to go vote for Bilotta, that person could be the person. The numbers are so small this is not academic. There are just shy of 5,000 subscribers to this newsletter. If 200 of you figure out a way to get one more vote logged in District 2, it’s over for Candy Mero-Carlson.

Here’s some messaging suggestions: She is a transphobe and she voted to support the genocide of Gaza and she’s responsible for the meteoric rise in rents in this city. She has made no improvements to pedestrian safety at a Shrewsbury Street crosswalk where a young girl was put into a coma, instead opting to get new speed humps placed right in front of the homes of her supporters. (Take a drive down North Parkway some time.) All of those things are true.

Rob Bilotta is a good guy who gives a shit and knows how city hall works and has already proven himself more than capable of the job over a long career of accessibility activism. He is not afraid of calling out developers, nor holding them accountable. All of those things are true. None of them apply to Candy.

All you need is two sentences: Mero-Carlson is a member of the “inner circle” that keeps Worcester stuck in the 1980s. Bilotta is not.

The next couple weeks are crucial for Bilotta and all the other good candidates. He needs campaign cash and volunteers, people! Unlike Mero-Carlson he is not backed by developers (head to WorcesterElections.com for some fun campaign finance facts!). His power is people power. So we need to give it to him.

FYI You can find a list of donation pages and volunteer forms for every good candidate on the Worcester Sucks Linktree.

Some other stuff coming up:

—Khrystian King is holding listening sessions at the Worcester Public Library for residents to speak about their experiences and help shape policy. Oct. 8 6-7 p.m. and Oct. 15 6-7 p.m.

—Three Worcester Regional Research Bureau debat—um, candidate forums: this coming Wednesday for at large, next Wednesday for district, and the following Wednesday for mayor.

—Tuesday Oct. 7: Public workshop on the proposal for a bridge over 290 to connect Vernon Hill to the canal district. 6-8 p.m., Senior Center.

Agenic AI Talk-Down

Last Sunday night Outdoor Cats co-host Chris Robarge was perhaps first to notice that an LVT security trailer was placed on a pedestrian island next to the Green Street bridge, and the adjacent dog park that has become a loitering area of last resort for the city’s unhoused population, having been muscled out of anywhere downtown more comfortable than the narrow sidewalk and chainlink fence exposed to heavy traffic. The one the Telegram recently published a complaint-disguised-as-a-news-article about. He lives down there and I’d just left his place, having wrapped a recording session in which we discussed a recent unsuccessful sweep at the site. Earlier, on my drive over, I saw about a dozen people gathered there.

The next night Matthew Noe (a great follow for #WorcPoli and library matters) posted a video to Facebook of said LVT security trailer blasting loud classical music at the dog park. The site was cleared. The obnoxious music coming from the surveillance robot rippled in the empty space. Mission accomplished. Housed residents of 145 Front Street—the development that at one time was synonymous with the “Worcester Renaissance”—also had their nights ruined by this conscious act of sonic violence the city inflicted on unhoused people. You can hear, in Noe’s video, the muffled sound of it easily penetrating his window, and then, when he opens it, the video is damn near clipping.

Noe wrote:

There is an obnoxious sound machine playing at all hours of the night by the downtown dog park right now. This was taken at 4 am.

I have to assume it is an anti-homeless device.

It is making it really hard to sleep indoors around here too. Definitely can’t open our windows (listen to the volume change about 10 seconds in).

What the hell, y’all.

Another video taken the same night confirms it. The person told me the music played straight from about 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

I put both of the clips together with a little sound meter. It’s an ominous spectacle to say the least.

On Wednesday night I went down there around 11 p.m. to see for myself and there wasn’t any music playing, but also no reason to. No one was gathered at the dog park. One person was sleeping, totally exposed save for a thin blanket, under the eerie bright lights of the Green Street tunnel. Those lights are themselves a relic of a kinder, gentler period in our city’s anti-homeless architectural campaign. The security trailer constitutes an especially sinister escalation.

I put an email in to the city spokesman and he told me:

“The unit is part of a pilot program WPD is doing, it will end Oct. 10. There was no cost. And it is just the one unit.”

He confirmed that the company is LiveView Technologies, or LVT.

Last year, LVT partnered with Axon, the body camera/taser/data collection company Worcester pays handsomely every year. In a statement announcing the deal, an LVT executive said:

“We forged our partnership with Axon to empower enterprises and law enforcement with best-in-class solutions that streamline resources for maximum impact, which we anticipate will drastically reduce crime across the nation.”

At the same time the company began offering an ACESS Taskforce package to retailers and government entities that the company claims has “proven that closer collaboration between enterprises, law enforcement, and community leaders drives a significant decrease in shoplifting, trespassing, and overall crime.“

As part of the partnership, ACCESS Taskforce member entities set up their security trailers, which record a 360 panorama constantly, and that data is then fed to Axon’s FUSUS system—the core data collection machine behind Evidence.com and the Real Time Crime Center, both of which the WPD avails itself of to much acclaim.

It’s all explained in this not at all worrisome GIF that appears to be cut off halfway? The company writes...

The need for greater collaboration, understanding, and seamless integration is bigger than ever, especially for security professionals and law enforcement. That’s why we’re excited to announce our partnership with Axon, including an integration of Fusus by Axon with our solar-powered mobile surveillance units.

At a recent public safety subcommittee meeting, Police Chief Paul Saucier informed councilors of a pilot program the department had recently launched with Axon Assistant, a new tool that integrates with the body cameras / apps to provide real-time AI language translation.

I asked the city spokesman if the trailers were part of the same pilot program as the AI, given the corporate partnership and the timeframe. No, he said.

“It isn’t from Axon or part of that pilot. It isn’t giving a live feed to the RTCC, officers need to log onto LVT’s website to see video.”

So it’s giving LVT a live feed then... and LVT gives its feed to Axon’s Real Time Crime Center back end… and officers can still watch it by switching tabs…

One thing that LVT proudly advertises it does with footage collected by cameras is its “agentic AI talk-down feature.” Check it out!

“Blanket,” you’ll notice. The thing detects “blanket” and uses it as an “identifying marker” to start barking... or playing music, perhaps. Blanket! Jesus christ! The robot is designed to disperse would-be sleepers who have nowhere else to sleep.

There’s a subpage on the website headlined “God Bless America.” Under that is a 2:30 video of pastoral landscapes and rugged individuals, set to sentimental piano music. “We experience America through thousands of different lenses.” Later: “We treasure the American ideal of having different views. Seeing through different lenses.” Lmao. Nice.

In a 30-second explainer video of the agentic AI blanket detector, the trailer’s AI voice barks at two men, telling them what they’re wearing, “please leave immediately.” They leave, taking their blanket with them. Mission accomplished! They definitely didn’t sleep in that one specific place.

The subpage for loitering is top-to-bottom bleak.

Glossy press releases, much like Shotspotter’s advertise a reduction in crime with little to no citation. There are use cases of early-adopting “partner cities.” Yours could be next if you call now to schedule your demo, which is exactly what the WPD apparently did. The spokesman told me the WPD secured the free trial, so.

After an answer like the one I got to my Axon question I didn’t bother asking the city who decided to play the music, WPD or LVT. Besides, the difference is more and more semantic every day.

This next point is the one I hope sticks.

Body cameras are a public facing accountability measure and an industry facing data collection tool. Whether they’ve made the police behave any better is an extremely open question but the wealth transfer from municipalities to the digital security state is objective fact. Worcester spends millions, and now that it’s in the collective bargaining agreements it’s never going anywhere.

The LVT trailer is a more honest representation of the same exact business model. It’s just not bothering to pretend it’s about accountability. In these times, why would you? Instead, LVT advertises its ability to monitor protests. And touts corporate partners (investors?) like Home Depot and Walmart. It’s further down the path, let’s just say.

All of the proliferation of tech sector policing tools—Shotspotter, LVT trailers, body cameras, AI assistants, drones—are bait. Worm on hook. Policing is being captured and privatized via these tools, at a time when the tech sector is also running out of ideas besides government contracts and becoming much more overtly right wing. Police officials find a revolving door swinging in front of them, with private sector pay on the other side. Like Saucier they’re all trying to get a foot in. And most municipalities, like Worcester, are either too enamored or too scared of their police department to ask any real questions.

Worcester might not share data with ICE, but LVT sure as shit does. And they are harvesting data here in Worcester, in direct violation of an ordinance banning the introduction of new surveillance tools without council oversight. They are harvesting that data because WPD was stoked on a free trial. There was no democratic body involved in any of this.

The betting odds are a proposal for a contract with LVT hits the public safety subcommittee sometime soon, but after the election. Toomey will read what she’s been told to read off her phone and the wheels will be set in motion making these trailers permanent features of the city’s landscape. That’s why it’s so so so important that we have a better city council than the one we have now.

Sheesh ok, I was about to transition to the ICE vote but this thing is getting long. I’m going to save what I had written for the ICE section and run it in the text body of next Outdoor Cats episode. We recorded it today and the interplay between the text and the conversation should be interesting. Adding it here feels bad. Too much mustard on the hot dog.

Here’s a piece I wanted to riff on but I’ll just recommend you read it too: “Weaponizing Classical Music” by Hermione Lai in Interlude.

What a week! What interesting times. Thank you for reading. Now just a few odds and ends then we’re out of here.

Odds and ends

In order to keep this thing running I need all of you always thinking about whether it’s worth one Dunkies a month to have this kind of writing and reporting here in this city.

Speaking of writing, rest in peace Kaleb Horton. This one fucks big time: “Merle Haggard, Son of Bakersfield”

Also the Seth Harp piece in the September Harpers about the Trump military parade (remember?) is the best thing I’ve read all year. Highly informed everything I wrote for this one.

This isn’t a sign of ascendant fascism so much as the nadir of late-stage capitalism, which depends on forever wars to juice corporate profits at a time of falling rates of return on investment. In its doddering senescence, the capitalist war machine is no less murderous than fascism was—witness the millions of Muslims killed by the United States and Israel since 2001—but it has considerably lower production values. In this soft dystopia, our military forces will not be destroyed in a cataclysmic confrontation with the armies of Communism, as befell Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. Instead, the defense oligarchs who own Congress will go on pocketing the money allocated to the military, just as they have been for the past forty years, until nothing is left but a hollow shell, a shrinking and sclerotic military so debilitated by graft, suicides, overdoses, and violent crime that it’s incapable of fulfilling its mission, and suitable only for use in theatrical deployments at home beating up protesters and rounding up migrants and the homeless.

Super quick dispatch from the “And I Love It” department: Katie and I participated in the Tuber Tournament this year and got our spuds weighed in yesterday afternoon. At 108 grams, it was a dismal showing. For perspective, the winner, announced at a nice little get together this afternoon at the Burncoat Arts Center, had like 30 pounds.

If they gave an award for the smallest single potato, we’d be a shoe-in. Here it is next to a coffee bean.

But in all seriousness the Tuber Tournament is a choice example of the slightly crusty slightly tongue-in-cheek slightly political (“fight fascism, grow potatoes” was this year’s slogan) community events that represent the real heart of the heart of the commonwealth far as I’m concerned. There’s a real fabric to this community, if only city hall could see it, enough to just consider nurturing it... enough, I’d settle, to not routinely step on it. Of course there’s the possibility that seeing it more clearly would lead to more trampling. So I’m open to the argument we should actually do a better job of hiding it.

Any Steve Reisch heads among my readers? I’ve been listening to “Music for Pieces of Wood” for nearly all my writing time over the past week. So sick.

Would love to hear some suggestions for any other modern experimental composers on that beautiful arbitrary knife’s edge between “classical” and “electronic.”

Lessons in municipal reel making right here from Las Palmas, CA.

laspalmasmedia

A post shared by @laspalmasmedia

I could make the right person much bigger than this newsletter very quickly by giving them the Worcester Sucks social platform to make these sorts of videos. If you wanna be a TikTok Intellectual but also a municipalist willing to focus on Worcester exclusively, hit me up. I got ideas I’m just not ever going to be that person. Billshaner at substack dot com.

Ok talk literally tomorrow! Erm... today. Like I was saying... Time is fucked.

1. Good post about this idea in Lauren Balik’s newsletter and recent appearance on TrueAnon.