Recap
Two cops investigate a series of murders involving robot bees and death to hashtags. The hashtag goes viral and shenanigans ensue.
Reaction
This episode had a lot going on from government overreach to facial recognition to geo location in pictures metadata. While the bees themselves seemed a little over engineered (very skeuomorphic with all the eyes, legs, etc), I quite enjoyed this episode.
Here’s what a real robot bee looks like:
The ending of this episode actually reminded me of Mike Tyson’s take on social media:
Specifically, that actions have consequences. Now I’m not suggesting that these 387,000 fictional people deserved what happened to them. Full stop. But bringing it back to the real world, inciting violence or death threats against people, be they MAGA-hatted teens or kneeling American football players, is absurd. I don’t buy the Thumper “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all” ideology. Criticism and dissent are very important in society, but those who exclusively use expletive-laden insults and calls for violence should not have a platform. Especially when they’re only comfortable saying such things behind the safety of their screen.
The throw-away line I found especially funny was when the bee guy held up “military-grade encryption” as some marvel of technology. As far as I’m aware military contracts go to the lowest bidder. Granted it could also just mean “industry standard but specifically used by the military” but still. I thought it was a great, if unintended, joke.
It’s hard relate Barry’s interactivity in museums to killer autonomous bees, but perhaps this entire situation could have been avoided if they had opted for a distributed system instead of centralized drones. Individual conservationist groups could have been granted access to a subset of robotic bees to program so a single backdoor wouldn’t have brought down the entire program. Granted, that would run contrary to the government’s police state, but bringing on more users is always helpful is identifying breaking bugs or issues.
Discussion Question
Knee-jerk reactions are easy but often half-baked. Have you ever amended, retracted, or apologized for a Tweet after learning new information or adding additional context?
