We could make Security Camera Gargoyles
Because current city skylines suck
Gargoyles are cool. Gargoyles made cities more classy. Now we have security cameras, which are dumb oppressive ball-and-stick gadgets.
What if we could beautify our cities with gargoyles?
www.UrbanGrotesque.com ?
(I own the domain but it isn’t set up yet)
We could do it as a two-piece, snap-together, fiberglass-reinforced resin with a stone-texture finish. Probably around $45-65 per unit including finishing.
The three concurrent tracks are, product, website, marketing:
And oh right the bonus track of ethics
Product:
-Decide on what the prototype cameras we want to work with are. Probably common stuff. Hikvision dome cameras. Axis bullet cameras. Nest doorbell cameras.
-Get exact dimensions and specifications of those.
-Create a design document with reference gargoyles we like. Decide where the camera goes for each of these; is it in the mouth, or is the camera itself the head. Figure out how to install them in ways that stay put, and also look good.
-Hire somebody to do the CAD / 3d modeling design for our sketches and design restrictions.
-Get a prototype fabricated via Xometry, Sculpteo, Shapeways
-Then, iterate until we have a design that isn’t dogshit.
Website:
-Get some rotating 3d product models of the gargoyles and pitch them for different camera types
-Make a cool white and black glitch text storefront website
-Build and open for preorders
Marketing:
-Go on shark tank?
-Perhaps launch a kickstarter
-Start reply guying to the RETVRN people on twitter
-A roster of egirls start shilling them
-Aim for partnerships with city planners / beautification committees. We want to offer bulk deals and we’ll sell them at cost in the early phases.
Sudoku Policing:
And now the most important consideration step of any of my projects, evaluating whether I have already committed a bunch of crimes by accident, and whether that means the project is immoral.
We can talk a big game about city skyline beautification but one of the obvious central use case examples for the product is taking some sting out of surveillance. The current government trend definitely seems to be a push towards infrastructure such as automated license plate readers, which can track everyones’ movements to the individual level—
(From a science and tech perspective, I think this is cool as hell. It pushes quite a few fields towards much higher resolution modeling. Policing, obviously, but economics, too; we’re moving out of the more meteorological, psychohistory style, which averages possible outcomes for an unknown set of variables, and towards cellular economics, which averages possible outcomes for a numbered and individually modeled set of variables. This is a really cool and never-before-possible form of deduction which will probably allow for some sudoku-type solves about who committed what crimes when, and who bought what when.
That said, from a civil rights standpoint, Aaaaaaa fuck no.)
Ah, whatever, so long as it’s random governments beautifying their skylines it’s okay. It’ll make the cameras more visible, in truth. Let’s just think before getting into a partnership with Flock.