She’s Not Sure What You Are

I find things like this creepy and voyeuristic. There’s an Isaac Asimov story called “The Dead Past” that should be more widely known, because it was prescient in a disturbing way:

“And every other important fact. Now what do you suppose would happen if we let news of a home chronoscope get out? People might start out by watching their youth, their parents and so on, but it wouldn’t be long before they’d catch on to the possibilities. The housewife will forget her poor, dead mother and take to watching her neighbor at home and her husband at the office. The businessman will watch his competitor; the employer his employee.
“There will be no such thing as privacy. The party line, the prying eye behind the curtain will be nothing compared to it. The video stars will be closely watched at all times by everyone. Every man his own peeping Tom and there’ll be no getting away from the watcher. Even darkness will be no escape because chronoscopy can be adjusted to the infrared and human figures can be seen by their own body heat. The figures will be fuzzy, of course, and the surroundings will be dark, but that will make the titillation of it all the greater, perhaps… Hmp, the men in charge of the machine now experiment sometimes in spite of the regulations against it.”
Nimmo seemed sick. “You can always forbid private manufacture-”
Araman turned on him fiercely. “You can, but do you expect it to do good? Can you legislate successfully against drinking, smoking, adultery or gossiping over the back fence? And this mixture of nosiness and prurience will have a worse grip on humanity than any of those. Good Lord, in a thousand years of trying we haven’t even been able to wipe out the heroin traffic and you talk about legislating against a device for watching anyone you please at any time you please that can be built in a home workshop.” — The Dead Past and Wikipedia page

We’re nearly at that stage now.

Is it fish?
It is not fish.

I want one.

Let me guess: the camera is a simple black slab, a monolithic sort of thing, with sides in the ratio 1:4:9…

Well, I’ not sure who you are…
But he is gorgeous and long may his kin thrive! (Inclusive male pronoun, for the feminazis)

Subtitled, “Your Webcam and the NSA: A Performative”
[ Combs hair, puts on tie. ]

I see the cat formerly known as Pallas’ is now referred to as the manul (which was always referenced in it’s Latin name, Felis manul anyway) as yet another Western imposition on the Third World is thrown out.
No doubt Rothschild’s giraffe will be given some Maasai name in a few years time…