Meanwhile: The boredom of surveillance
I monitor twelve webcams and let AI tell the story.
No #sundaytokenburning this sunday, the contrary.
Surveillance cameras are popular, cheap and they have a disciplining effect on people simply because you feel watched.
But who is actually looking at the images?
The answer likely is: Nobody or AI, which we can expose to the extreme boredom of watching a parking lot until something happens.
I asked myself: How would the story sound, if AI would recount this boredom?
Tomas moved through nine places—the airport road, the Kona road, the jetty, the port, the circus, the old harbour, the causeway, the west gate, the square—standing and walking in a white top, thirty-three times recorded.
In todays world, an idea to a website is a short step and with the help of claude code I put together Meanwhile.
12 Webcams in different time zones, polled every few minutes and analyzed with AI. Then, every day, I give all the evidence of daily life to a large language model to tell a story.
It's no surprise that the stories are not exciting at all, but the tool will try to find a pattern over time, a red line, people who appear again and are linked to things, though chances are incredibly low that anything makes sense when you put images from all over the world together in one story - but we will see what emerges.
The blue pickup, which was next in at The West Gate, did not come in. Nadia did, after several entries away: Nadia was at The Kona Road, at The Jetty and at The Circus. At The Jetty they were near Otto and the orange crate, which sat on the wet concrete five separate times, plastic, full of fish, in the company of the green tub, the blue bucket, the orange basket and the red mop — a great deal of shallow open vessel for one slab of quay, and every one of them earning its keep. Mara came back too, standing at The Circus beside the red double-decker stand, and missing the black taxi by about half an hour; the black taxi then missed the red double-decker stand by roughly the same margin, which is the sort of thing that junction arranges without being asked. Iris was at The Kona Road with Bruno, the red hatchback parked nose-in. - 21st of August
If you dare, you can even listen to the observations as a podcast. It's surprisingly soothing to hear a recount of daily boredom.
It was as well an exercise in "local AI" - I started the easy way, using the tokens I still had in openai and anthropic for API usage. Then I asked myself if I could not run the experiment completely local on my own machine.
Turns out - you almost can, but my prompt to tell the observations into stories was too complex for my local model and for this specific part, which brings many items, personas and rules together, I rely on Anthropic. However, as very few tokens are used, I claim this exercise not to be a token burning one!
