As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value

It seems really obvious as soon as I read it, but for some reason as I've been working locally in my neck of the woods against Flock and worrying about it snowballing it hadn't really occurred to me that the snowball could work the other direction as well. The emergent effects of more and more deployments into a single unified storage/search system has always been the new and scary part. But "the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts" of course necessarily means "the parts are worth less than the whole" too. So managing to stop or reverse a deployment in your own locality, however small, also serves to help reduce the capability to everyone else across the nation whether they agree or not. That's really hopeful.

As the article notes, in some cases a locality might try to switch to a competitor, but the competitive community pressure here is still useful. Seems like a rare time where it creates an actual direct incentive to consider what will be popular amongst the people all over, even if certain LEAs etc personally might want more.

> Perhaps it’s the local summer diet of deep-fried cheese curds, corn on the cob, and Spotted Cow, but Wisconsin residents have been feeling pretty dyspeptic about Flock’s automated license plate cameras.

Or... perhaps it's because Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics? Especially in the Madison area.

Wisconsin is a "purple" state, but that's somewhat misleading, because the people aren't generally "centrist". Rather, the state is deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.