Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/60 Thanks!
Let's welcome and Richard,
for our talk, policing the romantic
crowd, please give them a warm round
of applause to.
Gelfond billion Crozet
aid, and I bet as anyone
in the audience who just understood, I
said that was a
warm welcome to you and Welch and
it's really great to hear so many
different languages here on the thirty
three.
Now that's where we are
in Aberystwyth,
that's 20 kilometers north of the
only place in Europe where
civilian and military drones can
be tested in civilian airspace.
And that's crucial for future
policing techniques with drones and high
density environments
where also 50 kilometers north
of the town where Manning went to school
when he was a teenager.
So we are at the periphery of Europe,
but also at the heart of
some of its major debates.
So that's a perfect example then
I would say for the losers in quarterly's
theory of the rhizome of nonhierarchical
entry points into culture.
And actually in our talk, we're going to
bring some of these entry points
into creative opposition.
So since first we drafted this
paper in both Germany
and the UK, we have seen major example
of crowd activism
here in Hamburg last weekend
and earlier this month in London,
where amazingly, all three elements of
our talk policing, the romantic crowd
came together spectacularly.
This was the scene in London
where thousands of students
were protesting against police presence
on university campuses.
And Richard was especially pleased
to see a romantic book.
Mary Wollstonecraft A
Vindication of the Rights of Women 1792,
among the bookshelves carried by book
block, not black block.
But look, OK,
so this reminds us that's
a powerful rhetorical tradition of
civil liberties and gender equality
has its roots in the romantic art
and poetry.
Yeah, but a point isn't that Romanticism
has already had all the insights into
surveillance culture, the culture
of the news.
That said, it does appear that the
romantic saw the Internet coming.
OK, maybe not the Internet, but certainly
peer networks of communication based
on trust.
Now we have to be careful about
distinguishing between mere analogies
linking the romantic period to our
own age that maybe don't have any useful
analogs and those that
do have some continued operational
relevance, because it is the case
that writers, romantic writers
like John Keats, Mary Shelley,
William Wordsworth, philosophically
modeled and to some extent
thought through many of the
debates and issues that we're currently
having as we seek to shape
the contours of our
future societies.
Now, these writers lived in the age
that first imagined total surveillance.
This is the age of Jeremy Bentham
Panopticon published in 1791.
So at the very least, it's valuable
to remind ourselves where
some of the some of our ideas
about surveillance, privacy and
crowds and particularly the policing
of rhetorical and discursive space
have come from.
So we're going to go on a journey into
the romantic crowd.
What in romantic slang was called
the push, a bit like the coffee
Schlanger outside aims
and along the way will be meeting
romantic poet John Keats,
a couple of Dundee's writing Velocipedes,
a certain Victor Frankenstein
and two crowds that managed to be in
the same place at once.
OK, so spring 18,
19 and German cutting
edge technology arrives in Britain in
the form of Karl Tracy's love machina.
And these velocipedes
were popular among
the romantic geeks of the day.
Well dressed Dandy's like these
two, very eager to try out
new gadgets, although the rudimentary
steering mechanism sent many of them into
hedges or tumbling into
duck ponds.
John Keats, in a letter from March
1890, dismissed
this new technology.
The Nothing of the day, he said,
is a machine called the Velocipede.
It is a real courage to ride
cock horse upon.
They will go seven miles an hour.
A handsome gelding will come to eight
guineas. However, they will soon
be cheaper unless the army
takes to them.
So Keats is ridiculing the Raices
invention of. The nothing of the date
but that word nothing
disguises an anxiety attack,
no ethical anxiety, anticipating
that the army would take to them
streets, who is part of a circle
of anti-government activists, is
worried about potential military
applications.
Well, not quite like this design
of the first police
motorbike from 1818
and certainly not like this.
This is megacity want take on
the velocipede, but nonetheless the
potential revolution in policing
techniques.
Now, Keets wasn't the only one
to worry about the army taking to them.
On September the 1st, 1819,
a popular magazine called The Tickler
had great names. Back then,
it conjured up a vision of an entire
Corps of Velocipedes or
Dondi Dragoons.
And here they are riding cannons.
So apologies to this dream about the
readability.
So such cause might be
very useful for home of service,
particularly on the occasion of public
spectacles.
What the ticklers talking about here
is policing demonstrations.
But that date, first of September
18 19 is actually significant.
It was just two weeks after mounted
police riding real horses
and armed with Saber's,
had brutally dispersed 60000 protesters
and some computers field in Manchester.
That was the infamous Peterloo massacre.
15 people were slashed or trampled
to death and hundreds wounded.
And one eyewitness was so appalled, he
founded a new liberal newspaper called
The Manchester Guardian today, just the
Guardian.
But for all the humor, the Ticklers
actually suggesting that
the core of Dondi Dragoons
police on velocipedes could control
crowds without crushing people.
And it adds by the same token, that if
the head of a Dondi Charger was shot off,
the rider could simply quote Nalebuff
on again.
It's another absurd image, but it pulls
the velocipede into the frame of a
technological ethical debate about the
policing of public space.
Now, in 1819, the velocipede
cheap, lightweight and fast
looked like becoming part of the
technology of domestic crowd control
and post Napoleonic expansion,
as the Gentleman magazine
predicted. Echoing Keets,
The Velocipede is one of those machines
which may probably alter the whole system
of society because it is applicable
to the movement of armies.
As it turned out, the velocipedes
didn't catch on, not
for another 40 years until
Pedal's were finally invented.
The point, though, is that the Romantics
were quick to model the impact
ethically and on Britain's
fraught political landscapes.
So no one, of course, reads
particular anymore.
But maybe they should because the
magazine's whimsical take
on fashionable new machines in 1819
actually hides an acute and
sophisticated response to the Peterloo
massacre and of course, to
all potential use misuses of
technology.
And it is radical in its own way,
as Percy Shelley is better known.
Response to Peterloo.
The poem The Mask of Anarchy was
and here's a stanza from it
and it celebrates the energies of the
crowd by suspiciously summoning
another crowd into existence.
Let a vast assembly B.
And with great solemnity declare
with measured words that you are
as God has made you free.
OK, so it's, it's not a piece of high
abstraction.
Actually it's a crowd pleaser made
up of slogans.
And Sheli even manages to anticipate
one of Occupy own slogans
about the 99 percent year many
and they are few.
But let's not forget, this is rhetorical
space.
And actually how large public meetings
in physical space were to be understood
legally was crucial
for the Manchester authorities.
The Peterloo crowd represented
a single multiheaded monster,
and that partly explains why the
the mounted police were able to charge
into the crowd and attack them
indiscriminately.
If you were there, you were guilty.
And it's the same logic behind today's
kettling techniques.
And we saw that last weekend here
in Hamburg.
Incidentally, the official position
on the breaking up of the Court of Horror
demo, as you can see here,
was that quoting the official
police spokesman, the protesters suddenly
started marching.
And this was not what we agreed with.
So we have to stop the march and the very
same reason was given for breaking
up the Peterloo meeting in 1819,
as one government prosecutor explained
at the trial of one of the organizers,
Henry Hunt.
The protesters were all provided with
banners and advanced with a firm military
step, presenting every appearance
of troops upon their march.
And ever since the French Revolution,
actually. But fear of marching crowds
has never really gone away.
It's always there beneath the surface.
Now, actually, romantic literature was
fascinated by the idea of crowds
as potentially government toppling
monsters, including the most famous
romantic novel of all, one
of the most famous novels, Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein.
Now Frankenstein was published in
1817, and that's two years
before Peterloo.
But these were already riotous
times, regularly punctuated
by enormous gatherings of 60 to
80000 people protesting against
the high price of bread loss
of jobs to machines and corrupt
politicians.
So as we all know, Victor Frankenstein
is working at the limits
or beyond the limits of romantic
techno ethics.
It creates a monstrous creature
and then when he sees what he's done, he
immediately disowns it.
And the novel was straightaway recognized
in its own day as an allegory, an
allegory on techno ethics,
on the dangers of new scientific
techniques such as GalvÃ¡n
ism.
But it was also recognized as an allegory
on the political relationship between
a dissatisfied and underrepresented
people and their uncaring
rulers and the creatures.
Complaint that he'd been betrayed by
the father figure by Frankenstein
is also the complaint of the
underprivileged crowd protesting
at their treatment by the state.
But it doesn't end well for
Frankenstein's creature, right?
And the first thing that radical lawyers
after Peterloo did, and these
were not secret trials is
Chelsea Manning was we've just heard
claims, but these were public show
trials. The first thing they did was
to build their client's defense cases
around an agent base rather than
a flow model of crowd
dynamics.
And as one romantic attorney insisted,
a person's presence at a riot did not
in itself prove riotous
behavior. Quoting from the trial
records, the third and last charge
was seditious riot.
What was riot? There was no such thing as
riot. In the abstract.
The individual must be found actually
rioting.
Even if a multitude was rioters, a
man could not be made a riot,
even if present, if he was found
holding no participation in the tumult
that prevailed.
Now such arguments on the day
as can be seen in the current UK
Police Manual of guidance on public order
policing.
This is the theory anyway, and
reading from the manual,
as with any crowd, the protest crowd is
not a homogenous mass, but a collection
of groups and individuals who, while
sharing the same voluntary participation
within the crowd, may wish to express
themselves in different ways.
So how one understood interaction
within crowds in the romantic
period was crucial.
It could mean the difference between
freedom and the scuffled
and the questions Romantic's asked
themselves about crowds are the same
as computer vision.
Ask itself now
questions about how crowds
forms or how
how information was transmitted across
them, what behavior could
be accurately predicted,
and where the crowds were collective
entities or made up of individuals.
The agent based modeling techniques,
such as the social force model
appear to have settled some of these.
They've transformed subdomains of
surveillance, such as event detection
and group tracking.
And it turns out one of the keys to
accurately predicting and interpreting
human interaction was in high
density environments is velocity.
So if you look at these pictures, D to
f the decelerating
subject, us, the one with a shortening
blue arrow produces
attractive force as he approaches
a stationary group.
Deceleration indicates
affiliation or in romantic
terms, sympathy,
because as Mary Fairclough has shown,
romantic activities, activists
regard the movement of
information across crowds
as an instinctive flow of sympathy.
The authorities, on the other hand, saw
this propagation of data as contagion.
Modern visual analysis uses
the phrase attractive force
to describe the relationship between
people, which sounds neutral.
However, those romantic terms sympathy or
contagion, depending on your political
outlook, are still there beneath the
surface.
As you slow down, you give up
social information purpose,
which the algorithm then passes either
as normal or abnormal.
But of course, such terms are
ideologically freighted.
For example,
this is a data set here from
left to right, show escape, panic,
or could it depict beginnings
of a flash mob?
And how much interaction in crowds is
normal anyway?
Clearly, spatial context
is crucial, but even
here, the researchers assumptions
aren't neutral, and
this quotation shows in a normal scene
of a stock market, the interaction force
of stock brokers would be quite higher
than the interaction forces of walking
pedestrians and the street scene.
Now, for most people, there's nothing
normal about the scene of a stock
market.
But.
What's more, the binary
regrouping of normal and abnormal
and these must use data sets that are
actually from Getty Images is
very revealing in the category
normal crowd scenes, we find pedestrian
walking as any other kind of
wonder and marathon
running.
And on the abnormal, we find crowd
funding and protesters clashing.
But public protest isn't abnormal.
It's, of course, part of the democratic
process.
Now, today's SFM multi
object tracking techniques don't only
predict where objects and groups moving
groups moving through crowds
are going to be,
but they also predict where people
have been.
And this is potentially really scary.
Quoting the paper
trajectory estimation explains
the whole path as if it had always
existed.
We can follow a trajectory back
in time to determine where a pedestrian
came from when he first stepped
in to view
this brave, new, statistically
plausible world.
It's possible to exist in two parts
simultaneously.
One question immediately arises
then, to what extent
were surveilled subjects in the future
be held accountable for their
estimated past movements,
and it turns out that the romantics
worried about precisely this question.
So to finish the last five minutes, we
want to show you a romantic data set
of crowd interaction and one that
powerfully explores the psychological
impacts of projecting somebody backwards
into into an estimated trajectory.
And it's a good example of how romantic
literature and art opens a space
of shared imagination that's still
available to us now.
So London, 13th of September,
18, 19, four
weeks after Peterloo, two weeks after
that particular article
and one o'clock in the afternoon,
two political processions are about to
take place.
The first is enormous.
It's up to 300000 people,
possibly the largest romantic crowd
ever.
And they've gathered to cheer the
activist Henri Hunt on his way back into
London to stand trial for treason.
For his part in organizing, Peterloo
and its supporters are calling it Hunt's
triumphant entry into London.
The second crowd is also enormous
and it's filled with dark shadows
and suspicions.
And that crowd is accompanying Christ
into Jerusalem and for one
man. Update our poet John
Keats. Both processions are taking
place at the same time.
So it's the largest gathering in London
ever. That date of then,
the Keats hardly mentions it
in his letter newsletter
writes With brother and sister law, you
will hear by the papers of the
proceedings at Manchester Peterloo
and Hunt's triumphal entry into London.
I will merely mention that it
is calculated 30.
He means 300000 people were in the
street. As I passed Conaghan
his window, I saw a profile
portrait of Zandt's.
The Destroyer of Kotzebue is very look
Mussen interest everybody in his favor,
that's all he says nothing about the
banners or the flags.
And actually he's more interested in this
portrait of Zandt's
and the other before. In 1818, Karsan
had stabbed the distinguished
dramatist Kotzebue after accusing
him of betraying the nation.
So to crowds, one real one, a painting.
And in that painting, Christ's triumphant
entry into Jerusalem, we
find Keats's face
painted by his one time friend, Benjamin
Robert Hayden.
Now, the painting hasn't been exhibited
at the time Hunt's procession takes
place, but Keats is very
familiar with the painting.
He's seen it propped up in
Hayden's dining room, where it's been the
backdrop to many radical dinners
absorbing some of those radical energies
and perhaps some of the atmosphere of
suspicion.
By August 1819, Hayden's
relationship with Keats has disintegrated
for the Peter Keats is an opportunist
who's only using the activist networks
as a way to get his work out in
the radical press.
Perhaps you've already noticed that Keats
is the only person speaking
in the crowd. There he is alongside other
famous faces Voltaire, Newton,
Wordsworth. Keats is angry.
He's the only one talking because
he's found himself cast by Hayden,
has fallen out with him by now in the
role of the infiltrator,
the whisperer, the betrayer, the agent
provocateur, in short, within
the allegory of the painting as Judas
himself.
So as Kate stands around the London
crowds, looking at Hunt supporters and
seeing Christ's, he must have felt
uncomfortable.
Hayden's painting itself becomes a
parable, a parable of the reform
movement, closing in on itself
of political friendship, straining under
the pressures of surveillance and of what
happens when social confidence breaks
down.
So when Keats tells us in the letter that
he doesn't feel part of the crowds,
it's because he's standing in to crowds
at once.
Like many of us today, he's a quantum
Keats, a Keats who disturbs our sense
of historical narrative, a
double exposure, a double agent
that face in the print shop window
of Zant and his victim, Kotzebue,
must have brought home to Keats and
mediated the still fraught dyadic
identities of friend and
betrayal activists and
spy.
Finally, then, in many ways, that
painting of Haydon's is one of
romanticism, the most profound and
moving reflections on the
personal and interpersonal
damage caused by surveillance culture.
We'll leave it there. Thanks for
listening.
Oh, thank you very much.
Do we have questions from the Internet?
You know, if you
have questions in this room, could
you please walk up to the microphones
in the room here
to so we can record
your questions and answers
be.
Yes, please go ahead.
Hello. A question just
about my knowledge of
the romantic movement is not really
extensive, but I do associated also
with a fear of technology and not
necessarily with crowds, but with
individuality.
And I wonder if you could just elaborate
a little bit about
the notion of Frankenstein, which is
often read as a sort of,
well, a call to engage responsibly
with with technology and
also with a broader sense of romantic
distrust of crowds.
Right. Where it's precisely the big
groups of people in which you lose your
individuality.
And as a result, you get this traditional
romantic heroes alone
in nature without an iPod.
You know,
it's a fantastic question.
And and you're absolutely right.
Absolutely right. I mean, in a sense, the
Orthodox until recently, the orthodox
view of romanticism is that it is
a period of the emergence
of the individual genius, like the great
romantic, solitary genius
who he usually a man
is really just a conduit or a hollow bone
for inspiration to travel down onto the
page.
And the romantic hero
emerges with a fragment.
All he can grasp from is a great
infinite.
I say that's the Orthodox, actually,
that's been challenged.
And we now have a much more nuanced sense
of romanticism as a period of coterie
of circles of writers gathering together.
So, you know, the idea that Keats, for
example, is a poet of autumn
who so floats over the Earth having
cut himself free, a transcendental
figure who writes about, you know, the
great eternal themes of beauty and truth
and music. In actual fact, he's friends
with a manly hunter who served two years
in prison for insulting the prince regent
called him a fat Adonis of 50.
Fortunately, he survived prison,
but that's what the state did to him.
Keats wrote a sonnet celebrating
his release from prison, and the first
thing he did was try to get an
introduction. And part of the agan
between Hayden and Keats is that Hayden
was really the conduit into
this radical circle of poets.
Keats very quickly left Hayden to one
side and sided with Lee Hunt
because he hadn't had at a newspaper
published Keats.
So it is a period of coteries.
But the whole thing about the crime, it's
also a time when the crowd is
gathering to itself, you
know, a sort of a
sense of agency.
You know, after all, it was a crowd that
sort of wreaks havoc through France.
It's what the British authorities are
frightened of. And that's why as soon as
they have hints of the Peterloo crowd
is drilling as a military force,
they're very scared and they send in the
police and they disperse a bit.
But it's a great question.
Yeah, maybe a little bit of an anecdote.
First, actually,
the murder of Kotzebue
was followed by I don't know the exact
language, but it's the but I was
in Germany
and it really, really oppressed
the civilization and was followed by the
beat of my own thing
and so on. But what I wanted to ask
is, was there in
Great Britain any thing similar
to that? Was there any oppression by the
politics, especially after the massacre?
Fantastic. Yeah.
Yes. Is the answer to that.
One of the six acts immediately follows
Peterloo and the Six Act
essentially criminalizes
people gathering in assemblies.
It's already a period where habeas corpus
is a sort of
vindicate Zachares.
You would say it's been lifted in the
1796 lifted again in 1870.
It's a very repressive period.
It's a period of wide infiltration
of coteries and crowds by spies,
infiltrators.
A lot of romantic literature meditates on
this, often in oblique ways, because to
say it openly was dangerous.
You ended up in prison, likely HUNTE
So yeah, it is an oppressive period.
And the first thing the state does is a
series of repressive legal
measures aimed at preventing
anything like Peterloo happening again,
not the violence, but the crowd activism
could have been.
We had the question from the other side
of the room, but the lady.
A couple of questions.
Let's start with the first one.
My question, it's more like
asking to elaborate on the part
about the soft policing because I don't
think there's much more being talked
about that here.
And I think it's really good to bring
that up because I think that's a really,
really dangerous current that has been
going on for a long time, as you said.
But developments now like just questions
of how what we can do to
avoid this kind of detection, this kind
of analysis and where there's
more information on this.
You have strong views about CCTV in
Britain, for example.
Yeah, we have.
Well, Britain is the country where
well, in the world with
the most.
CCTV cameras and private
CCTV cameras all
over the world per head, really,
and the drones
where we had just 20 kilometers
up from and
basically
just trying to find out new techniques
where they can go into crowds,
go into
follow individuals, follow follow groups
of crowds. They have this visual
analysis technique where
they were able to
to pass.
One group into merging with others
and then dispersing again, and
especially in crowdsourced systems,
like awkward situations like like
demonstrations, protests, this
will be very useful for the police.
And that's all been tested just
below where we are on
the first the first police drone that we
use to monitor crime.
And and actually,
you know, the first the velocipedes often
went into duck ponds, according
to a cartoon by the first police drone
used for that ended up in the River
Mersey.
But, you know, in terms of what you can
do about it, it
cracks us up because it is the argument.
Well, you know, as soon as you start
talking about killer robots, people say,
well, yes, but drones do very useful
things. And they do Aberystwyth
University, where drones
are used to measure nitrogen levels in
fields they used to count
sheep transferable skill
set where, you know, lots of things.
But it doesn't mean because we have that
we have to have killer robots.
And actually the debate is getting going
is getting going in Britain
CCTV. I think we've become a culture into
it. It's normalized for us.
People don't see him and actually
they actually advocate for them.
People want them.
So streets will say, you know, why
haven't we got a CCTV camera protecting
that wall at the end of our street
council? Very happy to provide them
usually. Yes.
It seems like
it's getting people to believe
that it's is good for them and
reinforcing that, encouraging them to
believe that they're there for our
safety. You'll always find those
shields, you know.
Yeah, but then again, I mean, we're both
educators working
in different institutions.
And I think our role
is being
being multipliers and also educating
anybody that that comes across exactly
what's giving them opposite views.
I teach them in the universities to
assist them in the further
education college. So there's still a
little bit more brains are a bit more
malleable. So I think
it's tough to do that.
OK, how much
of the problem with
policing in overpolicing enrollment
period was due to the fact that the
state simply didn't have the
right toolbox?
I mean, it's important to remember that
the people who were sabering down
innocent women and children in Peterloo,
they weren't police, they were the army.
Chelsea Barracks existed to
police London because there wasn't a
police force.
Yeah, it's an important distinction.
They weren't police, they were the
yeomanry. It was a it was a paramilitary
force, a militia really.
And they're poised awkwardly between
a regular police force and, and
the army a true so it paramilitary,
but they were used as a police force in
different places. I mean, the other thing
I'd find quite interesting is that you're
sort of focusing on urban policing.
How much does this work with
more rural policing and what
comes to mind instantly with Wales?
This is the Rebecca riots against toll
booth, toll bridges and toll roads.
Yeah, well, you know, we have we have a
proud tradition in Wales stretching back
to the Rebecca riots and beyond.
And actually, Chelsea Manning is
could be seen as part of that radical
tradition teenager.
If you had a teenager in Britain and
you know, it's been a play recently,
I think the only major play so far, Tim
Price, is the radicalization of Bradley
Manning. It was first put on by the
Welsh.
Yeah.
In terms of, you know, wider
policing issues, I
mean, actual fact, what the velocipedes
the first thing the gentleman's magazine
said is great. We can pursue thieves
out of the capital, into the countryside
now.
So they were very, very adaptable in the
way they saw potential uses of this
technology.
I think I lost the question slightly of
everything.
OK, here we go.
OK, I want to say thanks for your talk
first. It was really, really great.
And also, I guess I've got
a point and then a question if that's
all right. And that the point, I
guess, is just more of an elaboration
on crowd control policing
in the UK today.
I think I'm not the only person who's
at that protest, as you
can see it.
But so
it's I find it really, really interesting
that you brought up the Lewis defenses
and the idea of just being at
a protest or in in a protest
crowd being not being
not enough for conviction, because now
that's basically the definition of
the charge of violent disorder, which is
a catchall charge to
use to prosecute protesters
and people on the streets
in the UK right now.
But your your distinction between
being in a crowd and being in
individuated is part of that crowd is
is really important, I think, for
understanding how.
Crowd control policing works right now
because you can be prosecuted just for
being part of that crowd, but at the same
time people are being prosecuted because
they've appeared on unspotted
sites, on police cameras and from the
from the student riots in 2010,
you saw people being picked
out of the crowd, you know, people's
faces being put up in the newspapers
released by the police.
And they had 12 pictures, the shaming
people, mostly young people
of color and
it and the idea that you can be
individuated and picked out, but at the
same time prosecuted
for being part of a larger movement as a
tactic of intimidation.
And I guess that was my point.
My question was, what is
if you had any more information about
the what was the reaction
to radical art in the romantic period
in terms of a political backlash?
Like what was what was the
state's reaction to Shelley and Keats
writing all this stuff?
Because I don't know.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, says technical
processes of individuation.
And that's what a lot of this technology
is supposed to do. And we do it all the
time, you know, just by slowing down as
we approach a group of people.
So it's an excellent point.
Well, the first point, I think, for
today's before you say your part
about everyone takes is
there seems to be a difference between
the theory, as we've seen in
the in the manuals, the
police manuals and
the actual what they do on the streets.
There is this
lecturer in Leeds who has very
successfully worked with the police
in football crowd situations
where he taught the police.
And that's where this manual comes from,
how to not see a crowd as
a mob, as an entity, but
see the individuals.
And it's worked very successfully in
distillation techniques and all the rest
of it. But it seems like for political
protests, nothing of
this is being taken into account.
So the theory and the reality of,
you know, it's very disparate there.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, as Clifford Saltum, he's doing
that research and it's valuable.
I think it's a really important
distinction.
Stadium crowd and social panic of that
kind protest is seen as very different
things. As for the romantic response
to radical art.
Well, very little in many cases
because the politics was
sublimated or sort of displaced on
to nature poetry often.
So, you know, what looked like nature
poem Pastorale and we talked a bit about
this last year is often sort
of stuck in a graphic way, radical
literature that is disguising itself.
And that's why it remains such a rich
resource, because, you know, we can pick
over these things now and we see those
radical agenda discourses
that at the time were purposefully
disguised. So the romantics, in a sense,
we can talk about unfinished
conversations and continuities.
Yeah, OK, we have one last question
from the Internet, our signal angel.
Yeah. So we spoke a lot about history
and the present, but there's also the
future.
And the question is, do you expect
any Precrime laws in the near
future?
We already saw those
pictures where people like could
be indexed like
surveilled in a way, but what can
they do with it?
Sort of minority report, predictive
policing a la carte.
Yeah. Yeah, well, they're doing that
already.
Predictive policing.
Yeah, yeah. They're very successful.
I mean, we disingenuous to suggest that
we had all the answers and certainly
romantic a you know, the literature,
the art is a rich resource, but I'm not
quite sure how far into the future we can
project. And we've seen the, you know,
the dangers of doing that.
Those estimates are trajectories.
I don't know. I mean, my my own sense.
I think our sense is that autonomous
policing and soft policing is
is raising all sorts of ethical issues.
And quite where it's going to go is
anybody's guess. But I, I, I would
guess that he's going in that direction,
you know, I don't
know.
OK, I'm sorry we are a little bit over
time, but maybe you will be here for
two or three minutes more if people have
more questions from rule.
Well, Richard, and thank you very much
for your talk. Thank you.