According to a count making the rounds this week, people in at least thirty-six states have started taking matters into their own hands with the little black camera boxes that read license plates as you drive by — sawing down the poles, spray-painting the lenses, in a few reported cases just shooting the things outright. A group called DeFlock says something like a hundred cities have already canceled their contracts or shut the cameras off. There are, by some estimates, more than a hundred and thirty thousand of these readers bolted to poles across the country, quietly filing away who drove where and when, for the benefit of five thousand-some police departments and whoever else eventually gets a subpoena or a login.

I bring this up because it strikes me as the most expensive way imaginable to reinvent something Chatham County has had running smoothly since before I was born: a small town already knows where your truck was. It does not need a subscription. It does not need a server farm. It needs Doris at the Cut & Curl, who has been cutting hair on the same corner since 1981 and who can tell you, unprompted and for the price of a twelve-dollar trim, who was parked outside the Baptist church on a Tuesday afternoon and what that probably means. Her surveillance network runs on gossip, casseroles, and the church bulletin, and its accuracy rate — in my long personal experience of being caught by it — is very close to a hundred percent.

The difference, and it is not a small one, is that Doris's network has a face attached to it. You know exactly who is watching, and you can, in theory, ask her to keep something to herself, and she might. The camera on the pole has no face. Nobody at the company holds your business in the particular, personal, faintly judgmental way Doris does. It just accumulates, silently, the way water finds a low spot in a field whether anyone asked it to or not.

The company that makes the most popular version of these cameras held its annual conference this week, by all accounts a subdued affair given that half its product line was, at that moment, being unbolted from poles across the country by ordinary citizens using directions they found on TikTok. There is something almost comforting in that image — the country's oldest form of information-gathering, the nosy neighbor, rising up against its own outsourced, incorporated replacement. Doris didn't need a hashtag. She just needed a chair by the window.

I do not know how this argument ends. I suspect it ends the way most arguments about surveillance end, which is quietly, in a committee meeting nobody attends, with the cameras either staying up under a new name or coming down and being replaced by something with a friendlier logo. What I do know is that whichever way it goes, Doris will still know. She always does.