The Fence Goes Up First
What a camera on one Historic Filipinotown street says about who governs Los Angeles.
On my block in Historic Filipinotown, the surveillance cameras are repaired faster than the sidewalk.
I have watched this happen more than once. A Flock camera goes up on a pole, a small black rectangle angled at the intersection, reading every license plate that passes. Someone in the neighborhood takes it down. Within a week a crew arrives to mount a new one. The sidewalk below it has been cracked and lifting for years; the streetlight on the corner has been dark even longer. Those never get fixed.
A few doors down, every week, a neighbor works the recycling bins for bottles and cans, the way thousands of Angelenos now assemble a living out of what the rest of us throw away. The camera is not watching the street for his sake. It does not register a man who needs social services. It registers a plate, a time, a direction of travel, a record that leaves the block for a private company’s servers and, the lawsuits filed across California this year allege, flows onward to the federal agencies California’s sanctuary law was written to keep out.1 The same machine that could house him has instead made him a target, and made a commodity of his comings and goings.
A city that lets the camera be fixed before the curb has told you what it values, without meaning to say it aloud. The fence is maintained first. The commons can wait.
My neighbors grasp this more clearly than any elected body has. They keep pulling the cameras down. The cameras keep going back up. That argument, carried out in metal and plastic on a residential street, is the subject of this essay.
Enclosure, all the way down
To understand why the camera comes first, start with the fence itself, because the fence, what the English called enclosure, is the oldest move capitalism has.
Capitalism began as a campaign of enclosure, the act of putting a price on things that had never had one, starting with the common lands that ordinary people had farmed and grazed together for centuries.2 What was shared got fenced, surveyed, deeded, and rented back. We still carry the memory of what stands outside that fence, because we have managed to keep a few things outside it. The public beach belongs to everyone, and you do not get a better stretch of sand by paying more for it. The library lends to the day laborer and the landlord on the same terms. The fire department does not check your balance before it comes. These are the commons we have left, and we defend them without quite having the words for why.
The newest enclosures are harder to see, because the fence is no longer wood and wire. It is the camera on the pole. It is the datacenter, which uses a city’s water and electricity. It is the platform you scroll, which pays you nothing while you build, with every post and every like and every pause, the most valuable thing it owns. Yanis Varoufakis has given this arrangement a name. He calls it technofeudalism, and he calls the firms that run it cloud capital: not businesses competing in a market so much as digital fiefs collecting rent, the way a medieval lord took a share of a harvest he did nothing to grow.3 The Tesla in the driveway belongs to you, but its maker can switch it off from a distance and reads everything you do behind the wheel. You own the car. The lord holds the fief.
The motive is rent. The mechanism is exit. Varoufakis puts the second point more sharply than I could: the aim of cloud capital is to get us to exit capitalist markets altogether, out of the open street where buyers and sellers can still see one another and into the enclosed fief where the lord sets every term.4 Hold onto that word, exit. It is where the second half of the story begins.
So far this is economics, a description of how money moves. It turns into politics the moment someone decides the arrangement is not an embarrassment to be reformed but an order to be defended. That is the work the so-called dark enlightenment performs. Its house intellectual, Curtis Yarvin, teaches a small and influential corner of Silicon Valley that democracy is mere friction, that the press and the universities and the courts are a single suffocating establishment he calls the Cathedral, and that a country would run better the way a company runs, under a chief executive who answers to no electorate.5 Strip away the varnish and the program is plain. The cloud lord already governs his fief in fact. Yarvin supplies the argument for letting him govern it in law.
The two halves fit because they are the same gesture pointed in opposite directions. Technofeudalism engineers your exit from the market into the fief. The dark enlightenment seeks the lord’s exit from democracy into a private jurisdiction of his own, a charter city, a network state, a company town that flies its own flag. One exit fences you in. The other fences the rest of us out of any say over how we are ruled. Enclosure is the act. Rent is the motive. Exit is how it gets done.
Which returns us to the pole on my street. The camera is one fence among several now going up across Los Angeles, and the sections that follow walk them one at a time. But the argument underneath all of them is the one my neighbors are already having with hammers and paint: whether a public still has any say over the ground it lives on, or whether that ground has quietly become someone else’s property to watch.
The screen
I watched part of the first fence go up from the inside. I joined Facebook when its mission statement still read like a public work: making the world more open and connected. I believed it. Coming out of a military career that the public had paid for, working on the infrastructure of a platform that connected billions felt like service at a different scale. The pitch was an open pasture, the whole world in one field, no fences anywhere.
What got built was a paddock. The feed was never the product. The product was attention, captured and trained, and the numbers tell you whose labor built it. Paid employees perform only a fraction of the work a platform like that runs on; the rest is performed by billions of people for free, every post, photo, and pause a brick in capital the poster will never own.6 We did it voluntarily. Most of us enjoyed it. That changes nothing about who collects the rent.
The election of 2016 shook my confidence that anyone competent was steering. Cambridge Analytica, two years later, ended the argument I had been having with myself: I watched leadership choose growth over the platform’s effect on the societies it operated in, not as a lapse but as a settled habit. When the company’s direction and my values could no longer be reconciled, I left, and the leaving eventually brought me to a house in Historic Filipinotown with a camera up the block.
I tell that story for one structural reason. The screen was the prototype. The engine built to capture attention and modify behavior on the feed is the direct ancestor of the machines this essay is about. The fence came off the screen, and it went looking for the street.
The grid and the street
Follow it out of the phone and the fence reaches two pieces of physical California at once.
The first is the grid. A datacenter is the engine room of the feed: a building that consumes electricity and water on the scale of a small city. The artificial-intelligence boom has set off a land rush of them across the state. Last year, the State of California tried, mildly, to make the industry pay its own way. Senate Bill 57 began as a plan to make datacenters pay their own electricity rate. Without one, the cost of powering them lands on everyone else’s monthly bill. By the time Governor Newsom signed it, industry lobbying had reduced it to a study, due at the start of 2027. Ratepayer advocates called the result toothless. The governor separately vetoed a requirement that the industry disclose its water use. This spring, the Legislature tried again with a stronger measure, Senate Bill 886, which would make large datacenters carry the full cost of the power they demand; in late May, it passed the full Senate over the industry’s objection, 27 to 8, and moved to the Assembly, which is where such bills go to be tested.7 Watch what happens to it there.
But notice what even the stronger bill concedes: the fence will stand, and the only question is the rent. Here Los Angeles holds a card almost no other American city holds. The City of Los Angeles owns its water and its power outright, through the Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the largest municipal utility in the country. Whether a datacenter is built here, and on what terms, and for whose benefit, is not a verdict the market gets to hand down. It is a decision a public body is allowed to make.
The second piece is the street itself, and the lede already showed you the mechanism. The camera converts public asphalt into private inventory. Every plate that passes becomes a record; every record becomes an asset on a company’s servers; the company licenses access back to the governments whose streets produced it. The street still looks public. Its data is private.
The barbed wire
No enclosure survives on fencing alone. There is always force at the perimeter, and the force is always tested somewhere else first.
The pattern is old. When the governments of the Global South drown in dollar debt, the relief comes with conditions, and among the conditions is the handover of essential public systems, water and electricity, to private investors.8 The technique gets perfected where the people affected have the least say, and then it comes home. Los Angeles knows the return trip well; the tradition I write from has a name for it, the imperial boomerang.9
This year the return trip surfaced in the audits. California law is blunt on this point: local agencies are barred from sharing license-plate data with out-of-state or federal agencies, and the state's sanctuary law walls local resources off from federal immigration enforcement. Yet an audit in Ventura County found Flock's "national lookup" feature switched back on without explanation after the sheriff had disabled it. Mountain View discovered a camera quietly set to nationwide sharing without the department's knowledge. Oxnard suspended its cameras outright. A class action filed in federal court this February alleges that the company's network routed Californians' locations to federal agencies, ICE and Border Patrol among them, on a mass scale, and San Francisco's own audit conceded improper access by outside agencies.10 The details are still being fought over in court, and they should be. The structure is not in dispute: a private surveillance network, mounted on public streets, with valves the public cannot see, opening toward the agencies our laws were written to keep out.
Los Angeles joined the reckoning this month. The Los Angeles Police Department never owned the Flock cameras on our streets; homeowners' associations, developers, and neighborhood groups bought the hardware and handed the police the feed. Days ago, rather than renew on those terms, LAPD let its three-year agreement with the company lapse, demanding penalties in any future contract if data reaches agencies like ICE, while at City Hall a motion from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado would bar new Flock agreements and directs the department to plan for removing the devices outright.11 But notice what the lapse did not do. The cameras are private property, and no one can say whether they have stopped recording. The city canceled its subscription. The street's data did not come back.
That is what hangs over an immigrant neighborhood like mine. The camera on my block is not a hypothetical. It is border infrastructure in Los Angeles. My neighbors’ hammers start to look less like vandalism and more like foreign policy.
The land
The last fence is the largest, because what it encloses is governance itself.
In Solano County, at the northeastern edge of the Bay Area, a company backed by some of the wealthiest investors in Silicon Valley spent years quietly buying farmland, tens of thousands of acres of it, and then announced a plan, California Forever, to build a brand-new city of as many as 400,000 people. In 2024, facing likely defeat at the polls, the company withdrew its ballot measure rather than let Solano County’s voters rule on it. It did not withdraw the plan. It rerouted, seeking annexation of roughly 22,000 acres through Suisun City, a town of fewer than thirty thousand residents that formally accepted the application in October 2025, with an environmental review underway this spring and a county commission still to clear.12 This is not, strictly speaking, an escape from democratic process. It is something more instructive: a search for the thinnest available democratic surface, the smallest electorate, the fewest hands on the levers, consistent with getting the fief entitled.
Some will say, and not foolishly, that California is in a housing catastrophe and here is someone proposing to build homes at scale, so the burden should fall on the objectors. The catastrophe is real. I have spent enough hours fighting for housing in Los Angeles to have no patience for a left that treats every crane as an enemy. But the question California Forever answers is not whether a city gets built. It is who the city answers to once it exists. A metropolis conceived by an investment vehicle, master-planned for its shareholders, with the ground rent flowing upward forever, is not a solution to the housing crisis. It is the fief made literal, with a general plan.
It would be comforting to file the ideology behind all this under internet eccentricity, one blogger's monarchism, safely fringe. The record no longer permits it. Yarvin attended the 2025 inaugural festivities as, in one report's description, an informal guest of honor, credited with enormous influence on the governing right. The sitting vice president cites him. Marc Andreessen, who calls him a friend, spent the transition recruiting personnel for the administration, and the program Yarvin spent two decades writing, he called it RAGE, retire all government employees, a hard reboot of the state, has been running through the federal workforce ever since: tens of thousands fired in the first year, thousands more stripped of civil-service protection this June so they can be dismissed at will.13 The lord's exit from democracy is no longer a thought experiment. It has a lobby, and for a stretch it had a desk in Washington.
The two exits meet on that Solano County dirt. The engineered exit of users into fiefs built the fortunes; the ideological exit of the fortunate from democracy now spends them. What gets purchased, if we let it, is the thing the fence was always for.
The answer to exit
If the diagnosis is exit, the cure cannot be nostalgia. The old settlement that Yarvin caricatures does not need defending so much as surpassing, and Varoufakis is honest about why: the road to this new serfdom was paved not because our governments were too powerful but because they were too weak, too weak to stop the cloud capital they themselves had birthed and bankrolled from taking over.14 More weakness will not save us. Neither will oversight by itself; an audited fief is still a fief. The test for any reform worth the organizing is whether it takes something back out of the fence, back out of commodity relations entirely, the way the beach and the library already are.
Los Angeles is unusually equipped for that test.
Take compute. Because the City of Los Angeles owns its utility, it holds the one switch the datacenter barons cannot route around: nothing runs without water and power, and ours are not for sale, only for public decision. The floor is conditions, real ones, on any facility that wants a connection. The ceiling is better: public compute, a municipally owned pool of computation allocated the way we allocate library hours, pointed at transit that arrives, at climate models for the neighborhoods that flood, at the unglamorous machinery of public services. If computation is the new land, then some of the land must be commons.
Take the street. Data generated in public space should be held in public trust, governed by the residents who generate it, and never licensed to anyone; and the corporate-owned surveillance grid, along with the black-box prediction software sold alongside it, should be off our streets outright. The honest objection arrives immediately: does public data not simply build the same panopticon under a friendlier flag? It can, which is why the governance is not decoration. Resident commissions, sunset clauses, a trust with teeth. A commons without democratic control is just a fief with better branding, and the whole point is to stop building fiefs.
Take the land. The answer to a billionaire’s city is a public one: the transfer-tax dollars Los Angeles voters already approved put behind a public developer building homes that never touch the speculative market and never leave it, the model Vienna has run for a century. If they can conjure a city for shareholders, we can build one for residents. The generative power is not theirs alone.
And take the vote itself, because every reform above dies without it. The deepest answer to a movement whose whole program is the exit of the powerful from democracy is to make the democracy worth staying in and impossible to buy out of: a City Council large enough that a member actually knows your block, ranked-choice ballots, a Public Advocate with subpoena power and no one to answer to but the public. I have spent enough time inside the City of Los Angeles charter reform fight to tell you exactly how these proposals die: not with a no but with a referral, a committee, a later. Which is why the voter initiative by petition matters more than any hearing. It is the one lever the gatekeepers do not hold. They can wait us out of a committee room. They cannot wait us out of the electorate.
None of this is small, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the scale of it is the point, and Varoufakis states the stakes in a single sentence: to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively.15 The serfs who tore down enclosure fences in the sixteenth century were not vandals. They were voters before the franchise existed, casting the only ballot available. My neighbors, hammers and paintbrushes in hand, are casting it still, and the contract keeps overruling them, one repair crew at a time, telling them with every fresh camera that the fence outranks the sidewalk.
The task is to move that argument from the telephone pole to the charter, from refusal to rule. A city that fixes the sidewalk first is not a utopia. It is only a city that remembers who it belongs to. That city is available to us. The fence goes up for exactly as long as we allow it.
First Amended Class Action Complaint, Javorsky v. Flock Group, Inc., d/b/a Flock Safety, No. 4:26-cv-02382-HSG (N.D. Cal., Oakland Div., filed Apr. 3, 2026), alleging that the company's automated license-plate reader network permitted out-of-state and federal agencies access to Californians' location records in violation of state privacy law. Plaintiffs' counsel include Gibbs Mura, Milberg, Pearson Warshaw, and Hausfeld.
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (London: The Bodley Head, 2023), 29.
Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 90-91.
Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 133.
For a secondary analysis of Yarvin's neoreactionary program and the "Cathedral" concept, see "What We Must Understand About the Dark Enlightenment Movement," TIME, March 11, 2026.
Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 87.
California Senate Bill 57 (Padilla, Chapter 647, Statutes of 2025) was enacted after amendments reduced it from a ratepayer-protection mandate to a California Public Utilities Commission impact study due January 1, 2027. Senate Bill 886 (Padilla), the California Technology Innovation and Ratepayer Protection Act, passed the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee 12-4 in March 2026 and the full Senate 27-8 on May 26, 2026, moving to the Assembly. See the reporting of CalMatters (December 2025) and inewsource (March 2026), and the author's office announcements.
Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 170-171.
The concept originates with Aimé Césaire, who described colonial violence returning to strike the metropole, un formidable choc en retour, in Discourse on Colonialism (1950; trans. Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Jean-Paul Sartre carried the image into his preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; trans. Constance Farrington, New York: Grove Press, 1963), calling it "the moment of the boomerang," available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/1961/preface.htm.
On the Ventura County audit finding the "national lookup" feature reactivated without explanation, see CBS Los Angeles, February 2026; on the Mountain View disclosure and the Oxnard suspension, see contemporaneous Bay Area and Ventura County reporting, February 2026; on the San Francisco Police Department audit released June 17, 2026, which acknowledged roughly 300 improper queries by out-of-state and federal agencies over about a year while finding no nexus to immigration enforcement, see CBS San Francisco, June 18, 2026. California's restrictions on ALPR data sharing are codified at Civil Code section 1798.90.55; the sanctuary statute is the California Values Act, SB 54 (2017).
On the Los Angeles Police Department allowing its three-year Flock Safety agreement to lapse in July 2026, its demand for contractual penalties should data reach noncompliant agencies, the private ownership of the cameras by homeowners' associations and other groups, and the uncertainty over whether the cameras continue recording, see ABC7 Los Angeles and FOX 11 Los Angeles, July 10-11, 2026. On the motion by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado to bar new Flock agreements and direct a plan for removing existing devices, see the Council District 14 announcement, May 2026.
On California Forever's withdrawal of its Solano County ballot measure in July 2024, see KQED, July 2024; on the annexation application accepted by Suisun City in October 2025, the approximately 22,000 acres at issue, and the environmental review underway in spring 2026, see Bay City News, March 21, 2026, and subsequent regional reporting.
On Yarvin's presence at the January 2025 inaugural festivities as an "informal guest of honor" and his influence on the governing right, see Politico, January 2025; on Andreessen's recruiting role in the transition, see The Washington Post, January 13, 2025; on Yarvin's "RAGE" program and "hard reboot," and DOGE's operationalization of them, see "What We Must Understand About the Dark Enlightenment Movement," TIME, March 11, 2026; on the June 2026 Schedule Policy/Career reclassifications stripping roughly 8,000 career employees of civil-service protections, see Drew Friedman, "Federal employees face reality of Schedule Policy/Career," Federal News Network, July 6, 2026.
Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 178.
Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 217.