Surveillance technology in 2026 has achieved a remarkable trifecta: it can’t catch people who openly admit to crimes, it relentlessly persecutes people who’ve done nothing wrong, and — in a plot twist nobody saw coming — it’s now being outsourced to possums.
Welcome to Whacky Wednesday.
The Shoplifter Who Won’t Shut Up About It
Let’s start with Jia Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker who recently appeared on a New York Times podcast titled “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” — a question apparently best answered by someone living in a $2.2 million Brooklyn townhouse.
Tolentino told the podcast that she shoplifts from Whole Foods. Not out of necessity — she’s a bestselling author praised by New Yorker editor David Remnick as her generation’s Joan Didion. She does it because she considers it morally defensible.
“I think that stealing from a big box store… [is not] very significant as a moral wrong,” Tolentino explained, framing her thievery as a form of protest against corporate greed. She also mentioned she’d “cheer on” anyone who stole from The Louvre, which is the kind of statement that makes you wonder if she’s workshopping material for a future essay titled “Why I Deserve Everything.”
When the Daily Mail showed up at her door, Tolentino was shocked — shocked — that her public confession might attract public attention. “I can’t believe you came to my f***ing house!” she yelped.
Turns out the AI surveillance absurdity doesn’t extend to tracking wealthy writers who openly confess to crimes on major media platforms. The cameras are too busy elsewhere.
The Man Who Can’t Drive His Own Truck
Kyle Dausman of Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, has done nothing wrong. Police confirm this. The courts confirm this. Dausman himself has never been charged with anything.
And yet, every time he drives his truck, he gets pulled over.
The culprit: Flock Safety’s automatic license plate readers, which have blanketed the Denver area with hundreds of always-on cameras. Dausman’s truck was erroneously linked to an active warrant in the Colorado Crime Information Center database — a data entry error from Gilpin County that nobody seems able to fix.
“Everywhere in the state, every time I pass a camera, they get alerts in their car that I’m in the area,” Dausman told 9News.
Cherry Hills Village police took him off their alert list after a couple of stops. But Arapahoe County alone has 283 documented Flock cameras, and every one of them flags Dausman’s truck as a vehicle of interest. He’s trapped in a Kafkaesque loop — a man marked by a phantom warrant he can’t clear because officials won’t tell him the name of the suspect he’s supposedly connected to.
“All I know is I’m in the system now,” Dausman said. “And there’s really no easy way to get out of the system once you’re in it.”
So: a writer who brags about shoplifting on a podcast walks free, while a man who’s committed no crime can’t drive to the grocery store without a police escort. The system works.
The Possums Doing Law Enforcement’s Job
Meanwhile, in the Florida Everglades, wildlife researchers have decided that if you want to catch a Burmese python — an invasive species that’s reduced raccoon populations by 99% and opossum populations by 98% — you need to think like a python.
Or, more accurately, you need to strap GPS collars onto the animals pythons like to eat and wait for the snakes to swallow them whole.
Researchers have fitted possums and raccoons with GPS collars that transmit location data. When an animal stops moving for more than four hours, the collar notifies researchers that it’s probably been killed. Burmese pythons digest slowly, so the collar keeps transmitting from inside the snake’s stomach, leading researchers straight to it.
Once located, the python is euthanized. The collar is cleaned and reused.
It’s a brilliantly pragmatic solution to an ecological disaster — and it raises an uncomfortable question: if we can track pythons by GPS-collaring their prey, why can’t we fix a database error that’s turning an innocent man’s daily commute into a police gauntlet?
When the System Works for No One
Here’s the connective tissue: AI surveillance absurdity thrives in a world where the tools exist, but the accountability doesn’t.
Flock Safety cameras can flag a truck 283 times based on a clerical error, but they can’t distinguish between a real threat and a man trying to drive to work. Tolentino can confess to shoplifting on a major podcast without consequence, while Dausman can’t leave his driveway without triggering an alert. And in Florida, possums are doing the job that millions of dollars in surveillance infrastructure apparently can’t.
The possums, at least, are getting results.
Researchers hope to have 40 GPS-collared possums in the field by summer. Dausman, meanwhile, is still waiting for someone — anyone — to remove the digital scarlet letter from his license plate.
“Once you’re in the Flock system, it’s on you to get out,” Dausman told reporters. “You have to bear any responsibility for making that happen.”
Tolentino, for her part, seems unbothered by the idea that anyone should bear responsibility for anything.
The pythons, one assumes, are just doing what pythons do.