Self-driving cars are the way of the future, I’m told. It’ll be the end of traffic jams. It’s progress. It’s destiny. In a generation or two, driving your own car will be unheard of.
Elon Musk inflamed the far left and many in legacy media, which I realize is a distinction without much difference, by suspending the Twitter accounts of some journos and celebrities who linked to sites that would track the personal movements of Musk and his kids. He relented somewhat, but there are still some bans permanently in place, with shrieks of ‘suppression of speech and expression’ wailing in a chorus from those who didn’t seem to mind that suppression when it was being applied to conservatives.
But a couple weeks ago, the weekend after Thanksgiving, in fact, an application of AI was used in a fairly sinister fashion, and it’s just now being reported. NBC’s New York affiliate tells the story of a mother who accompanied her daughter’s Girl Scout troop on a trip to the Big Apple to see the Christmas Rockettes Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall, only to be singled out while going through security at the venue and told she was not allowed to not only see the show, but to even be on the property.
Kelly Conlon and her daughter came to New York City the weekend after Thanksgiving as part of a Girl Scout field trip to Radio City Music Hall to see the Christmas Spectacular show. But while her daughter, other members of the Girl Scout troop and their mothers got to go enjoy the show, Conlon wasn’t allowed to do so.
That’s because to Madison Square Garden Entertainment, Conlon isn’t just any mom. They had identified and zeroed in on her, as security guards approached her right as he got into the lobby.
“It was pretty simultaneous, I think, to me, going through the metal detector, that I heard over an intercom or loudspeaker,” she told NBC New York. “I heard them say woman with long dark hair and a grey scarf.”
She said she was asked her name and to produce identification.
“I believe they said that our recognition picked you up,” Conlon said.
So what was her grievous offense that tripped the facial recognition software in the security room of Radio City Music Hall? She’s…a lawyer. And not just any lawyer, but a lawyer that works for the firm Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which is a personal injury firm based out of New Jersey with a dozen or so regional offices and dozens of lawyers and paralegals working for them. They’re not the biggest firm in the country to be certain, but they are not a one-attorney shop hanging out a shingle, either. One of the cases the firm has pursued is against a restaurant venue that has since been absorbed by the MSG Entertainment Borg, of which Radio City Music Hall also currently resides.
Ms. Conlon has not and is not currently working on the suit against a completely different division of MSG, nor is she any obvious security risk to go see the Rockettes perform with her daughter’s Girl Scout troop. But facial recognition picked her up, and because of petty vindictiveness inside of MSG, she’s been effectively shadowbanned, as has every recognizable associate in the law firm, from any MSG entertainment venue, apparently forever.
First, let’s dispense with the caveats that reflexively, lawyers aren’t going to get much sympathy for just about anything. In a lot of cases, that’s warranted. In this case, separating a mom from her daughter and her Girl Scout troop and forcing her to stand out on the sidewalk waiting for the show to end seems beyond outrageous. Also, unlike Musk’s fit of pique, whether one agrees or disagrees with him banning journos for his definition of cause, Twitter is currently a privately-held company. Musk may once again take Twitter public once he’s tweaked it the way he sees fit, but for now, it’s his bird, so he can give the bird to, or take it away from anyone he wishes. MSG Entertainment, however, is a publicly-traded company, and denying a valid ticketholder out of sheer vindication doesn’t seem too legal to me.
Recent court holdings in similar instances of blackballing have indicated that Ms. Conlon has a case to make. She’s currently bringing a suit under the umbrella of the New York State Liquor Authority, which requires the venue to admit ticketed members of the public unless they can show they were disruptive or presented an immediate security threat, of which Conlon was neither.
But the larger point to make here is where does this all end? I was just at a L.A. Kings game at Crypto.com Arena to watch my visiting Ducks play. The crowd, the P.A. announcers, the security guards, fans, even the organist was fairly hostile to the Ducks. I get that. Last year, visiting the restroom in the arena for the same road game, called the Freeway Faceoff, was met with a little plastic duck placed in the well of the urinal to assist you with your aim. It’s crosstown rivalry stuff. It was rude, the Ducks got hammered, and we were shamed out of the arena once it was over. But imagine a world where Ducks fans were not allowed even inside the venue.
Take it step further. What if facial recognition at a Chicks concert, who aren’t the biggest fans of Republicans in the world, identified you coming in as a Republican and denied you access? What’s the difference between that and what MSG did to Ms. Conlon? Why just apply it to pettiness over a lawsuit that had nothing to do with the transaction at hand? If Ms. Conlon happened to be Black or transgender, would the venue still have been able to deny her the ability to use her ticket to watch the Rockettes? And would the media have been as meh about the story if she were deeply ensconced in a preferred identity group?
If we’re in an era where the personal information of the 16-year old minor son of the former President is voted on by the Democratic majority on the Ways and Means Committee in the House of Representatives to be released publicly, and publicly-traded companies are permitted to deny access to anyone for any reason, we really are entering a new world that doesn’t appear to be very promising indeed.
Don’t expect the Congress in the next two years to address this with any meaningful regulation. First, I’m not sure they’re competent in the first place. Second, with the two houses being split in control, neither party seems too willing to put down the spear of AI that’s being used to gore the other party’s ox. The courts are going to have to get involved in this and send a message. Either we are going to be a society where freedom and individual liberty means something, and that we’re all able to do the same things as any other American if we play by the rules, or we’re already several chapters into the real-life dramatization of 1984.
