Facial recognition is just one of the tools of todays hyper-surveillance systems. In principle it's one of the tools we should all be strictly against to protect our freedom and privacy. But when I read stories of how these systems are being used to identify those people storming the congress or how they have been used to track down child abusers and kidnapped people it's hard to be all against them.
QAnon was based on conspiracies. Playing peoples inclinations towards mysteries and need to feeling of belonging. But what if this all was just the shallow coverup of a much deeper conspiracy. The long game that was meant to turn our minds more receptive towards such surveillance systems and other means to control our lives. Or maybe I'm just falling into the same apophenia (the tendency to see connections in unrelated things).
Is it worth having this technology for it's benefits? Do those benefits offset the horrors like what it has brought upon the Uighurs or Hong Kong protesters? Where do we draw the line, and who's gonna enforce that. How can companies like Alibaba and Huawei use such things as selling points of their technology. Or how can we trust Clearview AI with our privacy when their data have been breached already in the past.
It's a paradoxical choice but the real irony lies in the fact that the surveillance state is a product of the same right wing politics that drive people to disregard recommendations to use face masks. Even so far so that they try a coup without covering their faces in a spite and making it trivial for the system to pick them up from their self documented journey up to the hill.