Mobbing and tiny stories of… drone stalking?

The last months of mobbing have been… well, should I say, “informative”? It’s clear that mobbing has much in common with many of the crimes that men orchestrate against women, beginning with the choice of women as preferred victims and extending to the tactics used to achieve their criminal ends.

The thing is that, end-to-end, mobbing tells us more about those who mob than it does about their victims. Mobbers mob women not only to use “economic coercion” (as Google AI referred to it) to establish and ensure dominance over women both socially and economically, but to mend their narcissistic wounds. With the displacement of military strategy and technical superiority onto the block, with their sneak attacks, traps, and the determined desire to shame, mobbers reveal their own profound lack and their disempowerment in the face of a masculinity they cannot attain. Trapped in false constructs of masculinity and overtaken by their own personality defects, they blame those they see as weaker or “less than” themselves. They survive by blaming women. To compensate for their lack, they must put women in their place.

In the last months, the outcome of conversations with AI was real-world terminology like “conductive coupling,” “structure-borne sound,” and “economic coercion.” This terminology can lead a mobbing victim to the kind of response that is necessary to defend herself as well as to the recognition and prosecution of this serious crime that digitally imprisons its victims and probably occurs much more than we know. And even as I dampened the in-home harassment by putting contact microphones in place, even as I made expenditures to support the installation and monitoring of power quality on my electric system, the mobbers doubled down in their bid to take my assets, to take my home. In their attempt to finally shame me out of my home, they ensure I know they are tracking me in my home around the clock, in my bathroom and in my bed. The Albany block coordinator—supported by the City of Albany and in the past an elected official—stages  conversations they transmit using their own radios and IoT onto the structural elements of and any radios enabled in my home. “Give me a break,” they bully, as though they’ve nothing of interest in their own lives and are so bereft of ethics that they must read their bibles to learn. “What do we have to do to get her out!?”

“Gossip is the devil’s radio,” said George Harrison. I’ve cited it here before and it is true in this town of Albany, California that the same lot who bully their neighbors in their beds want to sell you as “family friendly”—if you have the dollars for a cash sale. They trudge by again and again, carrying radios blaring the radio of the religious right.  “Look at her!” they cry again and again, to make sure I feel watched as I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, as I wash my body in my shower, and as I try to sleep in bed. “Look at her!” they cry, using technology to see inside my home and then threatening to report me to the police for daring to do what people do in the privacy of their homes. They seem to think this is a quick way to run people off. They expected this to work. It does not work on me.

It is difficult to believe that such things would even be attempted in this day and age. I can only conclude that there must be a complete disconnect between the thinking of these criminal stalkers and more than one of their victims. Be advised, those who take up shame as a tactic in committing crime and especially those who come from out of state, perhaps from places like Texas and Idaho, and believe that with a little shaming women will hand over the titles to their homes, before you attempt to leverage the emotions of women as your victimize them, make sure shame means the same thing to them as it does to you. I studied the Stasi and McCarthyism in the course of getting a degree in American History. I grew up in the Bay Area knowing refugees of war and survivors of the Holocaust. I attended UC Berkeley during a time when “coming out” became crucial to gay identities and right-wing politicians spoke of AIDS as though it was punishment for sin. Here in the Bay Area, I grew up with the awareness that, “The personal is political.” Perhaps it’s because I grew up here in the Bay Area or because of my studies in history that I have lived in this situation with the conviction that no one should yield to those who attempt to smear or shame them—no one but the shamers, anyway. Given the political times, the sentiment remains valid.

It’s clear that these criminals have been powerfully oppressed by shame. But they already chose the wrong victim and this is apparently all they know how to do. “She just lifted up her leg,” says one of the morning minders. “She hasn’t got her shirt on. Don’t look yet!” “My God! She threw off the covers!” Usually it’s the functional, “She moved,” as they alert one another to my movements, perhaps to more seamlessly harass me as I continue to live my life in my home. And though I haven’t yet written much about it, it became clear a few months back when one of the mobbers announced that the floor was “vibrating,” that they might be using accelerometers or to have found a way to detect vibrations across short distances—perhaps leveraging piping or concrete (Coming soon: “The floor is vibrating!” and other mobbing accelerations). A few weeks back, when there seems to have been a change of personnel and tactics, there was a night when, in bed, I heard one mobber tell another to “keep” something “on my face” and to let him (if the male voice accompanied a male embodiment) know whenever I moved. They make sure that I know that somehow, some way, they do see inside my house, past the heavy velvet drapes and beyond the line of sight that the windows would permit. All of this makes me reflect on the times I’ve run across people writing on the web about how it seems like their neighbors know everything they do. People write about these things because most of us believe that our homes are private. We are reluctant to believe that our “neighbors” would not only victimize us in this scummy way but would turn out—surprise! surprise!—to be “investors” with an unbelievably trashy “business plan.”

I’ve written about drones in some earlier blogs (Get off the phone! We might have a drone! and Is it or isn’t it infrasound? Only your mobbers know for sure) and between the feeling of prickly heat on a cheek that could be from infrared or some type of laser, the fact of the easy mobility of the following within the house and the description of body positions that are most likely read from heights, the increased use of a drone to oppress is probably the best possibility for these last weeks. It makes me think of a web page I once saw on how to use a drone to create clandestine surveillance TV. Much of the effect makes me think about a “separation of concerns” in which a drone operator launches and positions the drone from some recreational area while another remotely watches the captive subject from a vehicle or dwelling and relays information about the subject to others or back to the drone operator to assist in keeping “eyes on.” Given the antennas, vents and pipes that mobbers install on their roofs and on the sides of their homes, as well as the kinds of equipment they keep in the back yard, I haven’t been paying much attention to the possibility of a drone as of late, but the experience of the harassment these last weeks makes a drone return as a stronger possibility.

I don’t have time to write more about this today—I’m working on another project. But maybe investigators should do a bit of reconnaissance. With drones flying into planes, you’d think there would be greater awareness of how drones are being used and how to detect and monitor them. It is unconscionable to allow predators to use technology to abuse women in their beds. Those who do this are doing it to me because they believe, perhaps because of their connections to the Albany block coordinator program or to others in the Albany Police or other city departments, they can abuse me out of my assets and get off scot free.

The problem is that those who do this are not going to do it just one time and they’re not doing it to just one woman. The entire “modus operandi” is elaborate, practiced, and clearly well established as a means to punish and strip an isolated individual of her assets. It’s unlikely that others will survive this situation as long as I have. What I’ve done by remaining in this situation to defend my rights provides what may be an unprecedented opportunity to break up this criminal ring. Let them do it to me and—beware—they might just do it to you.