Accountability
I was on my way to a friend’s house recently. Rounding a slow, blind corner at approximately the speed limit on a summer’s afternoon, a grocery store parking lot to my left. Up ahead were two vehicles waiting to exit their respective parking lots, both of whom saw me trundling up the road at speed. One of them, a Toyota SUV of some variety, decided to pull out just as I was too close to stop but too slow to pass. I wailed on my horn to get them to yield to my right of way, only to get run nearly into the right curb as they continued driving without a care in the world. Narrowly, I passed them in my much smaller vehicle without any damage.
I slammed on my brakes once I was safe, looking at the gentleman behind me who almost t-boned the driver side of my car.
They flipped me off and honked their horn.
The more I chew on the problems facing modern society, the more a singular word seemingly sits at the root cause of so many, many ills: accountability. It feels like society gave up entirely on the concept except when physical violence is involved, and even then it’s a conditional sort of justice rather than blindly applied to all. Wrongdoing is never punished, the mistaken are never held accountable, and bad actions end up finding reward as a result.
Accountability isn’t a dirty word, but the foundation of the social contract: bad actions and bad actors must be punished accordingly, to disincentivize those behaviors by other members of society. Failing to hold people accountable is what enables a lawless society.
There’s a major freeway junction near where I live, one I transit about a dozen times a week. A clover leaf, complete with the tiny merging areas and frequent traffic jams. For two miles, there’s signage detailing the impending traffic pattern: the right lane only exits eastbound, the second lane has an immediate merging zone with the eastbound traffic heading north where northbound traffic can exit to the west, and the other lanes clearly have no exit capabilities.
For two miles, traffic is often backed up to a standstill in that second lane waiting to merge. This is because drivers will skip the queue until the last possible moment, then shove their way in aggressively and without right of way. One such driver - a local MSP van - tried shoving me into the concrete barrier in order to get in ahead of me, rocketing into a standstill from ~70mph. My tires screeched, my head jerked sharply, my dashcam saved the recording as a potential collision event as my horn screamed futilely at the aggressive van deliberately trying to cause an accident rather than wait patiently like the rest of us.
The driver flipped me off and mocked me in his side mirror.
Accountability - or a lack thereof - seemingly sits at the root of a great many crises, both great and small alike.
Take the American housing shortage, intentionally engineered over half a century by homeowners who refused to see their property values go anywhere but up, and creating the zoning ordinances, financing schemes, HOA covenants, city bylaws, and state taxation caps to ensure they would achieve maximum return on investment at the expense of everyone who came after them. Now that homelessness is skyrocketing, housing is grossly unaffordable, and the stock has deteriorated into rotting garbage structures, there should be multiple ways of holding these people accountable for their actions: higher property taxes without caps, for instance, or forcing lighter-zoned areas near transit to build more housing, resident or council wishes be damned.
No accountability to be had whatsoever.
I live in a building with what I affectionately call a magical garbage hole: you put bagged garbage inside the door, it falls down a chute, and disappears from your sight forever. No dumpster to hike to, no rain to deal with, and it keeps pests down.
For nearly two years, a tenant has been leaving unbagged garbage on the floor of the room. The landlord has failed or refused to investigate it or hold the tenant accountable beyond bland emails to the mailing list.
The garbage room is now filled with bugs and mice.
My rent went up again this year to cover the costs of pest control.
If I had to take a guess at when this accountability crisis began in earnest, I think I’d peg Arthur Andersen’s downfall as the spark that set off the resultant explosion. Here is a corporate failure where everything went right, and that scared the living piss out of people. Thousands lost their jobs and suffered reputational tarnish not because they did something bad, but because they supported an employer who did. They failed to hold each other accountable, especially their bosses and partners, and the end result was the destruction of their credibility and thus, their firm.
The system worked, because we’re all supposed to hold each other accountable regardless of class or rank in an organization of any size. The Janitor must be just as accountable as the Boardroom, and everyone in between. When leadership violated that trust, that was criminal; when their workers who knew leadership was violating said trust didn’t blow the whistle, that was when the institution deserved its destructive fate.
And yet, frightened by the prospect they too may face accountability someday, SCOTUS unanimously reversed the verdict. It was too late to save the company, but it sent an unambiguous signal to the masses: accountability will not be tolerated.
The American relationship with law enforcement has always been tumultuous, particularly for minorities. Following several high-profile killings of African Americans by police, a significant contingent of citizens all over the world began protesting police brutality and the lack of accountability of police forces by the citizenry.
The demands, ultimately, were simple: violence as an absolute last resort instead of first choice, and accountability for police officers who break the law, harm citizens, or kill suspects. While wrapped in racial justice overtones, those remained the key grievances of the populace, and they were incredibly fair and reasonable.
Law enforcement responded by murdering more civilians, abducting them off streets, deploying mass surveillance systems without oversight or consent, and generally behaving like petulant toddlers told they couldn’t have a Hot Wheels car from the grocery store.
Repeated attempts to hold them accountable have been blocked by SCOTUS, granting law enforcement qualified immunity - that is, a legal inability to hold them accountable for misdeeds carried out in the course of their duties, however vague or inappropriate they may be.
To be clear, nobody likes being held accountable for their actions. We all generally want the freedom to fuck around, but without the worry of having to find out.
The problem isn’t that we don’t want to be held accountable for our deeds, so much as we seemingly demand everyone else accept the consequences for them without recourse. Fucked up the housing market? Let’s saddle our kids with fifty year mortgages financed by Bitcoin. Too much wealth inequality? Cut services for the poor so we can cut taxes for the rich. Workers getting too uppity with unions and workplace reforms? Fire them in the name of AI. Citizenry growing aggravated by mass surveillance pogroms? Brand them as terrorists. Destroyed the global biosphere with fossil fuels? Murder environmental protestors and deny the science.
This lack of accountability at the topmost echelons of society ends up rotting down into the foundations as well. When we fail to bar alleged pedophiles and convicted felons from political office, we tacitly approve their actions for everyone else. When both political parties refuse to hold their own members accountable for misdeeds, we expressly permit worse activities further down the societal power structure. When our leaders failed to excommunicate and exile those vile, despicable monsters who associated with Jeffrey Epstein, they openly approved the reprehensible acts they carried out.
This refusal of accountability by the elite is what enables violence among the working classes against one another, a distraction that allows the powerful to continue business as usual.
I had just gotten a dash camera for my car when I was front-ended by a BMW on a main city street. One-way traffic at rush hour was being gummed up by rideshare drivers stopping in very clearly marked “NO STOPPING ANYTIME” zones, waiting for riders on the clear other side of the park and blocking traffic. This BMW was one such driver, and so angry were they at my horn-honking that they thrust open their driver door, stormed out toward my vehicle…and left their car in reverse, hitting my bumper.
They were livid. ”You need to show some patience!“ Lots of yelling, screaming, anger and rage at me for daring to hold them accountable to a sign across from City Hall during rush hour, one that very clearly placed them in the wrong. Threats of cops, of lawsuits, of vengeance ensued.
I waited for him to tire himself out, then casually pointed to my dash camera. His tone reversed completely, becoming apologetic and desperate to escape blame. He wanted to flee, to escape accountability for his own misdeeds. I held firm, asking him to examine his car, and then mine, verbally stating any damage he saw on either vehicle. I confirmed his statements of no damage (because there was none, thankfully) for the dashcam to record, walking around the entirety of both bumpers before finally getting him to apologize, acknowledge he was in the wrong, and promising not to do it again - all on camera.
I held him accountable in that moment, and made it clear that his selfish deeds would have consequences if he engaged in them again. Realizing the risk vastly outweighed the reward, he left the scene a sweaty mess of anxiety and stress, but a more careful driver as a result.
I still have that video, a decade later.
Accountability sucks, but it’s necessary for society to function at scale. We must hold each other accountable equally regardless of status or position, otherwise accountability becomes meaningless. That’s not to say we need a return to broken windows policing, or eye-for-an-eye justice of yore. We don’t need to inflict harm disproportionate to the crime, only enough that it publicly discourages others from engaging in that behavior themselves.
A good place to start, at least in my mind, is traffic enforcement. With the glut of dash cameras out there today, surely we can enable citizens to submit footage of reckless, aggressive, and dangerous driving to cities for the purpose of fining drivers. We could encourage this sort of civic participation through reward-sharing programs, giving citizens a 50% split of the fines collected by their footage. It would require some safeguards to ensure it’s not abused, obviously: no automated submissions, no fixed cameras (in-vehicle cameras only), affidavits from citizens submitting them that the footage is accurate and a willingness to testify under penalty of law, cameras that security-stamp footage to prevent tampering, that sort of thing. A simple fix that brings civic engagement up in a healthy, mindful way without devolving into a warrantless surveillance state.
An even better place to start, if citizen movements are any indication, is government reforms around immunity. Nobody in the government - not even the President of the United States of America - should have any form of immunity from criminal charges, ever. Civil immunity might be fine for matters related to verbal or written speech, but criminal immunity shouldn’t be available to anyone, ever. The decision of whether to pursue criminal charges belongs to the people, not politicians or elites; we have jury nullification for a reason, after all. For all the political whinging about the chaos that’d erupt if POTUS or Congressional members were held accountable for every little thing they did in office, I for one like to imagine how straight-laced, how professional, how principled they might be if the threat of consequences and prison time for crimes were a real threat. If impeachment of Presidents from any party fails to function effectively, then clearly it is not an effective tool of punishment and must be replaced.
If there’s one thing I take away from the political clime of today, it’s an increasing frustration between those who demand fair and equal accountability for all, and those who demand accountability for everyone but themselves.
I know which side I find myself on.
I fucked up recently.
A staffer at my job reported they’d fallen for one of those fake Cloudflare phishing campaigns and had executed the command on their Windows machine. I went into red alert mode, seizing their machine for a forensic investigation and having them rotate all their passwords, setup better MFA methods, the works. With the newness of my tenure however, I lacked the familiarity with the tool stack and its configuration that I had inherited from predecessors. I missed that Crowdstrike had blocked the action for two days, so concerned was I with mitigating damage and kicking out an attacker that never made it inside.
When I finally realized my error, the staffer had already spent several days fretting that they’d compromised the business, had to move onto a new Mac, had to learn all new ways of working because I had overreacted.
So I brought them and my boss into the room, and explained my findings. I fucked up, Crowdstrike acted correctly, and I was too tunnel-visioned to notice. I apologized for the undue stress, for forcing the staffer onto new machines arbitrarily, and generally wasting time.
They both looked at me, puzzled. “Why are you apologizing for doing your job?”
“Because honesty and transparency is important to me, especially when I make a mistake. If I don’t hold myself accountable, how can I expect the same from our colleagues?”
Nothing else came of it other than sighs of relief, reassurances that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and gratuity for taking it so seriously from the get-go rather than acting complacent.
I held myself accountable, and they rewarded that.
No system of accountability will be perfect. Every system can and will be exploited for personal gain. There’s no solution to these problems that is simple, easy, and fast, because this is a problem that is decades in the making and intrinsic to society in general.
Over any time scale, systems that fail to adapt to exploitation will become maximally exploited.
Rather, my proposal is that we acknowledge the harms of the present and begin holding people accountable again, starting with crimes of outsized harm or significant risk. Start by prosecuting shareholders and executives of fossil fuel companies, as well as ticketing and seizing licenses from aggressive drivers. Both cause immense harm, both create friction that slows development, both need to be prosecuted to the widest degree possible to make an unequivocal statement that everyone is accountable.
Anything less does not fix a damn thing, only increase the rate of rot.
A resident on the ground floor of my apartment complex hung up a cloud-connected security camera outside their apartment door in a private common area of the building. Disgusted at this invasion of my and my neighbor’s privacy, I would obscure its vision of me as I walked by, generally by holding a bag or my hand close to - but never touching - its face.
One day, the neighbor confronted me. She lobbied false accusations at me, and then used my reasonable fear of the police as a threat of harm against me. She said that if I blocked its sight of me again, she’d get a restraining order against me and call the cops, “since you’re so scared of being seen”. She was aggressive, threatening, and physically got in my personal space to inflict maximum fear of reprisal against me.
I complained to the landlord, who refused to respond beyond saying they were permitting residents to install security cameras in the common hallways provided they weren’t pointed at doors or units.
Since then the proliferation has increased. I am surveilled in my garage by a neighbor’s Tesla, loudly announcing its Sentry mode every time I move near my own vehicle. A Flock camera sits outside the sole entrance and exit to my neighborhood, logging every movement we make. I have to take a deliberate pathway through our own building to avoid the increasing number of private surveillance cameras installed by neighbors in private hallways of a secured building without the consent of others.
I do what I can in this situation of hostility.
I hide my face, I call them out, and I flip them off.
In my own way, I hold them accountable.