Franz Kafka knew bureaucracy from the inside.

Editor's note: Kafka spent years working at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, processing claims, writing reports, and watching ordinary people get swallowed by systems designed not to help them but to process them. That experience bled directly into his fiction. In The Trial, Josef K. is arrested, prosecuted, and ultimately destroyed by a legal apparatus that never once explains itself. In The Castle, a man tries for an entire novel to gain access to an authority that perpetually recedes from him. Kafka was not writing fantasy. He was writing what he saw every day: institutions that treat human beings as variables to be managed rather than souls to be served. What makes his work so urgently relevant now is that the machinery he described has only grown more ruthlessly efficient and more invisible. Artificial intelligence does not hate you. It does not see you at all. AI sees you as a cold clinically detached data set. Kafka's nightmare was a bureaucracy staffed by indifferent humans; ours is increasingly staffed by systems that cannot even register your humanity as a relevant input. The dehumanization Kafka warned us about has found its ideal form.
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Man Trapped in Dystopian Nightmare Thanks to AI Surveillance Cameras Flagging His Every Move

"All I know is I'm in the system now. And there's really no easy way to get out of the system once you're in it."

By Joe Wilkins | April 29, 2026

A man in Colorado might not have done anything wrong, but that hasn’t stopped the AI surveillance state from casting him into a dystopian "Groundhog Day" of police harassment.

Kyle Dausman, a resident of Cherry Hills Village on Denver's south side, has been trapped in what must feel like a Kafkaesque loop after his truck was flagged by Flock Safety's automatic license plate readers.

Whenever Dausman leaves his home, he told local channel 9News, he's harangued by local cops, who are automatically alerted to the presence of an active vehicle with an outstanding warrant by Flock.

"I continually get pulled over. I can’t really use my truck in any fashion. I believe my safety is at risk," the Colorado man told local reporters. "They zipped out of nowhere and immediately got behind me with the lights flashing."

When 9News spoke to Cherry Hills Village Police, officers confirmed Dausman has done nothing wrong. What's happening, they said, was that the man’s license plate was erroneously connected to a warrant in the Colorado Crime Information Center database.

Flock, the AI-surveillance company whose license plate reading cameras (ALPRs) are overtaking the US, has hundreds of always-on devices in the Denver area alone. Arapahoe County, where Cherry Hills Village is located, has at least 283 active cameras documented on DeFlock, a grassroots tool used for tracking ALPR deployments.

Though it only took police in Cherry Hills a couple stops to realize Dausman was innocent and take him off their alert list, the proliferation of ALPRS in the surrounding area makes it nearly impossible for him to travel anywhere else without getting stopped ad nauseum.

"Everywhere in the state, every time I pass a camera, they get alerts in their car that I'm in the area," Dausman said.

Per 9News, the phantom warrant seems to trace back to a data entry error in a warrant issued out of Gilpin County, Colorado. When Dausman tried to fix the issue by contacting the Gilpin County court system, he hit a wall: officials said he’d need to provide the name of the suspect from the erroneous warrant, which no law enforcement agency would share, because the case was still active.

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The Technate Was Always Coming.

Brazil anyone?