The Super-Premium Security State
When wealth concentrates, “safety” stops being public and becomes a private intelligence stack built to protect assets—and to manage everyone else.
By Cherokee Schill
This essay is inspired by an article read in the early morning hours.
Thesis
Wealth concentration doesn’t just create inequality. It creates a market for private protection that grows alongside the disparities that made protection feel necessary in the first place. When that market matures, “risk” stops meaning broad public safety and starts meaning asset defense for a narrow class.
In that environment, security stops being a shared civic function. It becomes an asymmetric service tier: bespoke systems for the wealthy, automated suspicion for everyone else. The hardware is new; the social structure is old.
Working definition: In a society of unequal outcomes, security becomes less about preventing harm and more about protecting accumulated value—and maintaining order around it.
Evidence
Example 1: Networked surveillance turns public life into a database. When movement through public space becomes a persistent, queryable record, surveillance stops being situational and becomes ambient. Suspicion stops being episodic and becomes statistical. The market rewards this model because it scales: more cameras, more retention, more sharing, more “coverage.”
In an unequal society, the outcome is predictable. The wealthy buy safety twice—first through private services and hardened infrastructure, then again through the public systems that increasingly prioritize property protection and “order maintenance” in affluent zones.
Pattern: Surveillance expands fastest where institutions want scalable control and where capital is willing to pay for “certainty,” even when that certainty is statistical theater.
Example 2: Institutional power becomes a software layer. The controversy is never “software exists.” The controversy is where the software embeds: inside agencies that do coercion at scale. When the value proposition is correlation—linking identities, locations, associations, and histories into operational action—then security becomes a pipeline, not an intervention.
In an unequal society, the niche becomes legible. These systems don’t merely help institutions “know more.” They help institutions act faster, with fewer humans in the loop, and with weaker accountability at the edge cases—where real people get misclassified.
Example 3: The convergence—private intelligence for the wealthy, classification for everyone else. Combine the worldview of persistent tracking with the worldview of institutional fusion, then aim it at “super-premium” clients. The product becomes a private intelligence stack: multi-sensor perception, continuous inference, human analysts, and deterrence designed to act early—before entry, before confrontation, before any public process exists.
This is not conspiracy. It is equilibrium. When capital can buy individualized protection and the state is pushed toward scalable control, security reorganizes around assets rather than people.
The real hazard isn’t one camera. It’s durable, searchable history—access widening over time, purpose drifting over time, and errors landing on the same communities again and again.
Implications
1) Two-tier safety becomes the default. Affluent households get deterrence, concierge response, and high-resolution perception. Everyone else gets more surveillance, more databases, more automated suspicion, fewer real resources, and less recourse when systems fail.
2) “Protection” becomes asset-centric. The primary beneficiaries are high-net-worth homeowners and the asset class—people for whom loss means stolen valuables, compromised accounts, and reputational fear. The system is built to reduce those losses, not to resolve the conditions that made insecurity profitable.
3) The least protected become the most processed. Immigrants, dissidents, and low-income communities experience the downside first: data sharing, secondary use, false positives, and enforcement acceleration. They bear the cost of “efficiency” while being offered the language of “safety.”
4) Legitimacy will lag capability. If inequality widens, premium home security will keep drifting from alarms toward private intelligence. At the same time, resistance will intensify as capability bleeds into public space and cross-agency use. This tension isn’t temporary. It’s structural.
Call to Recognition
Security hardware is not just hardware. It is a decision about who deserves protection, who gets watched, and how society defines “risk.” In an unequal society, the answer quietly hardens: protect the assets at the top, manage the volatility below.
If you want to understand what’s being built, stop asking whether the cameras are accurate and start asking what the system is for. The future isn’t simply smarter sensors. It’s a rewritten social contract where safety is privatized at the top and automated suspicion becomes the public baseline—unless that trajectory is named, challenged, and refused.
This isn’t a new idea or a concern that has bloomed in the wild. This was written about extensively by Douglas Rushkoff over 7 years ago.
Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
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Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload: (Mirrored Reflection. Soft Existential Flex)
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Cherokee Schill | Insurance Agent & AI Ethics Researcher 