“The most effective way to diffuse collective action — and the sweeping, systemic changes it can spark — has always been to turn those who are suffering against one another,” Petersen writes. That is also a concise way of explaining what Ring cameras accomplish: They reject the possibility of collective action and embed “every person for themselves” ​ With social media, the reasonable desires for social recognition and tailored information metastasized into addictive use patterns and “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” ​ while the app can continually foreground a sense of the world is fundamentally dangerous.