If you hold a gun and I hold a gun, we talk about the law.
If you hold a knife and I hold a knife, we talk about rules.
If we come empty-handed, we talk as equals.
But if you hold a gun and I hold nothing —
there is no conversation.
Truth isn't neutral, and it isn't free-floating. It's produced — by whoever owns the instruments that measure the world. Whoever holds those instruments decides what counts as real. That's power.
"Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its régime of truth… the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true." — Michel Foucault, Truth and Power
Right now a handful of institutions are "charged with saying what counts as true" about the city. The state runs the cameras. Palantir and its cousins run the analysis. Real-estate and traffic and policing "facts" get produced inside rooms you'll never enter, then handed down to you as objective. The instrument is the power. Own the instrument, own the truth.
Bilbo Data breaks that monopoly. Same class of instrument — a full Palantir-style eye on the streets — pointed at the same city, running the same computer vision. The only difference is who holds it: everyone. The dataset is open, the code is open, the numbers are public the second they exist. Not a gentler tool. Not a watered-down one. The real thing, taken out of the private room and put in the street.
This isn't about changing what's in anyone's head. It's Foucault's actual point — the fight isn't over opinions, it's over the régime that produces truth in the first place. Who gets to measure. Who gets to count. Who gets believed. Bilbo Data is a small crack in that régime: a public instrument for producing public truth about a public city.
Bilbo Data measures the streets of New York City — every vehicle and every person moving through the intersections, minute by minute, and how that rises and falls across the day. It starts with a cluster of cameras and scales toward every public traffic camera in the city (~900+). One New Yorker's area of operation is NYC, so NYC is where it begins.
Public NYC DOT traffic cameras — the city's own low-resolution (352×240) traffic stills, already published for public use. Nothing here is hacked, scraped from private systems, or hidden. It's the city's own eyes, read back to the people who paid for them.
A scheduled cloud job does the sampling and counting; the results are stored as an open dataset and this page reads from it directly. No servers to keep on, no cost, no gatekeeper. Camera imagery isn't rebroadcast — only the counts derived from it. The data is the point, and the data is yours.
It's named Bilbo Data because my girlfriend's dog is named Bilbo — and we're keeping the LOTR theme going. A small creature, no one's idea of a hero, who ends up carrying something the powerful would rather keep for themselves. Made anonymously, in New York.
Open-access street intelligence · NYC · back to live dashboard →