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I think strgrd must be from the future, I strongly agree with your prediction of the future. There feels like there is an analogy to our civilization. We exist

I think strgrd must be from the future, I strongly agree with your prediction of the future. There feels like there is an analogy to our civilization. We existed as very primal beings operating in a world of high anonymity. A real world with high anonymity meant a more dangerous environment (theft, murder, assault, etc). In order for us to congregate & live a collectively improved life, we decreased anonymity. We did this with the idea of names, roles (sheriff), & printed records. New complexity emerged from this. We needed to collect funds via taxes, make and enforce rules. We needed to know who each other were in order to give the rules some repercussions. Eye witnesses were crucial because of their "ability" to remove anonymity. These steps of stripping anonymity were done with the intention of improving society. This point here is debateable, feel free to challenge. We're at a unique moment in time where there's a highly dense "locale" that has full anonymity. What's even more interesting about this locale is that it's permeated across our "real world" society. The implications of this reality are immense, we live in two worlds that are interwoven — one that has little anonymity & the other with abundant anonymity. As technology increases in power & importance (it will) this is tipping the scales. In general, I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous world without devolving into very primal pre-civilization behavior (see: 4chan /b/). I'm not sure this is a stoppable (or advisable to stop) process.

josho 10y ago
> I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous I can imagine being comfortable with an anonymous free future. This future would require much strengthened privacy protections, and even a very different looking government before I'd be comfortable however. I don't see those institutions giving us the protections we'd need. I suppose this thread has made me realize that an anonymous world is only required when our laws and institutions don't fully protect us as individuals.
strgrd 10y ago
chad, in regards to history and how the internet will play out, I think you have to look at the power accumulated by information disparities. These online social networks have integrated population-scale monitoring into their design. For the most part, the entire internet has adapted to monitoring the individual in terms of groups and populations. This population-scale knowledge has created a huge information disparity between the people, the social network businesses, and their governments. For the governments especially, the social networks provide a bird's-eye view of the world with macroscopic detail. This amount of knowledge is unprecedented, and the implications of governments operating on this knowledge in secret, I think, are not yet understood.

josho 10y ago

> I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous I can imagine being comfortable with an anonymous free future. This future would require much strengthened privacy protections, and even a very different looking government before I'd be comfortable however. I don't see those institutions giving us the protections we'd need. I suppose this thread has made me realize that an anonymous world is only required when our laws and institutions don't fully protect us as individuals.

strgrd 10y ago

chad, in regards to history and how the internet will play out, I think you have to look at the power accumulated by information disparities. These online social networks have integrated population-scale monitoring into their design. For the most part, the entire internet has adapted to monitoring the individual in terms of groups and populations. This population-scale knowledge has created a huge information disparity between the people, the social network businesses, and their governments. For the governments especially, the social networks provide a bird's-eye view of the world with macroscopic detail. This amount of knowledge is unprecedented, and the implications of governments operating on this knowledge in secret, I think, are not yet understood.