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At one time, most people believed slavery was a good thing. Discuss. This may be true for some places and times, but societies that practiced slavery commonly
by GHFigs 15y ago
At one time, most people believed slavery was a good thing. Discuss.
This may be true for some places and times, but societies that practiced slavery commonly suffered from the demographic problem that the slaves outnumbered their masters (and other freemen). That is to say, most people were slaves.
When and if you become interested in someone, you open up their file and voila!
The file is just data. That data can be used to establish the guilt of the guilty or the innocence of the innocent. It can also be used to make cool looking graphs and heatmaps to post on your blog, improve the flow of traffic, better design cars and cities, tax emissions, target advertisements, set insurance rates, get you laid, etc.
It's not that I disagree with you, but I think with time we need more specificity as to what the onerous scenarios are. Is the collection of that data the problem, or is it the collection of that data directly by law enforcement that bothers us? Is it the collection or is it the ease with which they do it? Is it the access to that data by law enforcement or the potential for abuse, misuse, and falsely convicting the innocent? And so on.
To take it in the more general direction: When exactly does more and better data become a bad thing? When exactly is the ambiguity in our lives sacred enough to shield against the tide of data and the changing dynamics that enable it?
- raganwald 15y agoAmerica in 1860 may have been one of those places and times where most people believed slavery was a good thing: http://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm http://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm Total Free Population 27,489,561 Total Slave Population 3,953,760 Grand Total 31,443,321 The freemen outnumbered the slaves in all but two states. And in any event, nobody asked the slaves. As for the file being "just" data, so is a picture of a man with his mistress, or an email conversation, or a list of the books you purchased online, or a list of URLs you visited this year. You tell me: Is this all just "data?" Are you good with the FBI/CSIS having all this stuff about you or any other citizen who is not being investigated with cause? I'm not, and furthermore I won't be tricked into some kind of reverse onus where I have to explain why it's a bad thing for the government to have this data just for the sake of having all this data. It's the other way around: The government should have to tell us, the people, why it needs this data. If it can't justify the collection of this data, it shouldn't collect it. The reason why the onus is upon the government to prove why it needs the data and not on us to prove why we're entitled to some privacy is because humans have an unbroken track record for abusing information about each other, and governments even more so. To argue that somehow 2011 it is all going to be different is to argue that this month will be full of Sundays or that pigs have finally taken flight with their new wings.
- MaysonL 15y agoChattel slaves. Wage slaves. What's the difference? Discuss.