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Can we still recover the right to be left alone?
- nobody9999 2y agohttps://archive.ph/ZK7tC https://archive.ph/ZK7tC
- metalman 2y ago[flagged]
- cassianoleal 2y agoIsn’t that a bit too much like Brave New World?
- metalman 2y agono, it's just a minor modification of what we are actualy doing, and it's a suggestion that we accept humanity as it is, and stop trying to export our contradictions the statistics are clear, we have lost our way, life span is falling, inequity is becoming stark, etc the question is ,can actualy comunicate about what is happening? or not I know the answer is, no, we cant comunicate and that there is a widespead notion that bieng exposed to anything that even makes ....some... uncomfortable....must be banned.,,..or something like that....more permanent.....and secure.... to which, I wish good luck with that.....
- JKCalhoun 2y agoNot really fair to the kids whose parents are against seat belts (just as one example).
- RedNifre 2y agoYour ideas sound a lot like those of the APPD, the Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany: They advocate to "balkanize" Germany into three zones: - Asozial Parasite Zone: For lazy punks who don't like to work - Safe Business Zone: For hard working people who really like work - Violence Experience Parks: For Nazis and other violent folks (like your Mad Max enthusiasts) See here, you might enjoy it: http://www.appd-hessen.de/index_dateien/appd_grundsatzprogramm.pdf http://www.appd-hessen.de/index_dateien/appd_grundsatzprogra...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago[flagged]
- trod1234 2y agoTL;DR you are basically just asking for a real version of "The Purge", while neglecting the inherent inequalities between those with resources and those without, and you contradict yourself later making this post of yours entirely incoherent, and a waste of time reading. Thoughts unshackled from objective reality trend towards delusion. People haven't survived by ignoring the reality of things.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago> many many people desperatly want some kind of mad max unhinged reality I'm not sure that's true. In any event, historically that might be the French Foreign Legion.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> historically that might be the French Foreign Legion. Today it's the nutters who join ISIS. (The Foreign Legion required discipline.)
- kelseyfrog 2y agoIf privacy is the ground for creativity and agency, then let it be the soil in which mystery grows, not the airtight vault that suffocates every conversation about you. When you extend that absence to forbid mention or thought, you’ve weaponized oblivion into censorship. The right to be left alone is the creation of thought‑crime by fiat.
- bendigedig 2y agoBut what about what the article hints to w.r.t. the right to never be recorded? To be recorded is to leave an immutable trail of the self which prejudices how you (and others) view yourself. To be monitored is to be categorised which is to see yourself in an imperfect and distorting mirror. Look at your distorted historical reflection and tell me that it does not prejudice the choices that you make and so alter the person that you choose to be next.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago> To be monitored is to be categorised which is to see yourself in an imperfect and distorting mirror. To be observed is to be put into a taxonomy - a cracked funhouse mirror that never reflects the real you. Typifications aren’t a bug in the system; they’re the mind main feature. If the glare of categorization freaks you out, therapy is cheap and plentiful. And let’s be clear: the Noumenal - the unfiltered Real - is forever barred from our awareness. Everything we think and feel must pass through the sieve of perception. If that bothers you, congratulations. Welcome to being human. The only escape is non-being.
- bendigedig 1y agoCool story. I think most accept that we are unlikely to achieve thr absolute state you have described above, but we can reduce the scale of the bureaucratic categorisation and the associated distorted trail we leave; there is no question that the volume of such data has dramatically increased over the past century and is undoubetdly accelerating.
- woodpanel 2y agoEven before the invention of public-private-partnership driven hyper-surveillance (aka social media), there were just three places known to western man where one is truly alone: In front of his steering wheel, inside of the voting booth and in the crapper.
- smsm42 2y agoTake the steering wheel out. Most modern cars are already networked and are capable of tracking your every movement and recording anything that happens inside and in the vicinity of the car. Not all of them do that, and not all of them preserve and forward this information, as of yet, but this is clearly a thing that will happen. Insurance companies already propose discounts for people that allow them to track their "driving habits", how long before it flips and you'd end up forced to let them record everything or be forced into the "dangerous and reckless driver" bucket where the insurance would be plain unaffordable? And that's not mentioning car manufacturers, which will record everything - for QA and performance monitoring purposes, of course - and then somehow this data end up on the market? I think if you need privacy, driving is no longer an option, better go for a walk in the forest.
- woodpanel 2y agoThat’s correct. It even applies to the other segments I mentioned: Smart Toilets aren’t even necessary, as most people won’t sit on an analog one without their smartphone in their palms. And yeah, about the voting booth: many of those who now demand a right to be left alone just a couple of years ago vehemently defended the practice of proprietary voting machines.
- ahofmann 2y agoEven if this were true (and I don't think it is), it misses the point. Two decades ago, it was perfectly normal for people to be untraceable or unavailable in most ways when they were away from home. Today, it is normal for some people to send their location to loved ones in real time. And we all carry one or more devices that record tons of data about us and our surroundings every second.
- keybored 2y agoAre we really societies based on liberal negative liberty? It seems that we are free-for-all when it comes to interference based on marketing. I don’t have it that bad even. Much worse for those who have to drive by/commute by obnoxious billboards every day.
- glitchc 2y agoThis can't happen unless we find a way to demonetize private information. And since digital information is trivial to duplicate/copy, that's a tough hill to climb.
- m463 2y agoI'm reminded of domain squatting - where just searching for a domain name caused the registrar to reserve it and they could sell it back to you. Is this the endgame? Any action, anything spoken or viewed is monetized for rent seeking intermediaries? information is power -> information is money.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> demonetize private information What does this mean?
- neogodless 2y agoWhile it's a bit of a contradiction, it's about private information that some money-seeking entity holds and utilizes to make money. In other words, the goal is to remove the financial incentive to collect and store information about individuals that should be private.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> the goal is to remove the financial incentive to collect and store information about individuals that should be private The NSA has no profit incentive. Neither do e.g. ICE or the nutters tracking womens' menstrual cycles.
- anigbrowl 2y agoI think they do; such institutions just seek to profit in something other than currency, to wit power.
- 2y ago
- dogleash 2y agoI too subscribe to the idea it's the collection of data that invades privacy not (just) usage. It used to be more widespread. But as software people there are traitor in our ranks. People who decided to become conman to justify abusing others and perpetuate lies that it's all benign. All in the name of maximixing data exfiltration so they could get in on the scam. Plenty of money to be made, after all. And such big servers to play with too.
- verisimi 2y agoWhich software isn't selling out privacy? PS even something like signal (presuming things are as private as we are told) encourages phone usage, which is very leaky. I'm struggling to think of benign software - I guess linux etc could be considered as that.
- throw-qqqqq 2y ago> Which software isn't selling out privacy? None of the software I’ve authored or contributed to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- genewitch 1y agoI don't even keep web logs 90% of the time. Logrotate puts the zips in /tmp I barely make users enter an email. What I do won't scale but I can sleep at night.
- zzo38computer 2y agoMany people (although not most of them, it seems), including myself, are designed to not sell out privacy (and also to avoid some of the other problems that are common in modern software).
- ty6853 2y agoI've never had this feeling more poignantly than one day, where I was deep in a wilderness zone of the Cascades, several miles from even the nearest logging road. I was minding my own business, pack in, pack out, with not a soul in sight. And out popped a park ranger, the first person I had seen in days, asking me if I had a permit to exist in the wilderness. No, no I did not. Sorry for the terrible intrusion of existing. Then he went up to write an order that I had 2 days to get off the public land, with it being a 2 day hike out. Before handing it, he wanted an address I had none. Apparently this somehow broke his brain. The dude would literally not let me go until I came up with an address, even though I legitimately had none.
- azemetre 2y agoHave you heard of "right to roam" laws in the UK? They make sense to me and maybe the US could use them for all public lands.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> maybe the US could use them for all public lands We have this for some public lands. It doesn't work for all of them. Our National Parks would fail at their conservation mission if everyone were allowed to break trail, for instance. (You'll also see rampant poaching if refusing to provide ID or an address for a citation turns into a get-out-of-jail-free card.)
- azemetre 2y agoI wouldn't consider right to roam the same as right to hunt.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- UKsoct 2y ago[dead]
- candiddevmike 2y ago
- ideashower 2y agoWhat are some places you feel alone, these days? I imagine it's a highly personal question.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stevenAthompson 2y agoFreedom of speech can not exist without private speech. Yet, my privacy rights always imply a lessening of someone else's right to knowledge. There will never be a perfect balance between these competing needs, and the line will be pushed back and forth as long as there are humans to debate the issue.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Freedom of speech can not exist without private speech It can in several variants. Freedom of expression probably can't without private speech.
- stevenAthompson 2y agoI'm not sure I follow. In all it's variants the ability to trace unpopular speech back to the speaker puts their life in danger and robs them of their freedom under threat of violence. Am I missing something? The United States, for example, wouldn't exist if Thomas Payne hadn't been able to publish his pamphlets anonymously.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> the ability to trace unpopular speech back to the speaker puts their life in danger and robs them of their freedom under threat of violence. Am I missing something Yes. Freedom of speech doesn't require privacy in most constructions as it typically concerns, first and foremost, publicly-made political speech. This finds its way into U.S. law through the expansion of the First Amendment's protections by its press and religion clauses [1]. [1] https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-01/06-difference-between-speech-and-press.html https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-01/06-diffe...
- stevenAthompson 2y agoYou're almost certainly correct from a technical legal perspective (although I loathe the way legal experts extract "extra" meaning form the spaces between the words of the constitution). I was speaking from a more practical dictionary definition of the terms. From my perspective, you simply can't speak freely if the government (or your neighbors) might murder you for saying things they disagree with.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoIn Britain young people say "Leave me in peace". Peace is the state of being left alone, not just an absence of violence. Only later, adults develop separate notion of "privacy", a diluted and weaker version of natural 'peace'?
- smsm42 2y agoIt feels kinda ironic to find this kind of article in The Nation. I mean if it were Reason, sure. But The Nation is a leftist publication, endorsing Sanders. Of all regimes that I could find myself in, I'd expect to be the least amount of left alone in the socialist paradise they are ultimately rooting for. Nothing is left alone in a true socialist country, The Will of The People is in everything and everything is subject to it. That's kinda the point of collectivism - everything is everybody's common business. Transparency is vital for regulation and control (see e.g. Seeing like a State) and the more opaque humans are, the harder is to control them, plan their actions, reason about their future behavior. How can you make a five-year plan for the whole country if you don't even know anything about anybody? Opacity is not going to work here. You would need a ton of very, very detailed information. That's why China is introducing more and more measures to defy privacy - this is the only way their model can hope to work, it it impossible in the opaque-person world where no information about the person can be created. The article argues that privacy is not property, but the concept of privacy can not but lead to the concept of property - if you can have private thoughts, can you have private expressions? If you can have private expressions, can you have their material embodiment? If you can have the material embodiment, can you exercise control over it and limit the control of others over it? Oops, you just created private property.
- justin66 2y agoPerhaps these particular leftists want what they say they want, rather than what you've been led to believe they want.
- smsm42 2y ago> want what they say they want Which is what? Pretty much all leftist state models require strong state, which leaves very little space to privacy. Somebody who holds both leftist or collectivist political beliefs and hopes for privacy is contradicting oneself. If they were anarchists or libertarians, that'd be a different business, but it's surprising to find libertarians in The Nation.
- 1y ago
- alphazard 2y agoYou could frame the entire project of building a political system as just solving this problem without extra side effects. If you want the right to be left alone, you have to concentrate power, so that people who don't leave other people alone can be effectively punished. That concentrated power attracts the kind of people who don't like leaving other people alone. To these power-seekers, people left alone are an opportunity cost, they could be forced to work towards some goal set by the power-seekers.
- NoTeslaThrow 2y agoI mean you could, but we're inherently dependent on each other. I'm not sure I see the value of building a society around personal liberty. It wouldn't make much of a society, would it?
- alphazard 2y agoSounds like you don't want to leave people alone.
- NoTeslaThrow 2y agoI'm quite the introvert. I just am flummoxed why you would build around something so much less substantial than equitable distribution of resources, which necessarily implies our bothering each other to enforce. If you want to be left alone above all else, you can always turn into ted kaczynski. But reaping the benefits of society comes with costs. one of them is accepting annoying neighbors and other social contracts that might not specifically cater to your desires.
- gscott 2y agoTom Hanks says not a chance! https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_circle_2017 https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_circle_2017
- thomastjeffery 2y ago> Pressly’s book is less about privacy and more about what it protects, a condition he calls “oblivion.” What an excellent way to frame the discussion!