I have a different read on that. Control doesn't work if no one cares about social opprobrium. If the culture has changed so that whatever behavior you're engag

I have a different read on that. Control doesn't work if no one cares about social opprobrium. If the culture has changed so that whatever behavior you're engaging in is no longer considered taboo / everyone else is doing it, you cannot be controlled by others using the threat of exposure against you (this doesn't apply to behaviors that are actually made illegal, so would be protestors/dissidents get no help from this.) Now, some may say that that kind of change itself is bad (due to the newer [theorized] cultural control strategy of reverse desublimation in the west since the 1960s), but I think that ship has long sailed anyway. For a basic example, let's take visible public inebriation. If large numbers / the majority of people do that on a regular basis - and everyone can see it - how could you use that as a threat against people? Right now it can be used against, for example, potential job seekers because of information asymmetry (job seeker has photo of being drunk on a public post / interviewer keeps their drunken photos private.) In a world where everyone can see everyone (and archives are infinite / searchable) that power goes away. As Brin discusses in The Transparent Society, people avoid eavesdropping (or at least hide it) because they know others are looking - and IS a behavior that gets social opprobrium, and so is effectively policed. An important (and perhaps obvious) caveat to all this is that social policing only applies to people with roughly symmetrical levels of power (i.e., this doesn't work for government surveillance - they can use much more powerful tools than shame / fear of exposure.) I think another interesting thing to think about (that we have a recent data point on) is comment sections pre- and post- Facebook comments. It was often stated in the pre- area that real names attached to posts would prevent egregious public behavior due to shame / fear. What we've seen is that this is not the case. Comment sections using Facebook comments are still often filled with much of the ugliness they had before. Is it ignorance, foolishness, feelings of invulnerability, the belief that their opinions represent a silent majority? Hard to say, but I'd like to see someone take on that topic since we now have so much data on it.