Comment by ponker

My "social cooling" hasn't come from big corporations harvesting my data (as far as I can tell, they're doing close to nothing with it that affects me directly).

My social cooling has come much more from the (I believe) well-founded fear of consequences from individuals using my social expressions against me.

15+ years ago when I started my career, I would talk about anything and everything with my colleagues. Politics, sex, dating, etc. I would argue on big email lists about fairly hot button topics. I wasn't afraid of any of these things having any consequences for me. My colleagues knew who I was hooking up with and I knew who they were hooking up with. I knew my colleagues' life stories. I knew who owned guns. Who was gay. Who fucked the hotel receptionist.

Things weren't great for some. A woman on the team would leave the room and the guys would talk about how they would have sex with her. A director of the company had a junior person vacate his hotel room since he was in that hotel and needed a room to enjoy two identical twin prostitutes he had found in that hotel's bar.

But now I've definitely been "socially cooled." I don't talk with my colleagues about anything other than the blandest topics. I go to work and only talk to them about work and the weather. I don't know whether this is better or worse, you'd have to also take into account the woman who isn't having her teammates discussing her oral sex skills the minute she leaves the room. But this is the new world.