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Comment by burkaman

5 years ago

I think the issue is that it is getting harder to have a private conversation or indulge in a private interest. It's quite difficult to have a conversation with a friend that's physically far away without using the services of one or more multinational corporations that may or may not be able to monitor what you say and sell that information to someone else. Of course it's possible, but how hard is it to analyze all the options and coordinate a method?

And what if you want to buy stuff for a hobby that you only talk about with a few close friends? Don't use Amazon, or a credit card anywhere, don't use Google to look up products or Google Maps to get to a store, don't use plaintext email or Facebook chat or Whatsapp or whatever else to talk about it with your friends, etc.

It takes a lot of mental effort to know whether or not an action will be "public", which can cause the cooling effect this page talks about. The trend is not people doing stuff in private instead of publicly, it's people not doing stuff at all because there is no "private".

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burkaman

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thegrimmest  5 years ago

I don't find using WhatsApp or Signal groups to communicate with my distant friends particularly hard. These particular corporate platforms are quite ubiquitous. I'm also not particularly worried about being canceled for what I say in these conversations, since it's not something I've observed happening in wider society.

parasubvert  5 years ago

Contrast it to living in a small town. Everyone talks, including the local store owners. There's very little privacy in having a private interest or hobby.

Local privacy is arguably far easier in a city, or in a crowded digital space. It all depends on the context of who you're trying to hide from. I'd much rather trust my privacy to Apple and Amazon if I wanted to quietly buy things no one else in my neighbourhood knew about.

  • thegrimmest  5 years ago

    That's kind of the point though isn't it? I imagine folks are rather more polite in a small town than a big city. I don't think having lots of privacy is a natural state for people. I think transparency is the ally of good and opaqueness the cover for evil. Mind you it only works if everyone is watching everyone (a la small town) rather than big brother watching you.

    More or less I'm advocating a distributed social credit system instead of a centralized one. In fact I'd say "distributed social credit" is a pretty good term for the social conditions we have spent most of our time evolving in.