Anarchism & Privacy
- April 28th, 2012
- Posted in For Discussion
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I have seen the future.
Long have I agonized as to how an anarchist society might obtain.
In the future there will be no privacy. Everything you do, night or day, will be visible to whoever is interested. Billions of people connected night and day by technology we can scarcely imagine now.
Privacy will be a “right” that we will gradually dispense with. Our desire to be observed, to be known, by others, and our diminished sense of shame will conspire to eliminate separateness.
And in a world with no privacy, where everyone is potentially exposed to everyone else, power will be dispersed.
A world of potentially perfect communication will undermine the secrecy required to consolidate power among an elite.
Don’t worry. This world will take generation upon generation to come to pass. We couldn’t live there, but our great-great-great-great grandchildren won’t have a problem with it.
This is the theme of a novel by Spider Robinson called [SPOILER ALERT]
“Time Pressure”.
Also, a young woman who was contending for party leader at the German Pirate Party convention this weekend had been an advocate of the post privacy movement, that is, until she decided to change her mind and place herself in the running for party leadership.
What we won’t do to be a leader indeed.
If you had to put odds on it, what chances would you give humanity to survive that long?
davidly: thanks for the tip. I’ll look for the book. I like the “post privacy” appellation, though I won’t be joining in and will resist it with all ferocity as only an aging dinosaur aware of its mortality can do.
ivan: i give the species 50 50 odds i guess. but i’m comforted by the notion that civilization (which is really the problem, not homo sapiens per se) is only 5000 years old.
I agree with the whole main entry. It’s where we’re headed and the speed is faster than you suggest, one more generation at most is all it’s gonna take. To youngsters (pre-college) cloud reality IS reality, to many college aged kids the same holds, it’s only people my age who question the truth of that concept and we’re on our way out. The ether will be real and alchemists finally will be seen to exist and have enough magical alchemical power to change the world they’re in.
The futurist pull, the lust for technology — this was just a sci fi geek’s realm when I was a kid. Today it’s nearly everyone who sees the world that way and those who do not are called luddite, reactionary, troglodytic, etc.
That’s why resources are going to speed away because we’re gobbling them up ever faster in the hyper-disposable-hardware world.
Many current pre-schoolers will –by the time they’re adults– aspire to be cybernetic. Hell, I hear from 30-something and 40-something friends wishful thoughts on those lines.
The techno-luster’s freedom to project one’s image into the Cloud trumps actual civil liberty of a type that I desire.
Don’t you think there will be waves of pushback that will take some time to overcome? I expect neo-Luddite resistance coming from both ends of the political spectrum that will slow down the progress for a while.
There could be, there should be, don’t feel too confident about “will be” though. People’s outlooks are shaped too much by e-reality or TV-reality and so it’s less likely they’ll see the Cloud Reality as threatening or worthy of fighting efforts or pushback.
The people I first engaged with on e-forums over 20 years ago would have been nearer to unanimous in finding this loss of civil liberty (privacy) problematic, but e-forums no longer are the domain of such luddite, reactionary or troglogytic mindsets and instead are now vehicles of ego-projection. Everything is affected by facebook/twitter, hard to escape their influences, which means more integral to a person’s outlook and less an external threat. Facebook is merely a hyper-interactive blog; twitter is emblematic of tl;dr outlooks.
The speed of change is crazy. Hard to say it isn’t what most want, though, from my experience. I think for most people it can’t happen fast enough.
Dmitry Orlov’s latest seems to build on this discussion.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/05/making-internet-safe-for-anarchy.html
I rather imagine that privacy, in the future will just change somewhat. The physical realm we inhabit would be monitored pretty much in its entirety… but who would want to live there when, in this same boat of godlike technologies, you would have your own presently unthinkable computer capable of generating a personal reality in which you are lord and master of everything. You would exist in a virtual world. what you do there is your business. This is where privacy would exist.
You would really only come out of this world for a handful of reasons I’d expect. And even for those there would very likely be a thousand or so alternatives
But in a virtual world indistinguishable from this one (if you so choose) and i expect most, if not everyone would have such devices.
really what’s happening is, we’re eliminating the need for the physical world.