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scattered thoughts

In response to a thread on Facebook about privacy stemming from this interesting presentation that I can’t be arsed to watch the whole way through, I wrote this:

There is no big brother, and never will be. Thanks to openness and the internet, our culture has dodged that bullet. All we have are a thousand little brothers who don’t care what you believe or how you live your life, but just want to sell you things.

So I’m not worried about facebook privacy; in practice, they’ll probably only share info in cases we’d probably approve of (like those evil witches/drug dealers/child molesters/this week’s demon), because there’s just not enough interest in rounding up hippies and commies and jews.

Of course, you might get targeted ads… personal stalkers… that sort of thing. But I’m not worried about the CIA/FBI/KGB/etc. They wouldn’t need Facebook’s permission anyway. I honestly don’t think that sort of thing can happen again - breathless proclamations about the alleged evils of guantanamo bay aside, because I think if any (many) of those people were actually “good guys” in any real sense, no one would waste their time and money locking up those folks.

I live my life in the open, or relatively so, and I’ve watched the last few years as youth culture seems to embrace that. I see Jennicam as the harbinger of it (remember her?), and I think the underlying feeling is one of replacing the illusion of “privacy” with a public life. Not “I’m safe because I’m hidden” but “I’m safe because everyone can watch me”. The panopticon is replaced with omniopticon.

If you don’t have a lock on your bike, do you park it in a dark alley? Or right in front of the store?

someone else responded:

I’m very concerned actually. The information that is asked for isn’t by accident nor is it merely for one’s convenience. I often pass on all the check marks on how I am connected to people. I just don’t like to reveal my network. That album of the day thing was rather enlightening in the end and did nothing more but confirm my suspicions. As for big brother, it is already here - just ask the folks in London. It may not be as we imagined it to be at the moment but it is a hidden hand nonetheless and surveillance is growing. I see it as a matter of conditioning where the state continues to encroach more and more upon society and an individual’s right to privacy. One recent example is London Drugs demand of ID regardless of age for those purchasing cigarettes. Reports of this state that clerks are taking consumer ID’s and entering in the data. Now this may sound harmless to some but if one thinks of it as conditioning and as pawn movements on a chessboard, the picture of the future starts to change. That’s my two cents…

and I added:

The issue comes down to ‘who watches the watchers’ and all that. I just honestly don’t believe that real secrets can be kept today. Information wants to be free, and has too many ways to get that way.

Like the people who claim that 9/11 was faked by the government. It’s just silly. How could you keep that many people quiet? Not a single one would spill the beans on the biggest story in human history? Sure 9/11 smells of a conspiracy, it WAS a conspiracy - of a couple of dozen fucked-up religious nuts. No need to hunt for any fancy explanations, slice that sucker right up with Occam’s razor. There’s NO WAY you could keep the hundreds or thousands of people who would have to be in on it quiet.

Similarly, let’s say “they” decided to come after, say, marijuana smokers. Who’s going to enforce that? Who is going to secretly take over and lock all those people up in secret prisons? It’s much easier to just do it in public, in the open, the way it’s done now.

What do you think “they” can do with that conditioning information? I mean, you can get away with locking a few dissidents in secret prisons - but only the crappy ones, if they were good writers or had anything that interesting to say, someone would notice

No, the only “fear” I can see is that once “they” have the database of who buys what brand of cigarettes where, you’ll get more targeted ads to get you to switch brands.

I just don’t see how it would be possible to recruit thousands of secret police to oppress the citizens of a country with free journalists and unfettered public access to the press - e.g. blogs.

You could do it fifty years ago. 25 years even. The Powers That Be COULD have taken over the media then and prevented the Internet from connecting us all so innocently. We couldn’t have had this conversation.

But we can.

You just can’t keep more than a dozen people quiet any more - if someone was to come out and say “I can prove that the government is doing horrible thing XYZ”… (e.g. flew radio controlled planes at the twin towers, or secretly locked up and tortured sincerely innocent people) Well, at that point they could be assassinated, publicly, and hey, that worked for JFK and MLK, but it would look pretty funny to everyone.

They’d probably have enough money from the TV appearances and book right to afford bodyguards to protect them from anything normal. I mean, look at that spy that got poisoned a few months ago. Every once in a while there’s a suspicious death, presumably executed by some cold-war leftovers who still think they can get away with it - and the media jumps on it and digs into every nook and cranny, because there’s always one more journalist that cares more about a pulitzer prize than his own personal safety.

It’s fine to want to keep that information private, but the only people you’re fooling are, really, individuals that might have a personal vendetta against you. No one else CARES!