Without privacy, you cannot have friendship. OK no, let me explain.
Friendship has a problem, which is gangs. You'll hear the police go on about reducing gang violence, and every action they take is a direct attack on the friendship of those gang members, and on the freedom of anyone else to form friendships. By equating friendship with organized crime and violence, they can and have convinced us that it's not safe to get too involved in the lives of our neighbors. Mind our own business, they say. Complete bollocks.
But the best worst bullshit out there always contains a grain of truth. What the police don't want you to realize is that they are also a violent street gang, and both gangs and police are part of the same problem. When you have a population making friends, not everyone is going to be friends, so you end up forming friend groups. This unfortunately means that we have a sort of friend group ecosystem, where natural selection applies.
Eventually some groups of friends will learn that they can benefit more if they can prevent other people from making friends. They will look for ways to destroy other friend groups, and take their resources, or exploit their labor. Not every group will do this, but the ones that don't, who can't protect themselves, get destroyed. Natural selection ensues, until the only people allowed to be friends are those vicious enough to fight off the other friend groups. It's not directly human nature to devolve into hostile societies of petty warlords, but it is our nature to produce that ecosystem which inevitably evolves in that direction.
Unless we have privacy.
Privacy is the "cell membrane" of this social group ecology. When something goes wrong in one group, rather than spreading like a fire of oppression into all the other groups, privacy can protect those groups from becoming infected, or destroyed. Privacy is also an anti-cancerous weapon too. When an authoritarian group arises and begins suppressing friendship in other groups, if members of the oppressing group have privacy, they can communicate with people outside their group, and conspire to reform it, or destroy it from within. If they don't have privacy, the ones who don't want to destroy friendship have to hide it and pretend that they do.
So with privacy, you can undo authoritarian regimes, break through the haze of persecution and xenophobia, be friends with people in ways that cannot be attacked or controlled, and react unpredictably with overwhelming opposition when some group targets you to be their slave. Without privacy, you can have none of that, and little by little, you'll find it harder and harder to rely on your friends. Not because they're unreliable, but because they're spending all their time working for an employer, and they'll get fired if they're caught "engaging in gang activity" with you, or evicted, or rejected by their other friends and family, or worse.
There are many systems already in place to severely punish people for making the wrong friends, whose definition of wrongness ultimately boils down to "friends you can rely on." Privacy is the only way we can undermine those systems and reform them into something that ensures everyone has friends. You do have something to hide, which is all the stuff you are proud of and admired for, that the police (insert top warlord friend group of choice) can use to make sure you don't have any chance to make friends.
(#longpost #rant #friendship #privacy #philosophy #politics)
Friendship has a problem, which is gangs. You'll hear the police go on about reducing gang violence, and every action they take is a direct attack on the friendship of those gang members, and on the freedom of anyone else to form friendships. By equating friendship with organized crime and violence, they can and have convinced us that it's not safe to get too involved in the lives of our neighbors. Mind our own business, they say. Complete bollocks.
But the best worst bullshit out there always contains a grain of truth. What the police don't want you to realize is that they are also a violent street gang, and both gangs and police are part of the same problem. When you have a population making friends, not everyone is going to be friends, so you end up forming friend groups. This unfortunately means that we have a sort of friend group ecosystem, where natural selection applies.
Eventually some groups of friends will learn that they can benefit more if they can prevent other people from making friends. They will look for ways to destroy other friend groups, and take their resources, or exploit their labor. Not every group will do this, but the ones that don't, who can't protect themselves, get destroyed. Natural selection ensues, until the only people allowed to be friends are those vicious enough to fight off the other friend groups. It's not directly human nature to devolve into hostile societies of petty warlords, but it is our nature to produce that ecosystem which inevitably evolves in that direction.
Unless we have privacy.
Privacy is the "cell membrane" of this social group ecology. When something goes wrong in one group, rather than spreading like a fire of oppression into all the other groups, privacy can protect those groups from becoming infected, or destroyed. Privacy is also an anti-cancerous weapon too. When an authoritarian group arises and begins suppressing friendship in other groups, if members of the oppressing group have privacy, they can communicate with people outside their group, and conspire to reform it, or destroy it from within. If they don't have privacy, the ones who don't want to destroy friendship have to hide it and pretend that they do.
So with privacy, you can undo authoritarian regimes, break through the haze of persecution and xenophobia, be friends with people in ways that cannot be attacked or controlled, and react unpredictably with overwhelming opposition when some group targets you to be their slave. Without privacy, you can have none of that, and little by little, you'll find it harder and harder to rely on your friends. Not because they're unreliable, but because they're spending all their time working for an employer, and they'll get fired if they're caught "engaging in gang activity" with you, or evicted, or rejected by their other friends and family, or worse.
There are many systems already in place to severely punish people for making the wrong friends, whose definition of wrongness ultimately boils down to "friends you can rely on." Privacy is the only way we can undermine those systems and reform them into something that ensures everyone has friends. You do have something to hide, which is all the stuff you are proud of and admired for, that the police (insert top warlord friend group of choice) can use to make sure you don't have any chance to make friends.
(#longpost #rant #friendship #privacy #philosophy #politics)
@cy How do the police equate friendship with organized crime and violence?
How does the concept of "the wrong friends' ultimately boil down to "friends you can rely on"?
How does the concept of "the wrong friends' ultimately boil down to "friends you can rely on"?
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They equate it by rebranding it as gang activity, and it boils down to "friends you can rely on" because that's what can most effectively resist class exploitation, and the police. The cops don't give two shits if you're friends with toxic assholes who help keep you down.
@cy Yes, information/speech/voice/PR/organization control is where the power is. It's largely why the US has the FCC.
Yeah the FCC is really good at exploiting us through information control. They're the propaganda arm of the US!