What's worse, how many of them can even properly think about it? The "nothing to see here" stuff in the last weeks really made me wonder, and all the splitting hairs about individual puzzle pieces without ever looking up at the puzzle itself. When it comes to this on HN, there are many insightful comments, but also a lot of telling sophistry, and I think even more interesting are the patterns of silence.
Would I expect a ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party to reflect upon their role in history, or have a meaningful discussion with others beyond "you're all wrong" and pouting, thinking the topic is beneath them when it's the other way around? Nah, something like that hardly ever happens, it is left to others.
>What's worse, how many of them can even properly think about it? The "nothing to see here" stuff in the last weeks really made me wonder, and all the splitting hairs about individual puzzle pieces without ever looking up at the puzzle itself. When it comes to this on HN, there are many insightful comments, but also a lot of telling sophistry, and I think even more interesting are the patterns of silence.
That. In a community where several people have worked in such schemes and/or with the government, I guess that's to be expected. There's this notion that "tech guy == liberal" or at least against any kind of suppression of freedom of information and such, but real life doesn't work that way. There have been tons of tech guys and/or scientists that have willingly and cheerfully helped every rotten regime on the planet. It's a profession, after all, not an ideology.
I didn't mean to point fingers at people, I mean, really, I blame a lot of people for a lot of things, and myself for most of them as well -- but I still found it frustrating at first, and then really telling.
People think walking out of it ends the discussion and the thought process -- but it simply means I am thinking about you instead of with you, and you get to hear it from others instead of directly. Some things are too big to end at the sensibilities of any person on this planet. Since I know for a fact that the people at the top are deluded and could really use some saving from themselves -- without knowing any of them, simply because power and wealth as ends in and of themselves are black holes, and only the mediocre pursue them -- there is simply nothing left to tip toe around, just a lot to discuss.
And the initial condescension reminded me of this quote, the bit about privilege:
I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is that it's bullshit.
We can't have a post-privacy world until we're post-privilege. So when we cave in our autonomy, then we can sort of say, "well, okay, we don't need privacy anymore, in fact we don't have privacy anymore, and I'm okay with that." Realistically though people are not comfortable with that. Because, if you only look at it from a position of privilege, like, say, white man on a stage, then yeah, maybe post-privacy works out okay for those people. But if you have ever not been, or if you are currently not, a white man with a passport from one of the five good nations in the world, it might not really work out well for you, and in fact it might be designed specifically such that it will continue to not work out well for you, because the structures themselves produce these inequalities.
So when you hear someone talk about post-privacy, I think it's really important to engage them about their own privilege in the system and what it is they are actually arguing for.
Maybe outrage isn't helpful, as a constant emotional state that is, but let's say "if you're not discussing this seriously, you're not paying attention", neither to today nor to history.
Would I expect a ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party to reflect upon their role in history, or have a meaningful discussion with others beyond "you're all wrong" and pouting, thinking the topic is beneath them when it's the other way around? Nah, something like that hardly ever happens, it is left to others.