Ars tests Internet surveillance by spying on an NPR reporter

Of course, you may still be right in that it adds no privacy, but I wouldn't call it an "incredible waste" (particularly not of bandwidth), since the cost is really quite low.

I think in the same way that we who live in an exceptionally wealthy society often get little practice in giving things up, but that this practice might be beneficial. It's not a very original observation to notice how having so many resources and opportunities and conveniences available to us makes us feel more and more dependent and averse to every sort of inconvenience.

As a vegan, I always find it remarkable how emphatically people feel that it would be impossibly difficult for them to go without eating animal products, or that they can't imagine how someone could possibly manage without them. Maybe that's literally true in the Aleutian Islands or the Australian Outback or something, but not so much in New York City or Portland, where one could eat in a different restaurant every day for a year without running out of vegan entrées to order directly off the menu.

But there are plenty of resources and technologies that I have that my parents and aunts and uncles grew up and lived and worked without for decades and that even today most of the world's population doesn't use—but that it's hard for me to imagine life without. (When I visit friends in Brazil, they don't have a machine to dry their laundry, but use a clothesline, the way almost everybody in history has done it, and to my amazement the clothesline still works OK. It's not even much more labor, just more latency in the clothes-washing process.)

The habits we form from being well-off and having so much access to everything we want, worry some people because they consider how something could go wrong and there are skills we might need that we haven't developed. (We might also feel more acute suffering from losing what we're used to; psychologists have documented that losing what you had is consistently perceived as a much greater cost than failing to gain what you didn't have.) War or social unrest or natural disasters or ecological disruption could strike middle-class city dwellers pretty hard because we mostly don't know how to grow food, how to fix things, and so on.

But another consequence of our abundance of resources and choices, one that I think is more core to what the parent commenter is getting at, is that when we become dependent on technologies and products and resources, our demand curve for them shifts. The people who supply these things to us have more power over us in terms of extracting money or concessions, because we and then understand that we're unlikely to actually give up our habits. That has consequences in terms of the difficulty in resisting changes that harm us (a classic example is if an Internet service changes its privacy policy in a way that reduces existing users' protections; service operators know that very few people will stop using the service even if most users dislike the change). It also means that the prospect of boycotts over ethical issues that affect others is dimmer. Manufacturers think that there's not that much chance many people would actually stop buying something because of disagreements with how it was made.

I think it would be amazing to have a culture where people commonly had the experience of successfully giving up a habit or a product that they liked quite a bit, without being forced to, just as a result of a conscious choice. My Catholic friends often do this once a year during Lent (the religious tradition in many communities used to be to give up specific foods, but many people today interpret it more broadly and personally pick something to give up temporarily—normally, something that they enjoy and that it will be an effort for them to give up). From what I hear, many people find it satisfying and empowering when they succeed. And following Scott's idea, it might be good practice for when you decide that you do have an important reason to give something up.

The darker later parts of the documentary make me think that we have a lot of practice celebrating people's power of choice and freedom from constraint (which I fully agree with). We have a lot of recent experience saying yes when there's no reason not to. What we perhaps haven't been practicing as much is saying no at those times when there is a reason to.

I'm shocked.