Privacy is the most important concept of our time

Is that more important than global warming? When you're standing in the center of a fire or you're a refugee because your city is underwater, it's also difficult to defend other rights.

My argument is that the headline is click bait to get eyeballs. Whatever, more power to you. Hope they sign up for your newsletter.

This is a much more compelling piece and it is what brought me here this AM because it was an email in my inbox and if you haven't seen it, I think it gives good context for this piece (which is why I am sharing it, not to dis this piece):

Social Cooling

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363

From this article:

Privacy is about boundaries. It is not about hiding something from someone but allowing to create a space with rules decided by its members. I like to compare it to borders. Some people say that borders are a restriction, something that limit freedom of movement and we do not need in the contemporary world.

I have a serious medical condition. I was treated like a hypochondriac for much of my life, then got a life-changing diagnoses in my mid thirties.

I like to joke "My problem got a better name than lazy or crazy" but people continued to call me crazy. They just call me crazy for talking about getting healthier when that isn't supposed to be possible.

I've been banned from a number of forums and part of that is because people find it so incredibly offensive for me talk to about getting myself healthier. I am routinely treated like I am doing something nefarious if I talk about "Hey, this home remedy was helpful to me" even if it has nothing to do with my deadly condition and even if other people are saying similar stuff and being well received.

So I generally backed way off of trying to be helpful and tried to limit my discussion of health stuff more to just asking questions for my own edification or more general discussion of the topic. It doesn't matter. People who just absolutely hate me for being a former homemaker who is getting well when that isn't supposed to be possible will not let that go and have hounded me and informed me I deserve to be harassed for my "crazy talk."

So, like, let's assume I really am crazy and making crap up because I have some bizarre need for truck loads of extremely negative attention online. Why the hell do you care?

Pat the crazy lady on the head and say "Wow, sucks to be her" and move the fuck on.

Of course, the real problem is that I am not crazy. Actual crazy people don't get typically get anywhere near this much hostility.

I get hostility because I'm a threat to something. I'm a threat to social norms. I'm a threat to current medical mental models. etc.

So I spent a lot of years trying to avoid ending up dead for thinking I know something medically useful, the way Semmelweis was more or less murdered for suggesting doctors should clean their hands before birthing babies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

This is possibly one of those comments I will regret and maybe delete. I have had too little sleep and yadda and I am spending less time on HN here lately. On the one hand, I am medically handicapped, so I have a long history of going through periods where I don't post much.

But the difference is I am healthier. I'm not failing to be here due to being too sick to deal with HN. I'm busy working more and trying to establish a business and blah blah blah and I'm also burnt out on the drama of being a prominent woman here and also also I had to put up with that shit to save my life and I don't have to put up with that shit anymore. My life is saved. I can go do other things now, like try to develop a fucking middle class income.

I do have a point. And that point is this:

Privacy is the right to make health choices for yourself that maybe don't make sense to other people, without having to justify it to a mob that wants you fucking dead for the crime of not going along with the party line.

Privacy is the right to make discoveries that are potentially scientifically significant and world changing -- if the mobs don't kill you for daring to have an original thought and mention it in public.

Privacy is the right to have some control over your own life, even if you are gay and some uptight heterosexual person doesn't like that or you have an undiagnosed genetic disorder while the world acts like you are just neurotic instead of actually sick.

I can't say I agree with the proposals at the end of this article. I think articles like this should probably be treated like a jumping off point for discussion of the issue, not a manual for how to settle it.

Leaping to conclusions for how to settle it are sort of antithetical to protecting privacy and the free speech this article and others like it posit are one of the things they value. We need to be able to freely debate things.

We didn't need "privacy" laws or social norms protecting privacy back when having a private life was the default norm that you didn't need to work making happen.

I think it was J. Paul Getty who got outed in some newspaper article as the richest man on the planet and he wasn't happy about that. Before someone blared that news everywhere, no one had any idea what he was worth and it was easier to drive a hard bargain.

We are seeing public debate of a great many things that, historically, a lot of people didn't really need to take a stand on. If you were gay and socially savvy enough, you lived with a same-sex "roommate" and people close to you knew it was really your lover, but a lot of other people didn't know and didn't need to know and whatever.

And this circumstance is pushing the development of rights for some groups, so it's not all bad. So I am not saying we shouldn't be working towards things like rights for LGBTQ people.

It's sort of like how rock stars used to be able to be anonymous in their home town. And then MTV came along, among other things, and rock starts stopped being anonymous faces in a crowd. Everyone knew their face and there were consequences for that in terms of their private lives. They lost a lot of their privacy and their ability to live a more or less normal life when they weren't on tour.

Everyone is now losing that right to live a "normal" life. And if we don't give push back against it, you are going to find the world getting drastically less healthy, both socially/emotionally/psychologically and also physically and in other ways.

The current pandemic grows out the fabric of the social order we have currently. It's partly about the ability for many people to travel internationally at high speed in a way that wasn't possible a few hundred years ago.

But it's also about other things that I can't as readily connect back and I get tired of trying to make that argument. I have had assholes on the internet who imagine they are "sciency" tell me "Thirteen years of steady forward progress on your medical condition is a wild coincidence. Stranger things have happened."

Anyway, this is rambling and likely to be deleted soon. I guess I will shut up now and go do other things for a bit while I wonder why the hell I do this crap to myself.

And I will reciprocate with this interesting paper on privacy in the context of war - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ethics-and-internati...

Climate change is as much a social problem as any. While I do think the constant focus on individual responsibility and small changes within domestic households is largely a misdirect to divert attention from real systemic & political/corporate causes of climate change, those large political/corporate entities are still ultimately sustained by societal behaviour; we would literally need to change everything (at the very least in the western world) to avert climate change, which is very much a social challenge.

> Climate change is a slow process

This may have been true in the 50s or 60s. It sounds like that's the last time you took an interest in this topic.

> Technology is fast enough to catch up with it and solve it

Is this satire?

> Automation is too(And my guess in the near future, it would be a much bigger problem)

People have been saying this since ancient Rome or before (see Vespasian), but it hasn't happened nor will it ever. This (unlike privacy) is a phantom problem.