Why privacy is important, and having "nothing to hide" is irrelevant (2016)

Curious to learn more about how you did this.

But I agree with your sentiment- we often surrender to the idea that ruthless evil has taken control without even trying to engage civically.

No friend, it's also absolutely the data that's collected and how it could changeably be used for good or bad and vice versa at a whim down the road. If modern times have taught us anything it's that centralized troves of data almost inevitably get leaked and misused sooner or later. You're ridiculously naive if you trust anyone with that kind of information no matter how nicely they presented their reasons for wanting it.

I don't give a damn how wholesomely the reasons for stripping one's ability to be private and anonymous are couched, they should be no excuse for actually applying such a magnifying glass to human lives en masse.

> Trans people who wanted to assimilate and blend in have by and large been blindsided by the massive increase in scrutiny they've gotten from random people and increasingly lawmakers in the last few years in much of the western world, because some machinations of internet culture made the right wing start thinking about them a lot all of a sudden in the last decade.

The reason they're getting more scrutiny is because of the negative impact of pro-trans ideological policies on women's rights.

I can't speak for the US, but in the UK the turning point was a combination of two things: firstly, the right-wing Conservative government announcing that they were going to remove all barriers for anyone to change their "legal sex", with no medical diagnosis required at all. Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.

This caused an uprising of women, initially groups of left-wing feminists who most rapidly organised, to push back against this "gender self-id" policy proposal and against men in women's prisons. And then against the whole principle of males identifying themselves as female and being given special privileges because of this.

Only later on did right-wing groups take an interest in this as a division against the mainstream political left who were still very much in favour of these policies. Though we've just got a new centre-left Labour government and it seems likely now, based on what they said during the election campaign, that they're going to prioritise protecting single-sex spaces for women over the desires of males who demand to access them.

And this is because they've realised that they can't just unilaterally diminish women's rights and expect the electorate to follow along. The increased scrutiny worked.

Civil rights are not a zero-sum game. One group of people gaining rights doesn't take away the rights from another group, but that is commonly used as an argument to manipulate people into opposing the expansion of rights without confronting what that opposition really means. We saw it with integration in the US often presented as an infringement on the rights of white people. We saw it with gay marriage when people argued that it was somehow an affront to traditional heterosexual marriage. And now we are seeing it with people claiming that trans people are infringing on women's rights.

>Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.

This is a good example of what that manipulation looks like in action. I agree that prisoners should have a right to safety despite their crimes. But what should the priority be for someone with this position? It certainly wouldn't be putting more attention on a single case of assault over some 999 other examples of a prisoner getting assaulted[1]. The focus on the one case involving a trans person shows that the motivation isn't actually prisoner safety.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/13/revealed-alm...

> However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable.

Certainly not yet, but with history you have to deal with things in a much wider time horizon. The mistakes most people make are having too narrow of a time horizon. The natural dynamics of people-based feedback systems have pulls in multiple directions to keep it in equilibrium. This served us well until perception was broken around the 1950s.

When the feedback system pulling us away from the cliff, in the opposite direction, are no longer functioning, inevitably (as a matter of time), the forces pushing us toward the cliff will push you over the cliff.

This is seen historically as escalating unrest, whose underlying cause is ignored, increasing violence, increasing coercive pressure, shortages, ceding of rights until you have none and its arbitrary.

The point of break is the moment a feedback system can no longer respond to stimuli to correct its equilibrium action. It is broken. The dynamics running up to catastrophe (as a system) almost guarantee it.

In captive systems where changes are done by the people who are incentivized to not solve the problem they simply have to sit back and do nothing and can enrich themselves (front of line blocking). What, after all, can people do about it given the differential of power and broken systems for feedback that would push back?

To answer your question, without privacy you can't organize. This is well documented since shortly after WW2 with regards to insurgency and counter-insurgency circles (i.e. how we fought against the Nazi's during WW2), and further examined with regards to modern day China. When the mere hint of someone not doing their best for the party is sufficient to punish them (and its arbitrary), people fall into menticidal spirals.

If not corrected, eventually, those in power will out of fear silence the dissenting voices under convenient accidents or limit their opportunities (social credit). Left unchecked it creates a environment where there is no hope for the future, and people stop having children. They may kill their own children to forgo the suffering (this was documented in The Wealth & Poverty of Nations with regards to Natives under the Spanish).

Already the manipulation of the currency has put the average person's ability to make enough to cover the expenses of having children in danger.

As the people who would seek reasonable conditions (not disadvantaged) most likely would be in the cohort of rational people, those leaders undermine their own power base of a strong citizenry (against foreign threats). This is well known structure in the fall of empires.

Additionally, when you have selection pressures towards the meek and irrational thinker, you sieve and eventually get a mono-culture of thought, which gets wiped out when they eventually come up against an existential crisis that requires the flexibility they killed off. There are many examples in history of artifacts where cultures died off and no one knows much about those cultures.

What the Stasi systems were capable of was about 1 generation behind our current disclosed systems. Its scaling faster as well with time. Its a very worrying time for the rational person to be alive.