Yesterday I sighed about what we might as well call the “self-surveillance state”* — the growing culture of cool-tech that seduces people into adopting (and paying for!) the very technology that the Big Brother state and Little Brother corporations use to spy on them.<\/p>\n
The first comment on that post came from David, who also sighed: “There\u2019s no putting the genie back in the bottle … and the sort of societal shift that would include protecting privacy of any sort seems increasingly unlikely.”<\/p>\n
He nailed it on the genie and bottle. And we’re certainly undergoing a tech-driven societal shift toward self-surveillance. It seems inexorable. But is it? <\/p>\n
So this weekend’s freedom question is: Can a culture of privacy thrive beside the growing culture of self-revelation?<\/b> If so, what will be the implications of that?<\/p>\n
Subsidiary questions come to mind: Will privacy-loving old fogies die off leaving only self-surveillers behind? Or will a new generation (think Anonymous, Wikileaks, young censorship fighters, etc.) wrap themselves in privacy and develop even better privacy tools? Will law enforcement focus on the low-hanging fruit of people who reveal all via smartphones, social media, and shivery future tech<\/a> — or will cops be more motivated to dig into the lives of we who “obviously have something to hide”? What are the cultural implications of having millions of self-surveillers living side-by-side with a smaller number who increasingly struggle to maintain privacy? Could some data catastrophe finally wake people up to what they’re doing to themselves? If privacy is crucial to freedom, as IndividualAudienceMember commented, what becomes of us if we can’t keep it?<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n * I’m pretty sure I’ve just coined a new term there; let’s see if it catches on. OTOH, I’d be happier if we didn’t need<\/i> such a term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday I sighed about what we might as well call the “self-surveillance state”* — the growing culture of cool-tech that seduces people into adopting (and paying for!) the very technology that the Big Brother state and Little Brother corporations use to spy on them. The first comment on that post came from David, who also sighed: “There\u2019s no putting the genie back in the bottle … and the sort of societal shift that would include protecting privacy of any sort seems increasingly unlikely.” He nailed it on the genie and bottle. And we’re certainly undergoing a tech-driven societal shift toward…<\/p>\n