This looks to be a promising 7 part series by the NYT Opinion section. It’s scary how much information is out there about most peoples lives
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It’s fine.
I mean the only thing we really have to worry about is if say an authoritarian govt entity decides to use all that information to become the Stasi x infinity.
Thankfully we live in a stable democracy where personal privacy is sarcosanct.
I’m going to make sure you get credit when Sarcosanct is added to the merriam-webster dictionary next year.
A potential benefit of this horror show electronic age is people just generally feeling less shame. Like I think Jeff Bezos is a sociopathic monster with infinity money but his dick pic reaction was pretty eye opening. “Yeah I sent my mistress dick pics, deal with it.” So much of the ability of the masters of the universe to keep us all from actually doing anything is fear. Fear of losing a job, or health care, or having our secrets exposed. But like, we’re basically all realizing that we’re all really messed up. That nobody cares if you like watching weird porn, you have no reason to be embarrassed by sexuality, you aren’t a bad person or lazy or stupid if you don’t want to participate in this dystopian rat race, and you aren’t an entitled loser if you want to see a doctor when you’re sick without going bankrupt.
Obviously rambling. The point is if we all realize we’re all basically similarly fucked up we can turn our attention where it belongs, obliterating the elite. It’s a necessary condition for meaningful change.
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You’ve been flagged. Our NSA bots are crawling through your browsing history and credit card receipts. Good luck.
Thanks! Your post was dripping with sarcasm and I thought you might have done it on purpose for a minute.
How many people literally have nothing to hide (affairs, embarrassing email about their boss, scat porn, etc)? Bezos fell into kind of a sweet spot where he has fuck you money and his transgression wasn’t that bad.
As always I blame Chrome spell checker.
So does the City of Seattle. Well at least the computer hacking community there.
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It worked!!! Good job guys.
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Yeah, but I feel like the plates are shifting on that stuff. It’s only like 40 years ago being gay was illegal and you had to hide in the shadows, now a gay guy is one of the Dem frontrunners for Prez. Radical change on that sort of thing is possible. You’re right that Bezos was operating from a position of privilege but I feel like it’s a harbinger of more to come.
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Are you saying we could have the first pro-bestiality presidential candidate in 20 years? Because my Mom has some thoughts on that she’d like to share.
Or raw-dogging a prostitute while your wife stays home with your kids will be NDB in 10 years? Everyone has a good laugh?
The other component to this is arbitrarily and unevenly enforcing deliberately vague laws. See Jim Crow South. Hope you don’t have any illegal MP3s or pirated software.
In the authoritarian police state - organizing against the authoritarian police state is a crime. They’re already demanding social media access of US citizens at the border. I feel like there’s a decent chance in my lifetime my twitter and FB feeds could going to put me on a huge list. Maybe I can’t get back into the country in 10 years w/o going through hell.
And finally if push comes to shove they can always just hack into your computer and plant some highly illegal pron. Who’s going to go to bat for that?
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I think you’re picking deliberately extreme examples. Do I think that in 40 years time it could be found out that someone is into pissing porn, or gangbangs, or something like that, and nobody will care? Or that if it were 2059, Katie Hill wouldn’t have to resign? Yeah, I think that’s totally possible. “Raw dogging a prostitute”? Probably not, but that’s the worst possible spin on “having an affair”, which is quite obviously something which might become tolerated. I know this because it is tolerated in France. Francois Mitterand had a daughter with his mistress, and both of them attended his funeral alongside his wife. Nobody cared.
I think most of the point of this post is to bait someone into taking a piss on France. Shame on you! Nobody loves France more than this forum.
The French never care about that stuff. But your wife might.
Elliot Spitzer tried to raw dog his prostitute but she wouldn’t let him. Maybe some of the other ones did. He was brought down by surveillance on moving money around. Supposedly all routine - but we’ll never know if he didn’t get some extra scrutiny because he had a ton of enemies.
The Stasi’s motto was “to know everything”. Snowden said “I wouldn’t even want God knowing where I go and what I do every day.” Both of those potential threats encompass a lot more than dick picks and affairs.
Information is leverage. Everyone has something they want to hide from someone - especially the average political hopeful who tend to be megalomaniacs.
For us average joes it only takes the fear of extra scrutiny to maybe get us to shut up about politics on social media. Like the RIAA prosecuting maybe 1 in 500,000 MP3 downloaders - but the scare effect got a lot of people to slow down. It’s already happening with people who have someone undocumented living in their house or close family.
In Nicaragua - no one says Ortega’s name. They just say “that guy”. I’ve started to see that with Trump a little. I don’t think it’s because of fear of someone listening, but it’s still interesting.
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https://twitter.com/JimGaffigan/status/1207659117864783872
FWIW this is the kind of thing I’m talking about. I know he’s able to just say “your guy” w/o writing Trump. But there’s still some level of being coy when you don’t name him. Or probably just not necessarily wanting the full force of him or his army to come down on you on twitter.
Whatever it is, no one ever was scared to name a previous president IIRC. Definitely something about a populist dictator.
Also holy cow good for Gaffigan - who certainly has a ton of Trumpites as followers who love his wholesome god-fearing comedy. So much respect.
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I did a double take when I saw that tweet. I had assumed he was deplorable adjacent at a minimum
Not for nothing but that ad with the guy talking his Sansa-Stark-Looking daughter through cooking a pasta dish so her date is a success is way more shitty than the Peloton ad.
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