Privacy rich vs privacy poor is still a thing these days. I think it will be a great day when not especially tech savvy individuals can opt into being privacy rich. What alarms me is how absurdly difficult it is to get bulletproof opsec for even the most mundane everyday tasks. Somewhere in the early 2000s smart-phones were still being marketed as phones. Now it's abundantly clear you own a beacon and a piece of SIGINT-enabled closed-hardware. This is interesting reading, but throughout the piece, I couldn't help yell: "Throw out your fking smartphone then" if you are averse to spying.
> "Throw out your fking smartphone then" if you are averse to spying.
It was like I was reading something I'd written, right up until this last bit.
(Just some thoughts. Not taking a point with or against you here.)
People want normality. Smartphones are normal, and so normal people want them. I feel strongly that normal people also want privacy, but only enough to say so and not enough to be inconvenienced or live abnormally. If told that normal smartphones are incompatible with privacy, they will then start saying things about not really needing or valuing privacy.
Cognitive dissonance in action.
imho the fix is still to work at making larger chunks of privacy free for normal people :)
No reasonable person would forgo a smartphone. And indeed, doing so would be abnormal, and so bad OPSEC. What's crucial, I think, is being present at all times to the fact of total surveillance. Given that, we can choose sometimes to put the smartphone in a sound-proof Faraday bag. Or use a VPN and/or Tor. Or whatever is appropriate to the context.
Not that this isn't a valuable and fascinating article (and extremely relevant to anyone who connected with that novel), but noted for other inattentive readers who potentially started into it expecting something else.
This piece is a well-built observation; woven from the oft frayed edges of film and books. Really cool to see someone have moderately concise and clear thought that binds across the many fields interested in their respective piece of the larger "issue" facing our current moment.
It's difficult to not share in the author's ambivalence, if not disdain, for the passing dawn of techno-omniscience.
It's that theme of the opacity of the motivations creating a fear response that's most interesting. Yes, we are enjoying these things because they are designed to be enjoyable, free, helpful. But, how is this going to bite me and/or us in the ass once it's beyond the ability to rein it in?
