When I thought about zeldab.com in 2007, it was about privacy.
It was about a simple thought = “Without privacy there is no freedom”.
And it was about this piece, The Right To Privacy by Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis. Published in The Harvard Law Review, December 15, 1890
Nobody cared about zeldab.com. Tech people such as Scott McNealy were telling everyone “privacy is dead, get over it“. BTW, these same people were making loads of money selling our data. A couple years later we abandoned development.
The other day Blackwellspace sent me this great piece on Buzzfeed – Infocalypse Now. People need to understand what’s happened and what’s coming. Because, “It’ll only take a couple of big hoaxes to really convince the public that nothing’s real”. Infocalypse Now is required reading.
This isn’t about Trump. But it’s related. Trump and his gang of thugs, oops, his Administration, have convinced people not to trust the media. This is right out of the Authoritarian Rule Playbook – convince people there’s no truth, so that they’ll believe you. David Frum lays out the path to Authoritarian control in his seminal piece for The Atlantic – How to Build an Autocracy.
The best advice about the Internet is, “Don’t post anything you don’t want following you the rest of your life”. We’ve seen what social media has brought us. We’ve seen what happens, when we trade privacy for a free account.
So why do we keep doing it? Why do we keep logging on? Why on earth, does any sane person log onto social media?
I’ve said for years it’s because we’re hooked on free software and two day delivery. Tim Wu says pretty much the same thing in his piece, The Tyranny of Convenience.
I was going to close with something like “It’ll get worse, then it’ll get better”. I think that’s being overly optimistic.
Instead, I think it’s way past time to admit that we’re fucked. That our minds have been taken over, privacy is gone, what little freedom we have left will soon be gone.
Does anyone care?
Also.
It makes not much sense to have “share this” links on a site that has anything to do with health or self-help sites. Because social media is really unhealthy.
Same thing with reading a piece like this one, then in the footer of the piece there’s links to share on social media.
To me, both examples are akin to telling someone about cancer, then handing them a cigarette.
“Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google prioritized clicks, shares, ads, and money over quality of information.” This is what Buzzfeed does only they cut out themselves from it as well they are stupid and pandering to young people with their crap quiz, which is just them datamining your information, they are unusable as a factual source. Its is stupid for common people to assume that your privacy is gone which it isn’t if you don’t use these platforms. What you say on a social media platform won’t come back to bite you because you don’t need to use your real information which is the best advice on social media not to think about it following you around for the rest of your life.