Hacker News Reader

Comment by totalperspectiv | Hacker News Reader

I recently finished "Information Doesn't want to be Free" and would highly recommend it as informed and well reasoned commentary on topics like this. Cory Doctrow puts into words the vague hand wavy feelings I have when we start talking about encryption, copyright, and freedom of speech on the internet.

The ebook is free (with suggested donation) on his website.

View on HN

To elaborate more and provide some substance, the existential threat posed by regulations like this is really hard to get across to the broader public. The more good analogies we can acquire for explaining why every day people doing every day things should be able to do so privately, is important.

Maciej Ceglowski recently wrote about this: https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm - he calls it "ambient privacy."

> For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.

The article is presented more in terms of JS/app trackers, but I believe the analogy still applies.

Absolutely. In the book I like above he gives a similar analogy: that most conversation is made up of little meaningless things, but that those meaningless things are essential to the more momentous things that build upon them. It would be ridiculous to require that all conversations between individuals be conducted with a third party observer, both for the logistical ramifications, but also because it would destroy the little things that are the building blocks of society, essentially.

I also like the bathroom door analogy. Everyone knows what you are doing, but we still insist that there is a door.

Reminds me much of the philosopher Fredric Jameson's notion that modern culture basically exemplifies the end of temporality. There is much less forgetting, including forgetting of inconsequential minutiae, nowadays.

Anyone who is in favor of this banning of encryption should have to hand over their unlocked mobile device to anyone that asks. The "I have nothing to hide" perspective doesn't hold when people think about it more personally. These things are very much about who will watch the watchers?

"Regulations" is a terrible word conflating and FUDing necessary protections with unfair restrictions. Deranged, all-or-nothing libertarians mindlessly cargo-cult refrain "regulations and government are evil becus government" is typical of bombastic, utopian drivel. Laws vary in harm, protection and/or benefit by degrees and by circumstances... nuance FTW. Most of the time, corporate capture of government's policy-making leads to inaction on major issues, corruption, military-industrial-complex self-dealing and capitalist-class-leaning grotesque inequality.

I couldn't find a downloadable copy on his website. Here's an external link: https://archive.org/details/InformationDoesntWantToBeFree

Reply on news.ycombinator.com