On the internet, we’re always famous
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not discussed often enough. Its a discussion that should have happened in (the year) 1984 when the terminator came out, and Arnold killed a bunch of people by looking them up in the yellow pages. Everyone having increasingly easy access to the tools necessary to perform these kinds of "OSINT investigations" into nearly anybody is not good for society.
Heh, maybe society can shed the fan star dynamic, and it will all be okay.
By the way, Anonymous wrote some pretty good poems back in the day; surveillance doesn't always come with fame.
Not 84, but Brin wrote about it in 1996 in Transparent Society. I find his take on it naive, was the first solid discussion outside academia and is worth read8ng.
Agre wrote about this quite a bit in the 80s.
It does seem a little naive in retrospect, but a world where people would be willing to pay a modest amount in a competitive market for pseudonymity, and would trust banks to provide it, sure seems like a better world than the world we live in.
That's sodding terrifying.
In the 90s, I found a bosses address in the yellow pages in seconds, then called him at home on a Sunday, to chat the end of a football game.
Now I hate my boss and love random folks online.
Weird.
What's especially disconcerting is how fast your physical address leaks out. Within a couple of months moving to a new rental, they have my address down to the apartment number even though I never publish that publicly anywhere. I assume they ingest large data breaches.
We really need a kind of DNS for physical addresses. Abstract your physical address behind an fixed virtual one and only allow authorized parties to resolve the address. This would also be hugely helpful for people that move around a lot, since you'd never have to update your mailing address with any vendor ever again.
* “You should aspire to be successful”
* “You need to be beautiful”
* “You won’t get what you want unless you are powerful”
All of these statements share the same narcissistic attribute of requiring attention and validation from people whom you have no other connection to. This is deeply weird. Social media gives this narcissism a platform.
The presumption of a distinction is pivotal to Western subjectivity, again, particularly in America; "class distinction" is an ornament of the individual.
Not saying, like Carl Schmitt, that we need to bring back actual, explicitly stratified distinction between the people and the people who make sovereign decisions, but that perhaps we need to reconsider the way we relate to ourselves in the form of some sort of socio-political mastery.
Then again, this idea of the self as master is as old as Aristotle, but the ancient Greek polis was a whole political organization built for that idea.
I sometimes consider the notion that, socially,
Western modernity was just reified feudalism:
everybody's a lord now!
For most of my life, people in the 'third world' lived in barely imaginable poverty while the rest of the world walked off with oil, lumber, precious metals, gems, historical artifacts, slave labor, etc. I was well out of highschool before I appreciated the connection between the squalor elsewhere, and the four or five previous centuries of pillaging that contributed to it.
That unpleasant state of affairs tempers my ability to feel triumphalist about 'first-world' nations ridding themselves of feudalism.
I'm not keen to rebut it at much length because my previous comment already leaves the wrong impression: my point is less about the morality of the past few hundred years than the stupidity of the narrative we built around it.
If I did expand on things, I'd list off the usual examples (Conquistadors and gold, Chinese opium trade, slaughter of native Americans, ad nauseum).
I don't know how to make those points without sounding like I'm appealing to emotion. The actual point is that - though the Steven Pinkers and Hans Roslings might disagree - people subject to those conditions clearly are worse-off than before (and than today, compared to the nations who plundered them).
To the original point of the thread, the colonial powers attained such obscene wealth (ie: by stealing gold, oil, farming cotton with slave labor, etc) that even the poorest among us, until the past decade, was rich compared to the rest of the world.
What changed my view about the world is thinking about the economics.
Take the US, for example. In the popular imagination, the success of America is all about entrepreneurial spirit, etc etc. But the other aspect is... four million square miles of (in a manner of speaking) undeveloped land! Entrepreneurial spirit is great, but literally having more natural resources than you know what to do with (didn't get around to developing California till the 1900s, for example) seems at least as important.
Given the past several centuries were a free-for-all for nations with empires, it doesn't surprise me that the colonized societies, whatever their inherent strengths and weaknesses, wound up in bad shape.
IIRC Aristotle's writing tends to explicitly exclude slaves (i.e. the majority of population) and women from moral reasoning, so the idea of self is discussed in the context of literate (so not very poor) free adult male citizens, perhaps the top 5-10% of the population at most. Quoting Aristotle, "The slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element; the female has it but it lacks authority; the child has it but it is incomplete".
In that time and place they invariably are literal masters of a household that's quite larger than modern households, including slaves, women, kids and younger male adults; so for the target audience of Aristotle's work it's never about just them alone as all of them have quite significant rights (and some responsibilities) over multiple other people; Aristotle was not writing for or about the "lower 90%".
I was hoping the latter part of that statement was a pointer at what you would go on to elaborate on, but wholy agree. Nichomachean Ethics, for anyone who's closely read that text, is an aristocratic parenting guide more than anything else.
But what's more, much of modernity's discourse of rational agency is built upon this master/slave metaphor; up to today where we still refer to whole demographics as 'incapable' of self-mastery.
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric...
Major science experiment.
- Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon
Says every utopian thinker throughout history against the overwhelming evidence of the human experience.
Note that, with the groups they “cancel” in place of “Cancel culture and its practitioners,” the practitioners of what you call “cancel culture” would tend to agree with every word of this, which is the entire rationale for what you call “cancel culture”.
The thing is - tolerance and love are wonderful values but they're things that need to be worked on, constantly.
Humans are, honestly, wired for small-ish tribes.
We're not meant to be over-exposed to information, much less endless groups of people and constant "other-ness" the way we are today. And i mean this not just in a "christians discriminate against a homosexual sense" but also the inverse, where progressives can't imagine someone thinking differently from them having a moral reasoning for doing so.
The internet has over-connected us and the machines of capital trying to capture eye-balls and clicks, or hell - just motivated people on social media trying to get likes and upvotes, is going to drive people to be assholes, to persecute, to "cancel", to try to ruin and take down someone. and every time that's done another group will try to do it "back".
Our connectedness - at the scale and the way we are connecting - is ripping us apart.
and there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
we won't be moving on from cancel culture. We will be building ontop of it things that are even worse.