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Comment by jrumbut | Hacker News Reader

It depends what kind of individual freedoms you care about. I've seen surveillance capitalism expressed as the freedom of people to enter into agreements where they get free cell phone games in exchange for a trove of personal data.

Like you I would welcome some state intervention here, but I have to recognize that this is me lessening my commitment to the values of individualism.

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Honestly I think individualism is inherently in conflict with populations in the hundreds of millions. The more people you have, the more your chasing a local maximum contributes to a tragedy of the commons situation.

This works across a whole bunch of smaller geographic or even ideological alignment. Eventually you have to draw a line on individual freedom when it oversteps the values of the society, and you have to draw more of those lines the more edge cases you have to accommodate.

I think the opposite is the case. The larger the population, the more infeasible central control becomes. Also, individualism doesn't support polluting commons. To the contrary, I have no moral right to pollute another individual's space or air under individualism.

Moral right or not, you have to violate individualism on some level to enforce any action about it. Individualism need not be curtailed by a central authority; cultural norms can do just as good a job.

And for too many people, “individualism” really just means “other people should be free to be like me”.

Every individualist I know, including myself since I consider myself one, believes that a state is necessary to resolve and mediate disputes between individuals. So I don't think this is a violation of individualism. Even Objectivists believe in the courts and police. The key is that the state is there to protect individual rights, that's it.

I think you're exactly right, another poster raised the interesting point of whether where those lines are drawn is inevitable based on the circumstances or if we have a lot of collective control.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

> Like you I would welcome some state intervention here, but I have to recognize that this is me lessening my commitment to the values of individualism.

Is it though? Do you consider state intervention to eliminate slavery/indentured servitude to be a similar reduction in commitment?

The question, when trying to maximize individual freedom, is what exactly you're maximizing. You can take approaches that maximize the freedom of those already most free (those with wealth and privilege), or you can try to increase the average (mean) freedom, or the median freedom, or increase the freedom of those who are least free by establishing a floor.

Most of the approaches other than the first involve curtailing the freedoms of the most free in some way.

Wanting to increase the median individual freedom by limiting the ability of individuals to enter into agreements with corporations that trade away their privacy in this way doesn't necessarily signal a lessening of commitment to individualism.

Well, first, it's "to enter into implicit agreements..." — I think it's an important detail. Second, you always pay for "cell phone games" with some amount of money (ranging from $0 to infinity) plus a trove of optional data; the option to pay with just money simply is not there.

> the option to pay with just money simply is not there.

You seem to be confused about the concept of consent.

Why so many people want to be baby sitted? You do not want something just discard it.

It is our fault let us not blame the others.

When was the last time you opened FB or similar? I try to keep it to a minimum. Probably less than once a year my wall.

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