Why Can’t Offline-Borns Tell Difference Between Voluntary And Forced Actions?
falkvinge.net
falkvinge.net
One thing i've noticed since my mom discovered Facebook, is how she seemingly always forgets who can see what. It would seem like she is not capable of understanding the multiple contexts that exist... and frankly I don't blame her. There's a lot. In facebook alone, there are posts everyone can see of course I can restrict that. I can post on someone elses wall, of course then mutual friends can see, unless or course permissions are configured otherwise.
It can get really confusing when in the previous 50 years of your life, you really only had to deal with two contexts. Person at the other end of the phone, or other people in your proximity.
I've pretty much grown up dealing with multiple virtual contexts, so it's natural to me (and other people in my generation) but its definitely not natural to my mother.
I'd be really curious if there's actually something physiologically different between our brains?
I really, really doubt it.
Part of learning to do anything abstract is that eventually, the abstraction becomes real to you.
Money, musical notes, a "for loop", at some point, the abstraction becomes as real to you as a piece of wood you can knock on.
All human brains do this, all the time, for everything. I bet you don't know what the little sticky-up-pipe thing on the top of your house does, but plumbers do. It's a thing and it has a name.
It's hilarious to me to imagine that "online stuff" is special when the fact is that most people do not see the real world at all through the massive fog of abstractions we all live in.
Most people don't know where their water comes from or where their shit goes to either. Do we call them "on plumbing" or "off plumbing" people?
It's just practice, context, familiarity and importance.
P.S: I do think things are radically different now, I don't think people or brains are.
When the water doesn't come out of the tap, the shit doesn't get flushed away, or for some other reason you're forced to deal with the mundane reality of life, your perspective will change slightly. Your reality will shift. Or if you buy a house, or have to do repairs.
What I am saying is, is that this is absolutely no different than everyone else - the other people, who also do not live in reality. They don't understand how the plumbing works either, but their reality most likely involves intrigues, dramas and scripts with other people, played out perhaps on a slightly different stage.
There is nothing in understanding facebook or moving a mouse around which requires new neural hardware.
P.S: > "Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it" This is kind of ironic when you're talking about "online" as a place. If we're to use that metric, "online" is extremely unreal. (I think it's as real a place as any other, and not especially more unreal than other unrealities we live in).
All of these are basically "spooky action at a distance". You move something here and something completely unrelated changes there by way of magic. It's no wonder people who've never even seen such things for 50 years or more don't have the mental model to understand them.
I'd be really curious if there's actually something physiologically different between our brains?"
Given the amount of effort spent "saving face" and "keeping up appearances" by the older generations, as well as oftentimes truly sprawling protocols for dealing with different subgraphs of extended family ("Don't talk about this to your aunt, unless your cousin is around, etc."), I'm pretty sure that mankind has had virtualization of social networks for quite some time.
I highly doubt that we're special snowflakes.
However I see plenty of young people who don't care about the NSA scandal ranging from apathy to "what do I have to hide?", and I see plenty of old people who understand the evils of mass surveillance even if they don't understand the technology.
If there's a generational correlation then first that should be established. It seems dangerous to simply assume it is generational warfare and demonize the older generation who actually should know a thing or two about surveillance states since they've definitely been around for a while.
I think you misunderstood, and that his point is that offline-born do not understand and value privacy online. He backs it up, kind of, with the statements he then goes on to discuss.
Facebook and Glass both have this property. Technologies which harness the privacy-unaware to compromise the privacy-aware really shit me.
Fortunately I have nothing to hide. Naturally ;)
The online generation, technically speaking, is giving away their private information to third parties which (in their TOS) state that they take no responsibility for it, make no guarantees about privacy, and will comply with government requests if they believe it is in their best interests. The problem isn't that governments can require service providers to hand over the data, as many of those service providers are usually very happy to comply. The problem is that we are using services implemented in a way which does not conform to our expectations.
Chatting online with end-to-end encryption and trustworthy software and hardware is reasonably analogous to chatting in real life: you are communicating with the individual identified by the key, whom you trust not to share your conversation with the world. Chatting on Facebook has nothing to do with this: you're chatting with a third party that you assume is relaying the messages to someone you assume is the person you want to talk to.
“These people are having sex with a lot of people. Obviously, they don’t mind having sex with other people, and that gives me the right to have sex with them, by force if necessary.”
People unfortunately actually have made (and still make) similar statements to justify objectification and sexual predation of people labeled as promiscuous. It doesn't seem like something that has changed though at a certain point in time due to a watershed reconceptualization (the sexual revolution?) equivalent to the generational shift of offline-born to online-born.
It is about societal conceptualization of sexuality and (in the case of NSA situation) privacy, but I don't think it maps cleanly onto generational change. When people see sexuality or privacy as "all-or-nothing" matters, the same crude logic pervades, whether it's "they aren't a virgin, so they can't refuse sex" or "they share everything on facebook anyways, so they can't refuse giving it to us."
His premise seems to be that the governments would respect privacy if only they understood the implications of their policies. But that's silly. In fact some older-generation people may fail to understand tech-related issues, but others do, and in either case the ruling class simply couldn't care about citizens' rights. They see an opportunity to gain more power for their respective governments, and a better position in relation to other nations, and that's all there is to it. They don't mind lying, concealing or spewing whatever euphemistic rhetoric or pretexts they can think of to mollify the public, but it has little to do with their actual policy objectives.
There is a valid point however, that privacy is not about who knows what, rather it is about being in control of what others know about oneself.
I was born in the early 80s, but didn't become aware of the existence of a thing called an "Internet" until the mid-late 90s. So I can recall a time when there wasn't a thing called an "Internet". Does that make me an offline-born?
On the other hand, since discovering the Internet, it's been an integral part of my life. Though I understand that society actually managed to somehow exist before the Internet did, the concept still feels somewhat alien to me now. It is like reading about the Dark Ages in a history book. Things couldn't have truly been like that, could they? Does that make me an online-born?
Am I both?
He didn't.
“This old lady is giving some of her money away for free to charities she picks. Obviously, she doesn’t care to keep her money, so it can’t possibly be a big deal that we take the rest of her money without giving her a say about it.”
“These people are having sex with a lot of people. Obviously, they don’t mind having sex with other people, and that gives me the right to have sex with them, by force if necessary.”
If these two statements come across as shockingly arrogant to you as an offline-born, then you need to learn and understand that the first statement, which treats privacy as up for grabs, is perceived exactly as shockingly arrogant to the net generation.
maybe privacy invasion and theft can be compared against each other, but bringing rape into the equation as if it somehow sits on the same level is ridiculous.