Like Oil Leads to Global Warming, Data Leads to Social Cooling
socialcooling.com
socialcooling.com
The privilege to be invisible, to be anonymous, is a right we never knew we had..
Total knowledge really limits your freedom. Why would you choose a course of action if you know it's wrong? Everyone ends up doing the same thing, according to the rules of the game.
In the past there were far more people who wanted to win the game but didn't have enough information to make the "correct" decision, than there were people willing to lose the game with knowledge of the correct decision.
You can call it imperfection, or the right to be wrong, or just ignorance. It's what affords us freedom.
When were you most carefree in life? When you were a child ignorant of the rules. I'm not saying be childlike, but just establishing the tradeoff here. We've gone way too far into the side of too much information, and it's making us less free and less happy.
Unfortunately it also leads to countries jealous of your success, undermining your everyday conversations with comments designed to trigger discontent.
Like, Fox News or Jezebel (or CNN, or Reddit, et al) are the ones causing these shifts, and foreign efforts are simply tapping into discussions and trends that have been pushed for years.
"All warfare is based primarily on deception of an enemy. Fighting on a battlefield is the most primitive way of making war. There is no art higher than to destroy your enemy without a fight by subverting anything of value in your enemy's country."
-Sun Tzu, c. 500 BC "The Art of War [0]
"Rules of Revolution"
"1. Corrupt the young, get them interested in sex, take them away from religion. Make them superficial and enfeebled.
2. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial issues of no importance.
3. Destroy people’s faith in their national leaders by holding the latter up for contempt, ridicule and disgrace.
4. Always preach democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.
5. By encouraging government extravagances, destroy its credit, produce years of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.
6. Incite unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of the government towards such disorders."
- Tomas Schuman (post-KGB-defection Yuri Bezmenov), "Love Letter to America" [1]
An effective way to prepare a child (newcomer to language) for the timeless bombardment of foreign ideological subterfuge is by telling a simple story of how paradise was lost [2] because the soothsayer targets the spirit of the life-affirming (compassionate) component of the city-state as the most direct path to that which provides its strength. The taste of judgement is forbidden because you will then spend your days (as an agitated, less productive civilian being physically protected by an authority) wondering about how local conditions should be changed according to your personal opinions&comfort which means you have rejected the requirement of loyalty&obedience. At this point you are not worth being provided for since you become the source of expensive internal convulsions, and are therefore cast back out into the unorganized chaos for which need of the nation-state arose. In the same breath, through this story-telling, you elevate the ideals of the assignment of order&purpose, creation, cooperation, and organization as central tenets for the foundation of civilization.
[0] https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/subversion-death-fr...
[1] https://ia800602.us.archive.org/11/items/love-letter-america...
I will definitely be referencing and sharing this more when I try to convince people that data collection, effective mass internet surveillance, and data hygiene actually matter. And it may give me a little ammo to respond to the people with the attitude of "why should I care? I don't have anything to hide, whatever"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 185 comments when posted originally in 2017
if you actually believed the club of rome was roughly/partly right, and that the ipcc's worst-plausible scenarios are ahead, then the subtle social effect of bigdata is like... a wildly abstract thing compared to the famines and wars and mass refugee crisis those assumptions entail.
as we iterate through our reckoning with the scope of the problem these little crossover nuggets are popping up more and more. people who understand the metrics of the problem, and are even on the pragmatically-pessimistic side, but who then sortof just sliiiiiide over it in their brain.
Furthermore, it's becoming more and more important to not only opt out of this nonsense but to actively engage in sabotage of such data(legally). Google shouldn't know nothing about you, it should believe lots and lots of useless and incorrect information about you.
How does one accomplish this?
This SHOULD be the default, where the current default is obviously problematic alerts (almost) nobody reads.
Edits in brackets