| The individual in a tribe of hunter-gatherers has a very different concept of privacy. In his/her world everyone pretty much knows everyone else's 'business'. The whole concept of privacy is relatively new to humanity. This doesn't mean its not important. Its actually an emergent property of a scaled civilization. Its an unavoidable situation there but, of course, in that case 'everyone' is a fairly small number. The Internet is revolutionizing privacy and proximity for the FIRST time since the rise of organized agriculture. This isn't going to be an easy transition and will require revisions in law, credit-creation and finance, governance and especially cultural norms. I don't know how it will turn out but I suspect it will be a deal 'maker or breaker' for humanity's future development and the role and rights of the individual. It's a true evolutionary landscape and its design whether arising by accident or intent will determine the nature of our future evolution. How would hunter-gatherers run the world? (pssst... They Do!)
http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-hunte... The Problem in Scaling Altruism: Where's the Intelligent Life?
http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/04/problem-in-scal... On Social Energy, Enterprise & Expanding the Technology of Money
http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-social-energ... Unhindered Speech and Association must be maintained as inherent qualities of this developing landscape. And the information inherent in this speech and association, if it is to have ownership at all... Must be owned by the Commons! The Individually-controlled / Commons-dedicated Account, I believe is an essential element necessary as part of this transition. But I'm an anthropologist and not a computer whiz just trying to understand this new landscape and provide a suggestion or two... |
To which the reply was: Yeah, but you knew exactly _who_ knew your business. This new brand of everybody-knows-everybody's-business is entirely different because it's asymmetrical: everybody knows everything about me but I don't know shit about "them", who they are, where they are, how many of them there are, etc...