[tslug]

I don't know where you get the Utopian / changing-everyone conclusion from. I don't see any Utopian solutions, but I do see the potential for dramatic improvement.

Improvement requires more information, not less. Democracy is about equality. You don't have equality when you don't have equality of information. The only way to have a level playing field is to have everyone's information publicly available.

Once you do that, you have to emulate the benefits of privacy in some other way. Tolerating more and respecting the wishes of others is I think the best way forward.

If you've got a better way to emulate the benefits of privacy, I'm all ears, but don't try to convince me we can have privacy back, not in this age of the internet of things, drones, Uber, Google, Facebook, smart cars, cell phones, big data, big corporations, big government. It's just not going to happen.

[newscracker]

> The only way to have a level playing field is to have everyone's information publicly available.

This is extremely naive, to put it mildly. More people will be oppressed and suffer heavily if this were to happen. All that such a request would result in is a dictatorship where everybody's information is publicly available except for the few who rule.

I also don't understand how anyone could bring about "tolerance and respect" while having all information public, considering what history has shown us for thousands of years, and is continuing to show us day by day. The two put together seem like a desire to destroy capitalism, which is not easy to destroy or replace because of innate human characteristics.

It does seem like you are dreaming of a Utopia that's far more difficult to achieve than better (not necessarily perfect) privacy through technology, laws and culture.

While I do see that privacy erosion happening and increasing, that's not an excuse for saying that nobody should have privacy at all. If you really mean "all of everyone's information" to be public, I can only assume you want everyone's photos, videos, messages, safe locker key codes, banking passwords, credit card numbers, health records and everything else to be publicly available. That sounds utterly ridiculous to me, unless you revise what you mean by "information" and what you mean by "everyone". The moment you start on that revision, you're already talking about privacy controls again.

[tslug]

Yes, I mean everyone, including the dictator you would have abusing the system, so that he could be seen doing it and thus would not be above society's agreements himself.

Replacing capitalism is a fine idea too. Even Trump, the original fan of capitalism, is making a show of kicking out folks who might have lobbying ties.

In fact, if you think about how a healthy family or healthy company works, the first thing they do is push capitalism to the outside, because it tends to make people upset.

That's why you're not encouraged to share salaries with each other or why you're not encouraged to put up advertisements encouraging people to come to your office for consulting for a 20% off for a limited time only. That's why when Mom serves you breakfast, you don't pay her $10, and kids don't say, "I dunno, Mom. Joey's Mom down the block serves a much more competitive breakfast and is offering 50% more love."

When you reduce the value of the goods and services people provide down to a scalar, it becomes trivial to compare people on a line, and that way lies drama.

If you think about it, the idea that the clearly multidimensional value of goods and services can be formally represented by a single scalar is ludicrous on the surface of it, and now that we have cell phones that can do a billion vector operations in one second, there's really not much reason that we shouldn't be migrating to a more accurate and powerful way to represent value using long, sparse vectors. This actually goes very nicely with broadcast surveillance, because you can repurpose all that information to capture far more attributes and information on any good or service all the way down the supply chain.

[type0]

> Democracy is about equality. You don't have equality when you don't have equality of information.

I'm not sure what you mean by it but in many countries collecting counter-intelligence info on intelligence agency employees would be punishable by law. If anything this sorts of laws will probably become universal with time.

[mario100]

You are assuming that the concept of tolerance and respect are the same for everyone.

[tslug]

Not at all. I think how everyone wants to be shown respect is quite different. This would be an enormous problem if we didn't all have cell phones in our pockets and the ability to specify how we want to be treated.

For instance, if you stuck multiple cameras in my shower that were broadcast to everyone, I would ask that you not force my friends or family to see it (but if course if they wanted to, they could), and I'd ask that you not tell me what you think of the footage unless you're a dermatologist telling me about a worrisome new mole you noticed, or you're someone who notified a first responder because you noticed I just slipped and knocked myself unconscious and was starting to bleed to death, in which case I'd like to thank you. If you want to make me a part of a study, go nuts! If you want to jerk off to me, I'm flattered, but again, prolly don't want to hear about it (unless you're my type).

That's how you can respect me. I can specify it. We all can. There's probably multiple lists of things that large groups of us want in order to feel our shower footage was respected, and I could just click on one of them. I'm sure many of mine fall under the GoNutsButDon'tWantToHearAboutIt and MedicalAndScientificValue lists. So if you decide man, gotta have me some of that shower footage of Dave, by all means, but with this approach, knowledge comes with a measure of responsibility.

This is very unlike how it works today. If footage of you in the shower leaks, boy, that's that. Here comes the internets to tell you everything you never wanted to know about your genitalia...