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by gyam 1778 days ago
Anonymity is the default, we don’t walk around with our names and all our interests and thoughts attached to a label to be read by anyone. If anything, internet made it go away. Eg. even if you knew a person’s name you wouldn’t be able to look up other information about them before, now you can. Previously, you’d be able to go to a store and buy a thing without giving any information, now you have to give the “email” that collects most information about you. Your examples of loan, licence etc are not like 99% of interactions, and those can be handled as special cases like before.
2 comments

> Previously, you’d be able to go to a store and buy a thing without giving any information

We can still do that, it's called paying with cash. Paper money is the people's money.

> Your examples of loan, licence etc are not like 99% of interactions, and those can be handled as special cases like before

With regards to loans, it is possible for state governments to establish regional public land loan offices to issue equity loans in reference to the production and replacement cost of existent tangible personal property fixed or held on site without monitoring all of the purchases of movable personal property by the borrower to determine credit-worthiness. The borrower just has to prove there is some tangible artifact of personal property which exists, which the loan office can auction if the debt goes bad or write off if the artifact is destroyed.

We just have to mandate the loan offices don't do something stupid, like issue loans against the excess value of real estate attributable land scarcity and resell mortgages to private investors which will resell derivatives, to avoid generating a real estate bubble and the accumulation of $100+ trillion in derivatives. Additionally we'd probably need to replace many regressive taxes with distributive land taxes to ensure that households and cooperatives had cheaper access to land in order to obtain a deed or long term lease granting the security for spatially fixed personal property necessary to qualify for such loans.

for most of human history, people knew the names and interests of people around them

anonymity is a recent thing