We live in two worlds now: the natural one where we have bodies that obey the laws of gravity and space/time, and the virtual one where there is no gravity or distance (though there is time).
In other words, we are now digital as well as physical beings, and this is new to a human experience where, so far, we are examined and manipulated like laboratory animals by giant entities that are out of everybody’s control—including theirs.
The collateral effects are countless and boundless.
Take journalism, for example. That’s what I did in a TEDx talk I gave last month in Santa Barbara:
I next visited several adjacent territories with a collection of brilliant folk at the Ostrom Workshop on Smart Cities. (Which was live-streamed, but I’m not sure is archived yet. Need to check.)
Among those folk was Brett Frischmann, whose canonical work on infrastructure I covered here, and who in Re-Engineering Humanity (with Evan Selinger) explains exactly how giants in the digital infrastructure business are hacking the shit out of us—a topic I also visit in Engineers vs. Re-Engineering (my August editorial in Linux Journal).
Now also comes Bruce Schneier, with his perfectly titled book Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World, which Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times sources in A Future Where Everything Becomes a Computer Is as Creepy as You Feared. Pull-quote: “In our government-can’t-do-anything-ever society, I don’t see any reining in of the corporate trends.”
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, a monumental work due out in January (and for which I’ve seen some advance galleys) Shoshana Zuboff makes both cases (and several more) at impressive length and depth.
Privacy plays in all of these, because we don’t have it yet in the digital world. Or not much of it, anyway.
In reverse chronological order, here’s just some what I’ve said on the topic:
- The first two podcasts we’ve done so far at Linux Journal.
- Privacy = personal agency + respect by others for personal dignity (10 July 2018 in ProjectVRM)
- Let’s Make May 25th Privmas Day (16 May 2018)
- Privacy is still personal (4 May 2018 in Linux Journal)
- Privacy is personal. Let’s start there. (2 May 2018 in Customer Commons and in Medium)
- For privacy we need tech more than policy (2 April 2018)
- More thoughts on privacy (13 December 2015)
- Privacy is personal (2 July 2014 in Linux Journal)
- Thoughts on Privacy (31 August 2013)
So here we are: naked in the virtual world, just like we were in the natural one before we invented clothing and shelter.
And that’s the challenge: to equip ourselves to live private and safe lives, and not just public and endangered ones, in our new virtual world.
Some of us have taken up that challenge too: with ProjectVRM, with Customer Commons, and with allied efforts listed here.
And I’m optimistic about our prospects.
I’ll also be detailing that optimism in the midst of a speech titled “Why adtech sucks and needs to be killed” next Wednesday (October 17th) at An Evening with Advertising Heretics in NYC. Being at the Anne L. Bernstein Theater on West 50th, it’s my off-Broadway debut. The price is a whopping $10.
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