- Nov 30, 2004
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Facebook paranoia is getting out of hand.
2 year plan to get off Facebook?
As said earlier, treat it like a public space and don't post nudes or stories about that time you took loads of drugs and woke up naked in the lama enclosure at the zoo.
"Facebook" isn't the biggest problem. Getting off facebook isn't about facebook. It's about controlling your identity, and controlling your life. Facebook gathers data, and puts into a neat database for anyone with money or a tin star to take. It's not about mom seeing your tit shots from Friday night. It's about insurance companies probing your life to see if they'll give you coverage. It's about potential employers running a psychological profile on your /friends/ to see if you get a job. It's about the government snooping on your "terrorist" affiliations. A "terrorist" is what they say it is, and it can change in a single announcement by the government. Think you aren't a terrorist? Think again...
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Eben Moglen said:Which brings us I will admit to back to this question of anonymity, or rather, personal autonomy. One of the really problematic elements in teaching young people, at least the young people I teach, about privacy, is that we use the word privacy to mean several quite distinct things. Privacy means secrecy, sometimes. That is to say, the content of a message is obscured to all but it's maker and intended recipient. Privacy means anonymity, sometimes, that means messages are not obscured, but the points generating and receiving those messages are obscured. And there is a third aspect of privacy which in my classroom I call autonomy. It is the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions that you make are unaffected by others' access to secret or anonymous communication.
There is a reason that cities have always been engines of economic growth. It isn't because bankers live there. Bankers live there because cities are engines of economic growth. The reason cities have been engines of economic growth since Sumer, is that young people move to them, to make new ways of being. Taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village, and the social control of the farm. "How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris?" was a fair question in 1919 and it had a lot do with the way the 20th century worked in the United States. The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living. We are closing it.
The network, as it stands now, is an extraordinary platform for enhanced social control. Very rapidly, and with no apparent remorse, the two largest governments on earth, that of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China have adopted essentially identical points of view. A robust social graph connecting government to everybody and the exhaustive data mining of society is both governments fundamental policy with respect to their different forms of what they both refer to, or think of, as stability maintenance. It is true of course that they have different theories of how to maintain stability for whom and why, but the technology of stability maintenance is becoming essentially identical.
We need, we, who understand what is happening, need, to be very vocal about that. But it isn't just our civil liberties that are at stake, I shouldn't need to say that, that should be enough, but of course it isn't. We need to make clear that the other part of what that costs us is the very vitality and vibrancy of invention culture and discourse, that wide open robust and uninhibited public debate that the Supreme Court so loved in New York Times against Sullivan. And that freedom to tinker, to invent, to be different, to be non-conformist for which people have always moved to the cities that gave them anonymity, and a chance to experiment with who they are, and why they can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2VHf5vpBy8
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