The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.
I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.
One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.
We need to start seeing privacy as a commons – as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer.
As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable.
There is this absurd assumption that the revitalisation of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse ‘civic’ and ‘civil,’ and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association.
Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it’s probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don’t see any big political consequences out of that.
North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives – or risk having their narratives shaped by others.
Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology.
We’ve never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It’s been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they’re always the enemy.
My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an Internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as ‘the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.’
I spent two years in Palo Alto – what an awful, suffocating place for those of us who don’t care about yoga, yogurts and start-ups – and now I have moved to Cambridge, MA – which, in many respects, is like Palo Alto but a bit snarkier.
I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.
I used to work for an NGO called Transitions Online, and I was their Director of New Media. I was a very idealistic fellow who thought that he could use blogs, social networks and new media to help promote democracy, human rights and freedom of expression.
If China’s expansion into Africa and Russia’s into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley’s ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.
If we don’t like rent control, we ought to oppose it on political and social grounds – and not just by arguing that, thanks to smartphones and social networks, we can create new, more efficient markets for matching short-term renters with tenants.
Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.
I want my government to do something about my privacy – I don’t want to just do it on my own.
My fear is that many institutions will eventually alter how they treat people who refuse to self-track. There are all sorts of political and moral implications here, and I’m not sure that we have grappled with any of them.
When it is about technology, there is this tendency to just reject all criticism as being anti-technological and anti-modern. I think this is very unhealthy.