Can we still recover the right to be left alone?

I&#x27;ve never had this feeling more poignantly than one day, where I was deep in a wilderness zone of the Cascades, several miles from even the nearest logging road.<p>I was minding my own business, pack in, pack out, with not a soul in sight. And out popped a park ranger, the first person I had seen in days, asking me if I had a permit to exist in the wilderness.<p>No, no I did not. Sorry for the terrible intrusion of existing. Then he went up to write an order that I had 2 days to get off the public land, with it being a 2 day hike out. Before handing it, he wanted an address I had none. Apparently this somehow broke his brain. The dude would literally not let me go until I came up with an address, even though I legitimately had none.

You could frame the entire project of building a political system as just solving this problem without extra side effects.<p>If you want the right to be left alone, you have to concentrate power, so that people who don&#x27;t leave other people alone can be effectively punished. That concentrated power attracts the kind of people who don&#x27;t like leaving other people alone. To these power-seekers, people left alone are an opportunity cost, they could be forced to work towards some goal set by the power-seekers.

If privacy is the ground for creativity and agency, then let it be the soil in which mystery grows, not the airtight vault that suffocates every conversation about you. When you extend that absence to forbid mention or thought, you’ve weaponized oblivion into censorship. The right to be left alone is the creation of thought‑crime by fiat.

I too subscribe to the idea it&#x27;s the collection of data that invades privacy not (just) usage. It used to be more widespread. But as software people there are traitor in our ranks. People who decided to become conman to justify abusing others and perpetuate lies that it&#x27;s all benign. All in the name of maximixing data exfiltration so they could get in on the scam. Plenty of money to be made, after all. And such big servers to play with too.

This can&#x27;t happen unless we find a way to demonetize private information. And since digital information is trivial to duplicate&#x2F;copy, that&#x27;s a tough hill to climb.

In Britain young people say &quot;Leave me in peace&quot;. Peace is the state of being left alone, not just an absence of violence. Only later, adults develop separate notion of &quot;privacy&quot;, a diluted and weaker version of natural &#x27;peace&#x27;?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;ZK7tC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;ZK7tC</a>

Freedom of speech can not exist without private speech. Yet, my privacy rights always imply a lessening of someone else&#x27;s right to knowledge.<p>There will never be a perfect balance between these competing needs, and the line will be pushed back and forth as long as there are humans to debate the issue.

Even before the invention of public-private-partnership driven hyper-surveillance (aka social media), there were just three places known to western man where one is truly alone: In front of his steering wheel, inside of the voting booth and in the crapper.

Are we really societies based on liberal negative liberty? It seems that we are free-for-all when it comes to interference based on marketing. I don’t have it that bad even. Much worse for those who have to drive by&#x2F;commute by obnoxious billboards every day.

Tom Hanks says not a chance! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rottentomatoes.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;the_circle_2017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rottentomatoes.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;the_circle_2017</a>

&gt; Pressly’s book is less about privacy and more about what it protects, a condition he calls “oblivion.”<p>What an excellent way to frame the discussion!

What are some places you feel alone, these days? I imagine it&#x27;s a highly personal question.

It feels kinda ironic to find this kind of article in <i>The Nation</i>. I mean if it were <i>Reason</i>, sure. But The Nation is a leftist publication, endorsing Sanders. Of all regimes that I could find myself in, I&#x27;d expect to be the least amount of left alone in the socialist paradise they are ultimately rooting for. Nothing is left alone in a true socialist country, The Will of The People is in everything and everything is subject to it. That&#x27;s kinda the point of collectivism - everything is everybody&#x27;s common business.<p>Transparency is vital for regulation and control (see e.g. Seeing like a State) and the more opaque humans are, the harder is to control them, plan their actions, reason about their future behavior. How can you make a five-year plan for the whole country if you don&#x27;t even know anything about anybody? Opacity is not going to work here. You would need a ton of very, very detailed information.<p>That&#x27;s why China is introducing more and more measures to defy privacy - this is the only way their model can hope to work, it it impossible in the opaque-person world where no information about the person can be created. The article argues that privacy is not property, but the concept of privacy can not but lead to the concept of property - if you can have private thoughts, can you have private expressions? If you can have private expressions, can you have their material embodiment? If you can have the material embodiment, can you exercise control over it and limit the control of others over it? Oops, you just created private property.