[107870] in Cypherpunks
Re: Sun and Privacy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Frederick Burroughs)
Tue Jan 26 23:17:09 1999
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 23:03:04 -0500
From: Frederick Burroughs <riburr@shentel.net>
To: Cypherpunks <cypherpunks@ns.minder.net>
Reply-To: Frederick Burroughs <riburr@shentel.net>
lcs Mixmaster Remailer wrote:
> Add the effects of government databases, medical insurance records,
> credit reporting agencies, and the notion that the average person has
> any significant amount of privacy left is laughable.
But a small price to pay for a consumer society that caters to our every whim.
Privacy is a farce anyway, an illusion with origins in the evolutionary selection
of a sense of self. A sense of 'self' did of course offer significant advantages
for survival in the hostile and predator filled environment from which we
evolved. We find ourselves in quite a different environment today.
A sense of self (privacy being just one expression of this sense) may not offer
the evolutionary advantages it once had. The accelerated give and take that
defines a robust consumer economy may select against privacy. While the selective
pressure against privacy is cultural and economic, it is nevertheless REAL and
increasing.
Evolution has endowed us with knee jerk reflexes that kick whenever our privacy
is invaded. This group is just one of those reflexes, responding to a stimulus. A
rock is being lifted and we're scurrying for cover, for privacy. But as gills
evolve into ears, fins into limbs, privacy must evolve into... (Theodore
Kaczynski looked just a little too Cro-Magnon, didn't he? Fucking primitive) ;-)
