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The age of privacy, and everything with it, including the freedom of association and separation of public and private life, is ending. The public is smiling merrily along the road. 1984 is coming, but the public is not scared or suppressed. They are smiling happy people, obedient and cheerful, and they take the best of care of their keepers.
The end of "privacy as we know it" is only a dystopian scenario if the institutions of authoritarian governance survive in the post-privacy world. I don't believe they can survive, because the same network infrastructure that has already made so much formerly "private" information public also shifts the balance of power away from established institutions in fundamental ways. Keeping State and Corporate secrets out of public view is becoming progressively more difficult, while the mechanism of ad-hoc self organizing "smart mob" actions arising from the public at large is an emergent challenge to established power centers. If and as these trends continue to accelerate, the nature of political power will eventually be transformed. The opposition takes this prospect very seriously, and is fighting back through automation of intelligence analysis, adaptive enemies lists, strategic deployment of reputation management, astroturfing, censorship, adaptive signal boosting and degradation, spoofing and disinformation, coordination of conventional propaganda across formerly isolated domains, etc. etc. The future I envision is not a dystopia per Orwell or Huxley, because these models presume the survival of large States and continued concentration of power in the hands of a ruling elite. I think that one way or another, large scale authoritarian rule is on the way out. One way is the continued development of established trends in information technology's impact on large scale social behavior. The other way is the pending collapse of the global material economy and substantial re-localization of production and commerce. Together, these environmental pressures drive adaptive responses that are /very/ unfavorable to the interests of our present rulers. :o) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJVkG4LAAoJEDZ0Gg87KR0L8QwP+waV7khYBFDtK8tnmhmE7J3l WHP/RjOIEY0dPin+sDVH2aKw7HgKAVuR2m2S8rKI5cnRzC57DTjSkL0DMtkEf4F9 /FfErXfujgM7scMz6Fn8B00NwW2fRqoc6bM+FbDOvCelcmE0SGOu/Ipu7IJ3KX3J gCekYunesDJgto38tIB5l/5gOZmdVjBDP0SA2149f2xSRwgZ74ouFUo8i0zCdOVT tBPVmzqnnk3dg80nkPm91X78+4PhyOe6Xod2sb+l7tohQT12AlfANrib8l9kX6RS WR14xvPg3NA4bnE75vIQ+OUnx3b54bNBmIa2OcMJ8ioViAOZJQ14RfFblH+CVZQr pTqJOFMJe8VlVEjGGKw5uIhbvLyMceII8Cr4hh1CMVudHqx+b5P6RXtxwrh1qXaO c+Wa+RFWhmxtB42HBL6WTaly6FVTkdTPL2P/8CxYcaVS0O7qIYa2hRnPhK8+DonA s5i9JSoTFgN7HCXiErEYa23barkpEHCnvlnu4b040gnnvw9sRLv2G5J70IIvuoIk oFz5cV6qUP8Dwm1R+9NyrnuKEiA1KmLJoTQTy74GMG1f/DXaROqZdehc8mrhEe2E IZ2Hm4Plhm8IbIu+I3pXSNLxbZhpiAx9go0Se7zIDP8JDy9E/IN+1Qea1ONU8f0S TtNLsRLfklKHnyiCPeV8 =N4Ue -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----