Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist) [LWN.net]

Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist)

Posted Dec 1, 2003 18:04 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (subscriber, #755)
Parent article: Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist)

All of this has been hashed out in much greater detail than most LWN posters would bother to do
it in David Brin's old, but still thought provoking book "The Transparent Society", which
anyone interested in this topic really ought to have read already.

Its fundamental premise is that the problem is not that I need to keep *my* secrets, but that
*other* people have secrets -- if other people *couldn't* *secretly* be into (for example)
porn, and then publicly denigrate *me* for having the balls to publicly say that *I* enjoy it,
then I would be less likely to be worried about saying that -- everyone would be able to see
that it's not a perversion; everyone does it.

And we'd have much less stress in society. The Asians would be all out of face, though, so it
probably wouldn't work too well for them.

BTW: did everyone's spell checkers get too much turkey this weekend? :-)

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Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist)

Posted Dec 12, 2003 9:55 UTC (Fri) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

The problem is any society where most of the people are looking at porn already tolerates it more or less. What about the interracial couple in a part of the world that doesn't like that? Or the interracial couple whose parents don't like that, and to heck with what the rest of the world thinks about it? Or the guy who's into women's feet? That last particularly will never get accepted by society, but will be harmless and happy so long as he can hide his habit.

Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist)

Posted Dec 13, 2003 4:14 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

Well, roughly, the answer is that in a Transparent Society -- where no one has *any* privacy
about anything -- people will not be inclined to *try* to take a moral higher-ground (to which
they're commonly not entitled anyway) over others, which is the most common source of problems
there...

Brin makes the argument much mo' better than I; if you're interested, go read the book.