Is being recorded that much worse than being seen?

Being recorded creates hard physical evidence

Which is a big deal if anyone needs to accuse you of a crime but kind of irrelevant if there’s terabytes of the stuff no one ever looks at.

Believe me, if I had the option of not being watched I would absolutely take it

I feel like this is somewhat related to the Big Other conversation I’ve been having with bambamramfan.

I genuinely don’t understand why people don’t want to be observed. I don’t feel the threat of being observed. But there are a few different components to this:

• I enjoy attention.  Attention is good, especially when you’re entertaining and/or confusing people.  
• I’m substantially less threatened by the Big Other that most people are–I’m mostly not worried about strangers judging me, or evaluating me, and don’t experience the judgments of vague “others” as a threat.  So people having seen me is fine, and not a threat.
• I’m actually in the real world less vulnerable to the sorts of consequences that the Other can probably deal out.
• I’m a huge optimist so don’t even really believe those could happen.
• Sometimes people actually are threatening you. I find being observed or recorded threatening, but if a specific person were to, say, follow me all around town recording me specifically, that would be creepy for entirely other reasons.
  
• I am harder to threaten in a lot of ways, and thus this is both less likely to happen and less threatening when it does.
• As I discussed a few days ago, people who are more vulnerable to actual threats, or have more history with them, are probably also more likely to process experiences as threats.

Basically agreed with @jadagul. I did not want to intercede because I respected @wirehead-wannabe ‘s emotions on the matter, and it did not seem like a good time to contradict.

The people arguing for “why they need public recordings” were giving terrible explanations of course. It was basically the panopticon “but for our morality”. There’s so many reasons to mistrust that. And anyone would feel only further alienated under that.

However privacy itself is not a solution to feeling afraid of the judgment of the Big Other. What would help is actual acceptance.

Let us use “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” as an example. LGBTQ were not allowed to serve in the military. So they requested privacy laws to protect them, a stop gap solution. But even with that, you’d always be afraid that somehow your privacy was being violated. This just breeds paranoia. No one can ever really trust that others will follow the liberal right (privacy in this case), so everyone is looking over their shoulder.

The actual solution was to… accept gay people, and not expect them to hide behind a shield they can’t fully count on. So eventually we repealed DADT and just made being gay in the military fine.

Basically every other concern about privacy seems like that? The actual solution is for you to not be judged for your stimming and other actions, and for you to not be afraid of the judgment of Big Other. Until then privacy is a stop gap, but it’s a stop gap that will cause significant emotional distress (because you can’t deep down really believe people will respect the privacy.)

I respect WW’s desire for it of course, but like, it’s not a coincidence that the people most relying on respect for privacy are miserable.

They’re never going to accept everything.  Everyone will always fight for social status, and recording enables many-to-one bullying on a scale not previously feasible.  The slim majority doing the bullying will support it right up until the moment they’re in the crosshairs, because they think they have nothing to fear, because many of them are pretty vanilla, so MAD won’t work.

That’s why privacy is so important.

Edit: Privacy allows people to shrink their social attack surfaces.  I need it.  Plus, legal system issues - legal systems don’t always secure people enough.  The lists go on and on.

I accept everything.

tumblr shows me these two posts of yours in a row.

If you believe one, then it follows you would believe the other.

I disagree with both, by the same logic.

I want to escape Hell.

I’d be more convinced by the people who want social technology that makes Hell more tolerable, if they did not seem so incredibly miserable trying to hang onto it.

Privacy is dying. Almost every pretense we have at liberal atomism is failing. I’m not saying it’s a good thing but you can’t turn back the clock. There are other, better solutions instead. Support the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

I’m going to have to go with @mitigatedchaos on both the above points, I think. I don’t seriously think escape is possible, so I’m not inclined to take long bets on utopia.

Practically speaking, though, privacy is eroding very rapidly without any specific effort, that much is also true. Given that, an all-directions radical panopticon might be the best option just because it would make the problem visible and costly to the largest possible number of people. which would be more equitable and would spur a strong interest in countermeasures. But since that’s the “burn your town to deny it to the enemy” option, it seems like a bad idea to sacrifice existing privacy measures (even those that rely on obscurity alone) in the interests of accelerationism. One day those measures will be gone anyway, but there’s no sense in rushing it.