Imagine if it became the fashion to wear glasses that block out the color green. If you do not wear these glasses then you are wrong, bad and deserving of condemnation. So everybody wears them.
Three generations down the road, anybody who mentions the color green is considered a fool.
I'm looking at reading here because of the intense, prolonged and (for many of us) daily concentration involved.
The concentration of attention is the active ingredient here. It is a smooth and powerful modifier of consciousness. And its effects stick and compound over time.
I'm going with reading because of the intense, prolonged and (for many of us) daily concentration involved.
The concentration of attention is the active ingredient here. It is a smooth and powerful modifier of consciousness. And its effects stick and compound over time.
But I’m not sure that vision logically extends to all information...
I see it more as a physical fact. Keeping a secret takes more effort than open communication. Information propagates like a fart.
assumes both a superhuman capacity for processing information
Well that would be google. You don't need to carry the information around with you, you just need to know how to craft the right query.
and a uniform comfort with exposure,
It might just be the taboo of the hour too.
But that comes at the cost of individuality, autonomy, and the very idea of personal...
That's a stretch
Anyway, here’s my key point. Protecting personal privacy doesn’t hinder the free flow of information, it enables it.
That's a big stretch. Literally "inhibiting the flow increases the flow". I mean I see your argument. But the constraining force here isn't free information, it's judgement and persecution.
So I agree, knowledge should be free.
Mine wasn't an argument of moral imperative but physics. And fighting physics is exhausting.
Information wants to be free. And to let it flow freely is the least-effort solution.
By letting information flow freely we approach a state where everybody knows everything about everything and everybody. This could be pretty great and seems the easy and natural way to go. A kind of superdemocracy. By inhibiting this evolution we create a state of deformity and disease.
But only wrong bad people take off the glasses. So nobody does that but wrong bad people. And nobody can trust them because they're wrong bad.
And spectrometers are clearly hippy dippy nonsense.
The wrong bad people do not sow curiosity, they sow poison!
You see how that works.
Do not discount the gravity and inertia of convention.