Re: <nettime> Jody Ribtot: The Hostile Email Landscape

[dan@geer.org]

In this,

 > http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html

for which I enthusiastically thank you, a sentence appears:

   Since exercising software freedom for email slowly becomes a
   rarer and rarer (rather than norm it once was), society slowly
   but surely pegs those who do exercise software freedom as "random
   crazy people".

I can attest to this.  I suspect many here can, perhaps each in
their own way.  I carry no cell phone, refuse Javascript, prefer
paper maps to all alternatives, stream nothing, use no social
networks, delete base64 encoded messages without reading, own
multiple domains each used for different purposes, etc.  Surely
these make me a random crazy person.

Yet I find it hard to recommend this path to a person just now
approaching the age of majority as my ability to get away with being
a random crazy person was earned when that was *much* easier to do.
Of my children, 25% have adopted the random crazy person path, so
it may be said to be clear that simply setting an example is not
sufficient in a mass culture going the other direction.

The central point in Daniel Solove's book, _Nothing to Hide_, is
that the greatest danger to privacy is people who say "I live a
good life; I have nothing to hide."  I might generalize Solove to
say that the greatest danger to any freedom is for it to be
unexercised.  The blythe, if commonplace, assumption that freedoms
can remain on the shelf, safely immortal, is the (our) enemy.

--dan

[ I would be curious to see the statistical distribution of MTAs
for subscribers to this list ]


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