> I think, in theory, a society with much less privacy could work...
I suspect what many forget or were perhaps unaware of is the in practice society with near zero privacy existed for the vast bulk of actual human history.
Before the car and the radical change in individual human movement that came about for those parts of the world privileged enough to have a car for every family the majority of people lived within a small radius surrounded by people who effectivel knew every detail of each others lives .. if not as it happened then almost certainly by the next quarter as word spread.
Again, as I mentioned above, I like privacy .. but it remains true that the greatest expansions of modern western economies; mass production, feeding quantitively more with less land and labour, etc .. all happened without any essential dependance upon privacy to bring these changes about.
It is the upstream grandparent claim that privacy is fundemental and essential for any advancement in a society that doesn't pass the smell test and certainly hasn't yet been well argued for.
I absolutely do agree that it is desirable .. but essential (in a strict sense) for the continuation of human society .. that needs better argument to pass muster.
> Before the car and the radical change in individual human movement that came about [...]
The lack of privacy in a local town is surely quite different in its effect on society than a centralized and wide reaching dragnet surveillance program. That local lack of privacy was limited in reach, not automatic nor persistent, and mostly symmetric... which doesn't present the same potential harms.
I suspect what many forget or were perhaps unaware of is the in practice society with near zero privacy existed for the vast bulk of actual human history.
Before the car and the radical change in individual human movement that came about for those parts of the world privileged enough to have a car for every family the majority of people lived within a small radius surrounded by people who effectivel knew every detail of each others lives .. if not as it happened then almost certainly by the next quarter as word spread.
Again, as I mentioned above, I like privacy .. but it remains true that the greatest expansions of modern western economies; mass production, feeding quantitively more with less land and labour, etc .. all happened without any essential dependance upon privacy to bring these changes about.
It is the upstream grandparent claim that privacy is fundemental and essential for any advancement in a society that doesn't pass the smell test and certainly hasn't yet been well argued for.
I absolutely do agree that it is desirable .. but essential (in a strict sense) for the continuation of human society .. that needs better argument to pass muster.