HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Obligatory CGP Grey video: https://youtu.be/e-ZpsxnmmbE

CGP grey have a cool short video "I, phone" about that topic https://youtu.be/e-ZpsxnmmbE

Small differences eventually become a difference in kind.

We are used to thinking about concepts like "in public" and "spying" in traditional human-scale situations. Many of our cultural and legal structures implicitly assume human-scale limitations; we understand that you lose your expectation of privacy when a conversation moves from inside your house to the public shared spaces like the street.

We are also used the spread of information as something that has noise, limited reach, and having a cost that limits both how far the information spreads and how long it lasts.

Combined, this mean it was usually easy say things that might technically be public, but in practice were de facto a private conversation. This is great for kids, who are still learning how society works, risk assessment, and how they want to express themselves publicly. Children need this kind of sorta-public, in-practic-private environment so they can learn and develop. This will often involve making mistakes. A vast majority of the time we simply call this "being a kid". The public side of the situation allows for a parent/teacher/whatever to (hopefully) offer education when a kid makes an embarrassing or rude comment - or a post that could be interpreted as threatening - while the transient nature means the child can move on having learned from their mistake.

What is happening right now is that the underlying assumptions are changing. Information no longer goes away. Far more is recorded and the de-facto-private aspect of many situations is being eroded. In some situations, it's already gone. When life is recorded as the norm, there is no room for mistakes, no allowance for growth, no room to discover by experiment0 how social expression works. We already see this on the internet ever time someone complains about hostility in forums, "cyber bullying", and even the moderation drama here on HN.

This means we need new definitions for what "in public" or a "public post" means. We really need entire new social structures to deal with this brave new world of computing and data. This will take time to convert. I don't know what those social structures should look like, but I do know that applying pre-information-age heuristics to modern internet-based, always-recording situations isn't the answer.

TL;DR - see CGP Grey's recent discussion of why precedent matters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ZpsxnmmbE

> private thoughts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ZpsxnmmbE

CGP Grey has a very good explanation of this situation.

⬐ josho

Then contrast our potential inability to keep private thoughts with the fact that the government is allowed theirs by merely stamping Top Secret across a document.

⬐ cyberrod411

I see what you did there :)