19 July

Maybe our increasing anxiety around privacy tells us a lot about how we see our own society. A lot of it seems focused on ideas about somebody - corporations, governments mostly - spying on us and using what they find to manipulate us in all sorts of ways. The problem is, corporations and government are us. They’re full of ordinary people, like me and you. We can’t seem to shake this Big Brother idea that big things like corporations and governments are somehow not us. There are obvious abuses of information, but a shift away from a society of isolated individuals firewalled in their own homes is actually a good thing, in my books. And again, we don’t tend to act in ways that match our beliefs anyway. We overshare the details of our private lives, it’s almost the default thing people can’t wait to put into places like FB.