Unlike some, I approve of privacy. There's a whole social movement now behind the idea that nothing has any value unless it's immediately public. That people's random daily activities should be cataloged and on the Roam just in case something they eat for breakfast might be cited as a source of inspiration for ... something interesting I guess. Never clear what that might be.
But all of our thoughts start out private, and we decide which to express. Some are best kept to ourselves, while others are ones we want to develop and explore by bouncing them off others. Only when properly matured should thoughts venture out into the truly public realm. There's a place for privacy. This journal, for example, is private. I'm writing it so I have a contemporaneous log of my thoughts, and I do expect that it will become part of the public record of this expedition at some point. But for now I write it longhand using stylus and tablet and limit it to my local Roam. So I'm not against privacy in limited form.
Centuries ago privacy was a weapon. Enormously powerful corporations hoarded information, keeping as "proprietary" even data that affected powerless individuals. Research that could have saved lives was locked away as trade secrets protected by law, and even evidence of corporate lawbreaking was secure behind those same legal barriers. The private ownership and suppression of knowledge was perhaps the most heinous crime of the Financial Age, and we owe a great debt to those brave individuals who released that knowledge against the monetary interests of their corporate masters. They did so at terrible personal risk, and we understand their reasons for acting anonymously.
Anonymity today, however, is a very different thing. Information must be attributed, and anything on the Roam that cannot be sourced is just there to confuse, obfuscate and otherwise cause trouble. As Princeton himself said, "Statements without primacy cannot be trusted." I found some anonymous markup today. Parts of my most recent observational data were linked to the Academy's conclusions of semi-sentience. While the commentary is fairly banal, I'm shocked that someone on our team would mark up my work without saying who they are. It's shocking and, frankly, a little scary. When hiding one's thoughts is considered questionable, I'm not sure what to think about someone who would actually try to hide their actions.
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