Social Cooling (2017)
What are you all taking about?<p>Come on, think. Society doesn&#x27;t seem very &quot;cool&quot; at all the last ten years. Color revolutions in Latin America and MEA. HK. US v China. ISIS, Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo. Twitter Mobs, Me too, Times up, incels. Antifu, Proud Boys. Snowden, Assange, Alex Jones, Qanon, Disclosure.<p>I&#x27;d say that Big brother&#x27;s technical panopticon has increased &quot;heat&quot; in society. Either that, or it&#x27;s had no effect, or if it has cooled things down, thank you to the eternal watchers for keeping all the crazies in check.<p>I think everybody just needs to adjust to this new normal, and be okay with there not really being any privacy. Privacy anyway is probably an industrial revolution invention, because village life was way less private with gossip and smallness.<p>If you think &quot;privacy&quot; is your natural state, you&#x27;re wrong and I&#x27;m not sorry. If anything privacy is an &quot;invention&quot; of tech companies to sell you it, while selling the watchers not-it. Or a sort of a sci-fi mass delusion born of the isolating power of tech and the frontier thrill of having your own megaphone to the world. All the little nasties out there in userland plotting, ever plotting on the next dangerous idea they will unleash gloriously on the world. How did that ever seem like a good idea? In a village you would be a trouble maker, and rightly condemned to the stocks for quarrelling, upsetting the serenity and maybe witchcraft. You never had privacy, and thinking you did, as if it was some sort of &quot;shield&quot; to mean now you can stir the pot and speak without filters, everything be damned, with impunity, what the hell kind of good idea was that ever going to be?<p>All these idiots, thinking privacy affords them freedom from consideration. No. The tech revolution, simply means you have stepped into a world with greater responsibility, because you can have far reaching effects. So instead of being babies, and demanding a return to zero consequence actions, start getting woke to the ripples your events have in the world, and act with consideration, now for the whole world.<p>That&#x27;s the blessing. A great power and connectedness and all you privacy morons want to squander it on speaking whatever you like, consequences imagined away by a fantasy of a pre-surveillance utopia that never existed, and even if it did.... You don&#x27;t get to be free of your karma for what you&#x27;ve done.<p>Don&#x27;t be like the village crazy. You speak now to the world. Privacy doesn&#x27;t absolve you of any responsibility, and surveyed or not, you should consider your actions online. Not just from the demented &quot;privacy-conscious&quot; perspective of self preservation, but from the global perspective of other people because you live in a connected world. Don&#x27;t blame people listening. Blame your tongue. And fix it. Speak consciously.