OK, I guess I&#x27;m starting to get where you are coming from. I read your original post pretty much as saying that people who wish for privacy on the internet are wrong.<p>I still disagree with you, though. Yes, of course, technology alone cannot solve the political problems. But I very much think that technology can play a role in implementing and securing the political will. If you think of a democratic voting process as a piece of technology, for example, that by itself won&#x27;t make a dictator go away. However, if there is a general consensus that democracy is the way to go, the specific implementation of the voting process very much makes a difference as to whether rogue actors can subvert this political will or not. If you make it so that votes cannot be bought and that the general public can watch the election from start to finish, that makes a democracy robust against a minority of people who try to rig the vote, for example.<p>I think information technology has a similar role to play in securing privacy. You can build systems that are far more robust against surveillance than facebook, for example. That doesn&#x27;t help if the police comes after you for not using facebook--but it might prevent Mark Zuckerberg from figuring out how to manipulate the masses to vote for him as the next president ... or whatever he considers his interest ;-)<p>Also, I think the internet is actually a pretty good basis for that. In contrast to previous networks, at its basis, it doesn&#x27;t distinguish between clients and servers, and it is a mostly transparent network with all the intelligence at the edge, so it&#x27;s technically relatively easy to build your own protocols and applications without approval from network operators.<p>As for the internet being the real world: Yes, I get where you are coming from, but I think the distinction in this way is still counterproductive, as it supports a narrative that is used by the other side that implies that somehow the internet is special and that therefore human rights don&#x27;t apply, and that special (and usually more restrictive) laws are necessary, as if laws that forbid fraud, say, for some reason didn&#x27;t already apply if the fraud was committed via the internet.