Three Things #12: Apr. 3, 2022
On privacy, authoritarianism, and the politics of fear
It’s been another week on the road, and another challenging week for writing. As I was traveling and reflecting on the surveillance, creepy facial recognition, and irrational Covid policies that I encountered, I felt inspired to write about the things that give me hope and fear in the modern world.
Thing #1: The Most Important Thing in the World
The most important thing in the world is the thing that’s most valuable, scarcest, and least well understood. To me, today, this is privacy. It took me a long time to understand this, but once I did, the world began to look and feel differently and there’s no going back. (Freedom is a close second, but freedom is much less subtle and easier to understand.)
Privacy is multifaceted, nuanced, and hard to explain. I think most people both don’t understand privacy as a concept and also don’t appreciate why it’s so important. It’s especially easy for those of us fortunate enough to live in a free country to fail to appreciate it, like the fish doesn’t appreciate the water.
Regardless of how well we do or don’t understand or appreciate it, there are many reasons privacy is important. For starters, it’s a requirement for human dignity (what person, without privacy, was ever able to maintain their sense of dignity?). It’s the only thing that guarantees freedom. It’s also an essential social tool: privacy allows us to define circles of trust, confidence, and sharing in our lives, and to separate personal and professional.
The best articulation of why privacy matters is that every valuable social innovation started out as taboo or illegal. And the only way that these subversive, “dangerous” ideas eventually win and become mainstream is when people have the privacy to discuss them without fear.
What sort of ideas does this include? Democracy. The idea that everyday people have the right to freedom, happiness, and wealth accumulation. Women’s rights and gay rights. Bitcoin: i.e., the idea that money can and should be separated from the state. These and many other things that we take for granted today all began as hushed, private conversations among groups of radical subversives. When you begin to understand how ideas germinate and how they spread, you begin to understand why privacy is essential. It’s the small, protected patch of soil, the sunlight, and the water that’s needed for social innovation to sprout.
It’s also really, really hard to maintain privacy, and it’s getting harder. On my recent trip I was shocked by the number of times I needed to have my face scanned, to give someone my passport, or to provide a name, email, and/or phone number, even when none of these should have been required—and that’s to say nothing of the much more sensitive data we all create and broadcast every day. We do these things, we require far more information of one another than we actually need and go along with it, because it’s easy and convenient. That’s another thing about privacy. It’s not easy. Which means, unless and until you care about it, you won’t have it. And when you really need it, it may already be too late.
I’m hopeful that Web3 technology, and even more importantly, the cypherpunk ethos that prefigured it, will solve this problem soon. But I’m also skeptical because I see how hard it is, and because people are fundamentally lazy and we’re so stuck in our ways.
For more: Reflect on what privacy means to you, and consider how you might do better. Read up on good opsec. For god’s sake, use a good password manager and robust passwords, and enable non-SMS multifactor authentication (MFA) for essential services as a starting point. Then do all of the other things on this list.
Privacy has a close and inverse relationship to the next thing…
Thing #2: The Most Dangerous Thing in the World
If I asked you, “What’s the most dangerous thing in the world?”, how would you answer? Would you talk about crime? Poverty or inequality? Global warming? Rogue AI? Disease? Pandemic, even?
I think the most dangerous thing in the world is the thing most inimical to the most important things in the world, namely, privacy and freedom. That thing is authoritarianism. I was surprised to learn recently that less than half of the world’s population currently lives in a free country. The number used to be a bit higher, but it’s been a rough few years for freedom globally and the number has slipped. In a complex world of few absolutes, I absolutely believe in human freedom and dignity, and I am absolutely opposed to the things that destroy them.
Authoritarianism is dangerous for a few reasons. First and foremost, it devours human dignity and happiness. On average, people are happier when they’re freer. They’re also more creative. Authoritarianism is negatively correlated to creative output, to the formation of dynamic businesses and to overall economic prosperity. Simply put, authoritarian regimes struggle to innovate. There’s a reason that, with the exception of China (an outlier for a whole host of reasons), pretty much all successful, creative businesses are founded in free countries. If we believe that happiness, creativity, and prosperity are desirable, then it follows that freedom is desirable as well.
Authoritarianism is also dangerous because it leads to instability. Liberal democracies are messy places internally, and occasionally swing too far in one direction or the other politically, but democracy is a “release valve” for political energy which allows free countries to periodically reimagine and reinvent themselves. Say what you will about the flaws and shortcomings of the liberal Western order (there are many), but it has been remarkably stable overall in the post-war era.
No such release valve exists in an authoritarian regime, which is subject to the whims of one person or a small ruling elite. Often enough the inevitable result is revolution and/or aggression towards other countries. The most obvious example over the past two decades is Russia, which has simultaneously become more authoritarian, seen more political discontent at home, and has attacked several neighbors—likely in an attempt to distract attention from the increasingly dire situation back home.
But there’s an even more subtle reason why authoritarianism is dangerous. It’s a brain virus. Even intelligent, educated, well-intentioned people who grow up in places that aren’t free often don’t value freedom or understand why it’s so important. Authoritarianism has its upsides: greater, centralized control and more homogeneity means more efficiency, security, and the ability to plan for the long term. Without a clear understanding of what’s lost in the tradeoff, it’s tempting to feel that it’s optimal. As a result, authoritarianism (in the form of state-controlled, state-sponsored capitalism) has a better brand than democracy at the moment. Democracy risks losing the war for the hearts and minds of young people everywhere, which is why it’s so important that the United States and other democratic powers get their acts in gear, reengage constructively on the world stage, and demonstrate in no uncertain terms why democracy and freedom matter.
For more: If you haven’t already, try living in an unfree, authoritarian country. And if you have, speak and write about the experience.
Which leads to the third thing…
Thing #3: The Most Insidious Thing in the World
Authoritarianism sneaks up on you in the form of gradually more control. At first it seems harmless, but you give an inch and they take a mile. This is why it’s so important to resist even seemingly mild, innocuous forms of control, especially when they’re less than critical and not clearly backed by science.
If the Covid pandemic taught me one thing, it’s that fear is a powerful tool of statecraft. Do I believe that there’s a global cabal of elite pedophile lizard people planning to keep the unwashed masses in a constant state of fear, unquestioningly submitting to their devious, authoritarian conspiracies? No. Things are never that black and white. But, are there politicians, businesspeople, and others in positions of authority who might benefit politically from a fearful populace and the freedom to act without the usual degree of skepticism and accountability? Absolutely. And might they, even subconsciously, stoke that sentiment as a result? Indubitably.
Of course, Covid is far from the first time this strategy has been used. Politicians have been invoking fear—of crime, of “the other,” of various boogeymen real and imagined—since the beginning of civilization. In the United States, in recent years alone, there was the “stranger danger” panic, the war on drugs, “weapons of mass destruction,” and the ill-defined “war on terror.”
This phenomenon reached new heights during the Covid pandemic. I watched people I know and respect, friends and relatives, ordinary, educated, intelligent, sensible people, turn into squishy blobs of fear. I saw friends terrified to leave their homes for months or in some cases even years for fear of an invisible virus lurking just around the next corner. I saw communities collapse, families and teams torn apart, people avoiding other people and viewing them less as fellow human beings and more as infected meat and potential death-spreaders. All of this was stoked by unclear, misleading, contradictory information from so-called authorities, including governments, enacting knee-jerk, reactionary policies that had less to do with science than they did with some combination of political theater, stoking fear, maximizing control, and making money.
And then, when the first Covid vaccines miraculously emerged, the governments and authority figures that backed them were hailed as saviors and the vaccines were sold to everyone as a panacea that would end the pandemic in short order, without giving anyone a chance to question or understand or consider. After a year and a half of fear-stoking, it began to feel almost like the plot of a Bond film: a plague ravishes the earth and a genius mad scientist offers a magic antidote to those who will submit to his scheme for domination.
It didn’t have to be this way. We could’ve had an open, honest dialog from the earliest days of the pandemic. Scientists, health experts, and governments could’ve shared openly, honestly, and with humility what they were learning in real time and admitted that they, too, didn’t have all the answers.
You still see remnants of this irrational fear when people insist that you wear a mask inside a restaurant—but only when you stand up. Or when they insist on testing you, again and again, even though you just recovered from Covid. Or when they wear a mask outside. Or when they do something else totally irrational, and you ask why, and they tell you, “Because Covid” and shrug, as if that explains anything.
Fear is a useful emotion. If you’re facing real danger, a real, imminent threat—if a lion is chasing you on the savannah—then that fear, the way it focuses your mind and primes your body for fight or flight, may save your life. But when it’s intentionally stoked for political or economic purposes we need to see it for what it is: a lingering, paleolithic emotion that’s out of place and can be exploited by underhanded, immoral people in a position of authority to make you fall in line.
How should we react when this happens? Resist. Question. Act with agency and dignity. It’s quite literally the only way we’re going to make it as a society and as a species, without rewinding the clock hundreds or even thousands of years.
And, most of all, don’t fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Keep your wits about you. You’re going to need them where we’re going. And everything is going to be fine, I promise.
For more: Consider how much of a motivator fear is for you. Examine your actions and behaviors rationally and dispassionately and consider why you engage in them. What behaviors are you doing out of fear, rational or irrational?