

Why Can’t Offline-Borns Tell Difference Between Voluntary And Forced Actions? - yason
http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/12/why-cant-offline-borns-tell-difference-between-voluntary-and-forced-actions/

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swalsh
I'll leave the politics aside for a moment. What's really interesting to me is
the human development around "online" and "offline".

One thing i've noticed since my mom discovered Facebook, is how she seemingly
always forgets who can see what. It would seem like she is not capable of
understanding the multiple contexts that exist... and frankly I don't blame
her. There's a lot. In facebook alone, there are posts everyone can see of
course I can restrict that. I can post on someone elses wall, of course then
mutual friends can see, unless or course permissions are configured otherwise.

It can get really confusing when in the previous 50 years of your life, you
really only had to deal with two contexts. Person at the other end of the
phone, or other people in your proximity.

I've pretty much grown up dealing with multiple virtual contexts, so it's
natural to me (and other people in my generation) but its definitely not
natural to my mother.

I'd be really curious if there's actually something physiologically different
between our brains?

~~~
xyzzy123
> I'd be really curious if there's actually something physiologically
> different between our brains?

I really, really doubt it.

Part of learning to do anything abstract is that eventually, the abstraction
becomes real to you.

Money, musical notes, a "for loop", at some point, the abstraction becomes as
real to you as a piece of wood you can knock on.

All human brains do this, all the time, for everything. I bet you don't know
what the little sticky-up-pipe thing on the top of your house does, but
plumbers do. It's a thing and it has a name.

It's hilarious to me to imagine that "online stuff" is special when the fact
is that most people do not see the real world at all through the massive fog
of abstractions we all live in.

Most people don't know where their water comes from or where their shit goes
to either. Do we call them "on plumbing" or "off plumbing" people?

It's just practice, context, familiarity and importance.

~~~
nitrogen
No plumber thinks they live in the pipes, but "online" people can feel like
they live in a separate place called "online".

~~~
xyzzy123
That makes it a privileged delusion I suppose, as opposed to people who can
read and temporarily relate to Julius Caesar. I suppose those people live in
"Reading".

P.S: I do think things are radically different now, I don't think people or
brains are.

~~~
nitrogen
Who are you to decide what is a delusion and what is not? Reality is what
doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.

~~~
xyzzy123
My original point was, and is, that the idea that your idea of reality inside
the computer is exactly as real as you think it is. Which is as real as you
would like it to be. Also, as unreal.

When the water doesn't come out of the tap, the shit doesn't get flushed away,
or for some other reason you're forced to deal with the mundane reality of
life, your perspective will change slightly. Your reality will shift. Or if
you buy a house, or have to do repairs.

What I am saying is, is that this is absolutely no different than everyone
else - the other people, who also do not live in reality. They don't
understand how the plumbing works either, but their reality most likely
involves intrigues, dramas and scripts with other people, played out perhaps
on a slightly different stage.

There is nothing in understanding facebook or moving a mouse around which
requires new neural hardware.

P.S: > "Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it" This is
kind of ironic when you're talking about "online" as a place. If we're to use
that metric, "online" is extremely unreal. (I think it's as real a place as
any other, and not especially more unreal than other unrealities we live in).

~~~
nitrogen
I'll concede that perhaps the experience of being one with the network is
somehow similar to the experience of being one with a car, or one with the
scenery and characters in a good book, but my point still stands that
politicians who don't experience that connection are ill equipped to make
decisions affecting those who do.

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dasil003
This article is really out of left field for me. It doesn't do anything to
justify the assumption that online-born people value privacy and offline-born
people don't. It just launches into a tirade about how offline-born people are
abusing their power.

However I see plenty of young people who don't care about the NSA scandal
ranging from apathy to "what do I have to hide?", and I see plenty of old
people who understand the evils of mass surveillance even if they don't
understand the technology.

If there's a generational correlation then first that should be established.
It seems dangerous to simply assume it is generational warfare and demonize
the older generation who actually should know a thing or two about
surveillance states since they've definitely been around for a while.

~~~
gizzlon
_" It doesn't do anything to justify the assumption that online-born people
value privacy and offline-born people don't"_

I think you misunderstood, and that his point is that offline-born do not
understand and value privacy _online_. He backs it up, kind of, with the
statements he then goes on to discuss.

~~~
dasil003
Yeah I guess I glossed over that. Certainly a lot of people, particularly
older people don't really understand tech and the magnitude of spying that is
possible through Google, Facebook, et al. That's pretty much a moot point
though, when you consider what this surveillance apparatus enables. The vast
majority of people use some tech (eg. telephone) that will enable
inappropriate data to be collected and stored, and even if they are hermits
living off the grid, they can still be implicated as a subject of interest
simply by being named in a third-party email exchange. Getting all up in arms
about the government snooping our Facebook data seems to be almost completely
missing the point.

~~~
xyzzy123
> they can still be implicated as a subject of interest simply by being named
> in a third-party email exchange.

Facebook and Glass both have this property. Technologies which harness the
privacy-unaware to compromise the privacy-aware really shit me.

Fortunately I have nothing to hide. Naturally ;)

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a3_nm
Online people are not "open about some parts of their life voluntarily in ways
that the offline-borns wouldn’t". Given how Facebook and such services work,
they're being open about everything they do online with service providers
which (they hope) will only divulge what they choose to the people that they
choose.

The online generation, technically speaking, _is_ giving away their private
information to third parties which (in their TOS) state that they take no
responsibility for it, make no guarantees about privacy, and will comply with
government requests if they believe it is in their best interests. The problem
isn't that governments can require service providers to hand over the data, as
many of those service providers are usually very happy to comply. The problem
is that we are using services implemented in a way which does not conform to
our expectations.

Chatting online with end-to-end encryption and trustworthy software and
hardware is reasonably analogous to chatting in real life: you are
communicating with the individual identified by the key, whom you trust not to
share your conversation with the world. Chatting on Facebook has nothing to do
with this: you're chatting with a third party that you assume is relaying the
messages to someone you assume is the person you want to talk to.

------
jdmitch
Very interesting analogies, I thought this one was particularly poignant:

 _“These people are having sex with a lot of people. Obviously, they don’t
mind having sex with other people, and that gives me the right to have sex
with them, by force if necessary.”_

People unfortunately actually have made (and still make) similar statements to
justify objectification and sexual predation of people labeled as promiscuous.
It doesn't seem like something that has changed though at a certain point in
time due to a watershed reconceptualization (the sexual revolution?)
equivalent to the generational shift of offline-born to online-born.

It is about societal conceptualization of sexuality and (in the case of NSA
situation) privacy, but I don't think it maps cleanly onto generational
change. When people see sexuality or privacy as "all-or-nothing" matters, the
same crude logic pervades, whether it's "they aren't a virgin, so they can't
refuse sex" or "they share everything on facebook anyways, so they can't
refuse giving it to us."

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ds9
Falkvinge is often insightful and I generally agree with him on issues, but in
this case he is attributing to "online born vs. offline born" something that
really has other causes.

His premise seems to be that the governments would respect privacy if only
they understood the implications of their policies. But that's silly. In fact
some older-generation people may fail to understand tech-related issues, but
others do, and in either case the ruling class simply couldn't care about
citizens' rights. They see an opportunity to gain more power for their
respective governments, and a better position in relation to other nations,
and that's all there is to it. They don't mind lying, concealing or spewing
whatever euphemistic rhetoric or pretexts they can think of to mollify the
public, but it has little to do with their actual policy objectives.

There is a valid point however, that privacy is not about who knows what,
rather it is about being in control of what others know about oneself.

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korethr
So what's the threshold for being online-born or offline-born?

I was born in the early 80s, but didn't become aware of the existence of a
thing called an "Internet" until the mid-late 90s. So I can recall a time when
there wasn't a thing called an "Internet". Does that make me an offline-born?

On the other hand, since discovering the Internet, it's been an integral part
of my life. Though I understand that society actually managed to somehow exist
before the Internet did, the concept still feels somewhat alien to me now. It
is like reading about the Dark Ages in a history book. Things couldn't have
truly been like that, could they? Does that make me an online-born?

Am I both?

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clarkevans
I think this is a distinction borne of poor communication. I've never yet
talked to a person over 60 who thinks recording their phone conversations is
wise, let alone tracking their movements or assembling their social network.
To them the technology is beside the point; focus on the outcomes -- the real
information being collected.

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alexjeffrey
The use of "offline-born" in this article is very disconcerting and seems to
express something of a "superior-us vs. inferior-them" mentality. While I
agree with the majority of the article and the need to preserve the right to
privacy, calling a large group of people "offline-borns" and equating their
actions with theft and rape is dehumanising and should not be considered
acceptable!

~~~
gizzlon
_"..and equating their actions with theft and rape is dehumanising and should
not be considered acceptable!"_

He didn't.

~~~
alexjeffrey
To quote:

“This old lady is giving some of her money away for free to charities she
picks. Obviously, she doesn’t care to keep her money, so it can’t possibly be
a big deal that we take the rest of her money without giving her a say about
it.”

“These people are having sex with a lot of people. Obviously, they don’t mind
having sex with other people, and that gives me the right to have sex with
them, by force if necessary.”

If these two statements come across as shockingly arrogant to you as an
offline-born, then you need to learn and understand that the first statement,
which treats privacy as up for grabs, is perceived exactly as shockingly
arrogant to the net generation.

maybe privacy invasion and theft can be compared against each other, but
bringing rape into the equation as if it somehow sits on the same level is
ridiculous.

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ianmcgowan
One annoying thing about this article is the "born" aspect - it seems to be a
synonym for "old" and "young". It's a gross generalization to equate old
people with technophobes.

