#67: What's privacy? Are our memories ruined?

💎 Word gems

Why the “Privacy” Wars Rage On (The New Yorke / Jeannie Suk Gersen)

This article has a fantastic take on why “privacy” is such a complicated issue. We conflate two ideas into one; secrecy - personal matters that should be hidden from others, and autonomy - personal decisions that should be unimpeded by government.

The knowledge that others—whether private citizens or the government—may be observing our words and actions against our will alters the environment in which our decisions are made; it makes it harder to exercise true control over personal decisions. What Alito dismisses as a conceptual conflation is better understood as a necessary alliance. As we head into a world without Roe v. Wade, the enforcement of abortion restrictions will depend, tellingly, on industrious efforts to ferret out information about individuals seeking, obtaining, and performing abortions. People arriving at certain clinics already find themselves filmed, their license plates recorded.

So it’s unfortunate but unsurprising that the use of one term to refer to the personal dimensions of both secrecy and autonomy has led to confusion over whether privacy really is a fundamental right. The problem arises when we take secrecy as an end in itself, and thus as the paradigm of privacy—an error that can be traced back to Warren and Brandeis’s parochial preoccupations. In truth, privacy with respect to the disclosure of information is an outgrowth of the deeper concern to preserve the conditions for individual autonomy, not the other way around. Rather than a prerogative of the privileged, intent on keeping the general public at bay, the right to privacy should have been understood from the start as a prerogative of the people, establishing a zone where the state cannot readily trespass.

Is your smartphone ruining your memory? A special report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’ (The Guardian / Rebecca Seal)

Does outsourcing our memory to technology negatively impacts us? I’ve often been skeptical of that line of thinking, but the article also explores the far more likely reality of partial attention, especially given how tech overstimulates us.

Smartphone use can even change the brain, according to the ongoing ABCD study which is tracking over 10,000 American children through to adulthood. “It started by examining 10-year-olds both with paper and pencil measures and an MRI, and one of their most interesting early results was that there was a relationship between tech use and cortical thinning,” says Larry Rosen, who studies social media, technology and the brain. “Young children who use more tech had a thinner cortex, which is supposed to happen at an older age.” Cortical thinning is a normal part of growing up and then ageing, and in much later life can be associated with degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as migraines.

Metaverse, what metaverse? (BIMA Talk / James Whatley)

Finally, this doc, and video of the talk here, takes down the notion that people are spending time and money in the metaverse, because reports are actually talking about are video games.

Anybody who stands on this stage and tells you the metaverse is the future hasn’t got a fucking clue and you should not be ok with that

💩 Cool shit

The History of User Interfaces - This is so much fun to browse, and mostly visual too.

Pollinator Pathmaker - A fun algorithmic tool to design a garden for bees and other pollinators.

Icebergify - Chart how deep your Spotify music tastes go in an iceberg-like visual.

Park my Spaceship - See if your favorite sci-fi spaceship will fit in your yard by overlaying it on Google Maps.

Wikivoyage - A free, editable travel guide. Designed in the spirit of Wikipedia.

Stattogories - A trivia game using IMDb, Google, Spotify, Wikipedia and YouTube data.

The Atlantic Archive - Explore 165 years of journalism from The Atlantic.

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