Why Can’t Offline-Borns Tell Difference Between Voluntary And Forced Actions?

http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/12/why-cant-offline-borns-tell-difference-between-voluntary-and-forced-actions/

by yason • 13 years ago

76 23 13 years ago

jdmitch• 13 years ago

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."

swalsh• 13 years ago

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?

xyzzy1234• 13 years ago

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.

nitrogen3• 13 years ago

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

anonymous• 13 years ago

Well, my mom manages pretty well with e-mail and such, but she's ahead of the curve on such things. My grandmother on the other hand is pretty fascinatingly bad with any electronics. She teaches English, so she doesn't have much trouble reading the stuff on the screen, it just seemingly doesn't make sense to her - any hierarchical menu or any sort of context input confuses her. Things we would describe as simple, such as programming a channel on a TV or adding a contact in her contact list on her phone are nigh-impossible tasks for her. Anything as complex as moving a mouse pointer with a mouse or typing on a keyboard is completely beyond her abilities.

All of these are basically "spooky action at a distance". You move something here and something completely unrelated changes there by way of magic. It's no wonder people who've never even seen such things for 50 years or more don't have the mental model to understand them.

angersock• 13 years ago

"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?"

Given the amount of effort spent "saving face" and "keeping up appearances" by the older generations, as well as oftentimes truly sprawling protocols for dealing with different subgraphs of extended family ("Don't talk about this to your aunt, unless your cousin is around, etc."), I'm pretty sure that mankind has had virtualization of social networks for quite some time.

I highly doubt that we're special snowflakes.

jotm• 13 years ago

Not physiological, unless you count the different number of neurons and synaptic pathways. It's just that we learned how to do it, and they didn't. Kind of like learning how to use a sewing machine or two/more languages growing up.

alexjeffrey2• 13 years ago

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!

gizzlon2• 13 years ago

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

He didn't.

alexjeffrey2• 13 years ago

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.

dasil0032• 13 years ago

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.

gizzlon2• 13 years ago

"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.

dasil0032• 13 years ago

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.

clarkevans• 13 years ago

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.

a3_nm• 13 years ago

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.

ds9• 13 years ago

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.

ianmcgowan• 13 years ago

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.

korethr• 13 years ago

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?

Why Can’t Offline-Borns Tell Difference Between Voluntary And Forced Actions?

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