There might be a precedent question. Generally, we observe that people comfort themselves by giving post-hoc "logical" justifications for unconscious behavior they do not want to or choose to understand, to bring into consciousness. The resulting thought process is called "rationalization." You've just told us that you want to have your rationalizations confirmed, by having readers take them for your "logic." Wouldn't the precedent question be, why we shouldn't discuss your behavior without rationalizing it?

This is crap in both directions. People who are far more relaxed about their unconventional behaviors and ideas than you are also have a strong positive regard for their privacy. Many people who are extremely happy with and relaxed about who they are barely use the Net and have "totally clean records." Many super uptight people I know are technically incompetent, use only proprietary software on their computers, and are as naked on the Net as you could imagine. People like me who may be prolific sources on the Net can be also so much written about that our own contribution to our "Internet persona" is nonetheless much smaller than everybody else's. The real determinants of the net profile of an individual at this particular stage of the evolution of the Net have little to do with intrapsychic traits. The attempt to judge character merely from how much or little you get from a websearch is ludicrous.

Which, given that you were just engaged in egregious and hopeless efforts to determine "who people are" from out-of-context assessment culled from the Internet, suggests that if your friends were like you say you are now, as opposed to who you were being in the last paragraph without saying so, they wouldn't want to hang around with you. Probably, however it would be better to say it's just an incoherent, illogical mess, and that we're now two sections into the essay without knowing what it's about except that it's a record of your rationalizations, which given its now-proven irrationality seems increasingly probable.

Well, now. If we weren't compelled to accept rationalizations as logic, but were instead allowing ourselves to ask how the structure and content of rationalizations communicated unconscious motives lading to patterns of thought and behavior, I believe that we might feel that this passage helped us considerably. On the logical level, it seems to me that this passage stands for the idea that it's good to be super-uptight. Super-uptight enough, at any rate, to think that there's a reason not to Google "child pornography," among other things. Which was previously the state of mind you didn't trust. Without obsessing, we might want to revisit the point that privacy is not about the secret you don't want revealed, if we weren't actually analyzing the unconscious emotional limitations against remembering that this was actually the point of what I tried for four weeks to teach you.

But that's not what one would do if one had privacy concerns. If one had privacy concerns, one would go wild on a website that one built for oneself somewhere other than a centralized social networking database. People could leave messages, and you could send out status updates and do all the Facebook things that you like, without losing privacy. The problem with this logic isn't that it's illogical. It's completely bat-shit crazy, but that's not the problem either. The problem is that it's rationalization and you're pretending that's logic. Seen as rationalization, it's perfectly fine and it makes total sense. Of course, it doesn't lead to the ostensible conclusion, but what difference does that make?

It’s good to be critical of flawed institutions - and to be sure, there are many in America. At its best, critical thought both leads to progressive change and constitutes a healthy brain exercise. But there’s a point at which critical thought becomes corrosive and self-destructive, and limits your enjoyment of life. I’d rather spend my 20s blissfully ignorant than scared of Big Brother.

Which would be the point, if there were in fact anything to be scared of, which is the only time in which all that "critical thought" (which we could also call "logic") would be particularly necessary.

I don't take these paragraphs any more seriously than you do. I see no reason to believe the reader will take you seriously, either.

The route to the improvement of this essay is, it seems to me, to make it something that can be taken seriously. First, you have to confront the argument the very predicate of the essay is to ignore. If each of our behaviors in the Net affected only our own privacy, giddy self-involved ignorance might be ugly, but it wouldn't be unethical. Littering, however, is unethical. Abetting others' unwelcome invasion of the privacy of people you know who would prefer you wouldn't help to destroy it is immoral. Abetting others' tracking of people who will be hurt or killed based on their activities should be avoided at almost all human cost. You pay no attention whatever to the real issue, which is the ecological nature of the destruction of privacy. You can disagree with the basic argument around which I built this section of the course, and I don't have the slightest objection to your choosing for the purpose of your disagreement whatever Paris Hilton imitation you think best advantages your argument through satire, but you've got to disagree with the argument I advanced, not ignore it. If what you do destroys other peoples' privacy, teaches the machine both generally and specially how to interfere in the lives of others who depend upon you not to be working against their human interests, then all this cheerful bullshit of yours is just the shallow excuses you make for negligently and self-involvedly hurting people. So the first step is to explain why I am factually wrong in my central proposition on this matter: that the privacy crisis is an ecological problem created by an anti-commons: we hurt OTHER people when we share a photograph with Facebook.

Second, if you have advanced an argument sufficient to show why, despite my argument to the contrary, it IS all about you after all, there aren't significantly harmful third-party consequences of our choices, and thus there is no problem you could create that you couldn't solve by running away, we are still left with the distinction between logic and rationalization. The very tone of the essay discredits the ostensible "my logic is so good that you might want to adopt it" posture of the piece. It winks "rationalization" loudly enough that it cannot be taken seriously no matter which way it's taken to be intended. However it is to be rewritten, that surely must change.