Law in the Internet Society

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TiffanyYoungFirstEssay 4 - 01 Apr 2018 - Main.EbenMoglen
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 The ultimate convenience that technology offers us – and the hardest to part with – is the ability to stay well within our comfort zones. At any moment, we are only interacting with those we want to and expected to interact with. By staying within our comfort zones, we insulate ourselves from new bonds (like striking up a conversation with a stranger) and from new ideas (living in an echo chamber). We must accept that discomfort is part of the human experience before we can break the technological shackles with which we have chained ourselves.

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This revision acknowledges the issues raised by my comments, but doesn't address them. The rewrite takes the fact of anxiety, or the "comfort zone" into the picture, but doesn't take up the invitation to consider the fact saliently. You're not only interacting with the people you want and expect to interact with: that's the myth. You are instead always interacting with a series of espionage companies powered by machines that comprehensively surveil you and remember everything you read, listen to, and do. To say that's a "comfort zone" is to have created a new and—at least to my mind—incoherent idea of comfort. But this draft is as little willing to come to grips with that as the last one. I don't think the question is, as the conclusion states, accepting discomfort. That would involve, say, living human life the way it was lived for several million years before the development of anesthesia. This is about deciding whether to accept the elimination of freedom.

 
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.

Revision 4r4 - 01 Apr 2018 - 17:25:28 - EbenMoglen
Revision 3r3 - 27 Dec 2017 - 17:23:16 - TiffanyYoung
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