I have written on and off about my ambivalent feelings about a society where we value individual privacy over collective intelligence. Whenever I bring up this argument there is a counter to the effect of “but we need secrets” or “concealment is a condition of civilization” (from this piece by the NYU philosophy professor Thomas Nagel). While I completely agree that our society at present is constructed in a way where secrets and concealment abound, it still seems fair to ask whether that is ...
