Private property has become so prevalent in the world that we rarely think about the commons. Most people consider the subway as a public good, it is part of “public transport” after all. But they are unlikely to recognize the space on the subway as a common, the way a community would previously have thought about a shared pasture. The COVID19 crisis is a stark reminder that commons are all around us: A single infected subway rider not wearing a mask could infect dozens of people. How is that...

I have written and spoken a lot about how technological progress is incompatible with privacy. One example I have used is someone bioengineering a virus in their basement. It turns out a much simpler example is what we are seeing today: a new virus that’s spreading. We cannot both have fast, easy international travel and also have privacy of travelers. If you travel and later come down with the coronavirus, we need to know where you went and who else may have been exposed. At a minimum societ...

NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s post wraps up the prior discussion of why as part of increasing informational freedom we should embrace a post privacy world. —- So we can’t really protect privacy without handing control of technology into the hands of a few and conversely decentralized innovation requires reduced privacy. What should we do? The answer, I think, is to embrace a post-privacy world. We should work to protect people and their f...

NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s post continues on the idea from last week that privacy is not compatible with technological progress (if you would rather watch a talk, you can find some of the same material in my Blockstack Berlin presentation). —- So why do I keep asserting the impossibility of assuring privacy? Don’t we have encryption? Encryption is great for securing information in transit and at rest, but there are problems that encryp...

NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s section introduces the idea that privacy is a strategy for freedom that has real downsides if we want to enter the Knowledge Age. In case you missed it, I posted a talk last week that summarizes my case for getting over privacy.Getting Over PrivacyCopyrights and patents aren’t the only legal limitations slowing down the Digital Knowledge Loop. We are actively creating new restrictions in the form of well-inte...

I was overly optimistic when I thought I could resume excerpts from World After Capital today. Turns out the next section is on privacy and it needs major editing. So while I am working on that, here is the talk I gave at Blockstack Berlin that summarizes my admittedly controversial view that privacy is incompatible with technological progress. We need strategies other than privacy to remain free in the digital age.

The Zuckerberg hearings were predictably pretty weak. First, the format does not lend itself to a deeper inquiry on a complex topic. Whenever someone seemed close to getting somewhere, the next questioner would take it somewhere else (or weirdly start over). Second, the politicians asking the questions appeared for the most part not to have a super deep understanding themselves which means they stick to the questions prepared by their staff even when an answer provides a small opening that th...

With the release by Wikileaks of the so-called Vault 7 CIA Hacking tools, the debate has once again turned to the effectiveness and role of encryption. As Zeynep Tufekci (you should absolutely follow her on Twitter) rightly points out, this is all about endpoint security and not about broken encryption. Now we are at the point where it gets interesting and one that I have been writing about for years whenever it comes to the relationship between privacy and general purpose computing. To repea...

The terror attacks in Paris, just like other terror attacks before them including 9/11, are a challenge to core democratic values of tolerance and freedom of speech. Turning against Muslims or against refugees is a terrible response as it only confirms the apocalyptic ideology of the attackers. Insisting on a primacy of individual privacy and government secrecy and continuing down a path of moral relativism is, however, equally doomed as a response. Let me start with moral relativism. Now wou...

After some initial uncertainty it appears that the data released yesterday is in fact from the Ashley Madison hack that had been announced a little while back. The data contains not just email addresses but a lot of other information including internal corporate documents. As for the email addresses there will be some percentage that was entered by others as Ashley Madison did not require an email confirmation (so I would take any revelations with a grain of salt). I believe that this hack an...