Re: [projectvrm] Privacy is SO overrated - Scoble

[Phil Wolff < >]

David Brin's and Bill Joy's post-privacy writings were one kind of watershed: imagining that you could live with the worst-case privacy scenario. 

This week's is a different kind of watershed moment. It's the backlash to privacy advocacy. Not to privacy, mind you, but to its advocacy.

Privacy fatigue is real. 

People are tired of ineffectual whining, hyperbolic accusations, fearmongering, and the vague weak ass repetitive language that makes up 99% of privacy editorial and unpersuasive speech. It's all the same and nothing's changed and isn't it time to move on? 

The closest historical comparable is the labor movement. People forget why unions came about, some of the great outcomes from the movement (like the 40 hour five-day workweek), and with this forgetting comes a lack of political will and a new acceptance that employers should have all the power. 

So much of what I love about the ProjectVRM list is how often and how well we explore the rhetoric and language and semantics of this topic. Somehow all of this great thought leadership never seems to leave the list.

Doc, let me suggest that it might be time to abandon ProjectVRM. I think the ideas have been articulated and companies have a clear path to implement these ideas. What the world needs is a real five-year marketing campaign that ties the Harvard intellectual rigor to the Madison Avenue heartstring-pulling to produce changes that rebalance power. This is about privacy and control. About relationships among people, groups of people, businesses, and governments. About rewiring a web that's fueled by advertisers. About infrastructure extortionists, aggregators, surveilleurs, and other powerful institutions. (Extend the list if you like...) 

But right now and for the last ten years privacy (and the rest) has had immature messaging. It's agonizing, antagonistic, abstract, laden with the most vicious memes from go-to-war, save-the-planet, with-us-or-agin-us propaganda. 

In the alternative, we might author framing that's positive (VRM's original style), human, actionable, social, value-aligned, emotionally connected, and that can be explained by kids in primary school. 

And then we need professional propagandists to craft and carry the word, build communities of action, and effect change. 

Until we do, we'll be burning through goodwill like the AFL/CIO has for generations. 

Back to Scoble. Let's not smack down Robert for revelling in the joy of disclosure. The right, the freedom, the power to disclose what and how we want is part and parcel of personal control. 

P.S. Next IIW, let's recruit kids and see how well we explain our top ten ideas; haven explain them back or to each other. We should learn a lot. 

--

Phil Wolff


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