It's funny you say that. I've had a longstanding conclusion that my true individuality only arises from the secrets I keep.
Even if these are benign and even sometimes silly secrets, even if no one would find them interesting, they are the only thing I have that sets me apart from others.
This is another reason I feel anxious over creeping mass surveillance and the loss of privacy. It's a direct threat to my individuality.
The more I think about it, the more I come to one conclusion.
An organisation only knows who an individual is by the secrets they share with each other. It doesn't matter what the secret is, it comprises the identity.
It's why I get angry when I hear talk of backdooring/banning encryption.
It's why the phrase "I have nothing to hide" is a ridiculous fallacy.
Even the credit card in my wallet has multiple secrets to identify itself, and its ties to my account.
Without secrets, you become a non-person, because you are incapable of proving who you are.
>The idea of the individual would need to be eliminated to remove all secrets.
Well, this is good when it happens, on occasion, anyway. It's not a static value; sometimes such states as you propose are valuable/valued - other times, not so. This is not absolute, since you mention practicality.
More specifically, since we are discussing governance, we must absolutely remove the individual from the occasion if we are to maintain a stable social construction, while at the same time strengthening the individuals position within either a fluid .. or rigid .. social structure.
I personally believe modern government is holding us back. Lets just get this out of the way now.
In the digital age, we don't need all the hierarchy; we simply need better apps. And I most certainly do not want my apps to have personality, if they are designed to ease the means by which I exchange, equitably, with everyone else using my app^W^W^Wwho is a member of my society...
>The idea of the individual would need to be eliminated to remove all secrets.
I believe this is a call-to-authority fallacy. You have not thought the original statement through; but rather acted as an individual unit of agency reacting to the pressure of the masses.
Of course we will still have individuals; human bodies are made that way, and hopefully will stay that way for a long time yet.
What we won't have is rock-star/evil-genius politicians, nor will we have much reason to keep secrets to each other, over who has rice and who has salt and who is on the way to Mars, and so on ...
I have thought this through. I'm happy to have new thoughts come my way, but you seem to miss some of the requirements of interaction.
Any organisational unit needs to be able to identify the state of any individual it interacts with, to ensure continued interaction, such as resource allocation. Because resources are finite, such allocations need to be fraud resistant in some way. That is achieved by proving identity - an exchange of "secrets".
Some examples from day-to-day life are license numbers, registration IDs, home address and so on. How private such a secret neefs to be is proportional to the ownership of the secret.
My address is usually fine to share, as a stranger may find it difficult to possess my house, though they can intercept things on-property, but its more difficult.
My bank details are not as safe to share, as they tend to be the sum totality of how a bank identifies me. Thus fraudulently removing a primary resource is easy.
> Well, this is good when it happens, on occasion, anyway.
I rarely see secrets being removed at all. In fact, the only time I can see an individual no longer having any secrets, would be when they are made a non-citizen, and can no longer interact within society, or not without an enormous amount of effort.
