There's some who argue that having all of your life in one place, recorded, won't be a problem because society will be forced to shift in a more liberal direction and stop judging people. The alternative outcome is that this forces a hard crystallization around various very specific cultures, where for every community there's a list of "weird stuff that everyone does," and "stuff that gets you ostracized." So for example going to furry conventions might end up assigned to Googlers, and going to church assigned to machinists. That seems a lot more likely, given human nature.
As a young man I had a few friends and acquaintances who intimated that they had been stalked. My ex wife shared a story of being stalked by a deputy sheriff. And I can’t recall now but she may have been underage at the time to boot.
Pretty quickly I saw a pattern. People who don’t want privacy have never cared about someone who really needed it. Or needed it themselves.
If you think you might be queer, molested, or your neighbor might be in a hate group but you’re not sure, if you think your kid is doing drugs, you can’t just voice these opinions without putting someone in literal mortal peril. And there are a host of other things that might get you stigmatized. If you are in a bizg city that’s not a big deal. Find new people. But if you’re in a small town...
It's really everyone, if they know what's good for them - no matter how "normal" you are, there is always somewhere on earth where you would end up marginalized if you found yourself there for some reason. Nobody's traits are centered in every culture.
In the USA, homosexuals earned legal rights because they were forced out of hiding by violent police, leading them to fight back, win allies, and secure rights. Having secrecy also forces secrecy, weakening political power. It's a bloody war for sure, but a winnable war with long-term improvement.
I wonder whether the whole idea of a single “authentic” identity to present to friends, family, colleagues, etc. is fundamentally flawed. Humans are social beings, and that necessitates a certain agreeableness, which implies fluid and context-dependent social identities for each person. Not doing so affects range and depth of experience, IMHO.
In a bid to capture all aspects of your “true” identity (that too, for marketing purposes) Facebook is trying to force legibility [1] on something it fundamentally doesn’t understand. If it succeeds, then we might have the largest disaster caused by a bureaucracy, the kind one has learned to expect from reckless government planning [1,2].
>society will be forced to shift in a more liberal direction and stop judging people
Really? This hasn't been my experience at all. FB can be just as toxic as e.g. a youtube comment section, and what I see more often than not is people self selecting based on who agrees with them nearly 100% of the time.
Right, but the theory (which I'm arguing against, see above), is that if economic rewards are grafted on to the social side then people will become more open so that they can become more economically successful. Youtube comments and today's FB aren't economic - there are few incentives against bubbling yourself beyond personal gratification.
Sorry, poor wording on my part. I didn't mean to imply you were supporting that theory, I had never heard it before and was just shocked that _anyone_ believes it.
