AliceFraser
patreon
Prepping, peeping and piling on.
🕑 Added 2021-08-03 12:39:23 +0000 UTCI have a prepper friend who talks about hoarding amoxicillin and ammo, and every time he does, I think “I’m allergic to amoxicillin”, which is true. It brings me out in a full body rash. Well, it did once, and now I have to write it on forms. I guess I’m allergic to bullets too; if they’re delivered in the traditional manner. But I don’t tell him either of those things, because he doesn’t need that information. You need to be a form for me to deliver that kind of rash-info.
Thinking about information and privacy makes me think about freedom and the surveillance state - I am consistently surprised at how okay people are when they find their data is being used, leaked, algorithm-ed, sold. I can’t help feeling part of it is a reassuring feeling that at least someone’s watching… someone cares enough to monetise the fall of a sparrow. If the divine were an algorithm, I’d want to talk to someone about the User Interface.
No, really the thing I get confronted by is the blasé types who don’t mind being tracked and watched because “I’ve done nothing wrong so I have nothing to hide”, which according to my friend Joseph bespeaks someone who doesn’t entertain many interesting thoughts. To me someone saying they don’t need privacy because they have nothing to hide is possibly someone who would let you look at their anus with a periscope in public. (Do I mean periscope? I don’t mean microscope or telescope. I feel periscope does the job in that sentence of communicating some sort of aggressive lens) Which is to say, you don’t need to have done anything wrong to want to keep some things private.
On the other hand Matt Damon recently talked about how he’s stopped using certain words, because his daughters told him they weren’t acceptable any more, and the internet piled on about how sharing this in public was a ‘massive fail’. I don’t know that it should be seen as a massive fail to have learned something (even if it’s what we think of as ‘too late’). And really, do we expect Matt Damon to be immersed in ‘The Culture’? I can’t imagine he talks to many people, you know? Family, high school friends who still treat him like he’s human… other wildly famous people who presumably chat about scripts, facial preservation and yacht trips.
I have this theory about how we find it really really hard to understand that other people haven’t been exposed to the same information we have, so we read ignorance as culpable. Like we can know in theory that other people have a different life experience, but we can’t really *believe* it. And we certainly can’t believe they’re not doing it on purpose.
Anyway! To keep me from turning into an amoeba in lockdown, I’m doing a few writing rooms. Which is to say we just chill on the other side of the internet from one another and work on our own stuff. Maybe do some prompts, if you’re at a loose brain.
Details below.
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Writing Room 1 this week (U.K. wednesday evening time 10pm)
Time: Aug 5, 2021 07:00 AM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (or your local equivalent)
Link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85444690455?pwd=TGJhWXp6TnRKU1RRNUN4RXUyempqZz09
Writing Room 2 this week (Aug 5, 2021 08:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) aka Aug 6, 2021 10:00 AM Sydney (or your local equivalent).
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81529750841?pwd=V3U5S1dEK2FvRUF1Q25uVlRkWWR2Zz09
I’ll send through the relevant passcodes to whoever wants to join at any level. Drop me a DM via this app. First come first serve. Capping it at a handful.
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Comments
Tim Parsons
You might mean endoscope, I guess, although that hasn't really got going at the point you No, maybe I won't continue that thought. Is it my fault that one of the computer systems I look after collects endoscopy data so I know more about it than anyone non medical should have to? Yes, okay, maybe I could get a different job. Where were we before I interrupted with biological irrelevance? Oh yes. Do, please, carry on.
Keith D. Jones
Here's a possibility that just crossed my mind. It may be less blase acceptance that our information is tracked as weary resignation. It's just one more thing that people feel they cannot control while also feeling so abstract as to not really matter.
Fascinating process writing jokes, because you have to actually figure out what common knowledge is.
I remember that flavour! I had that one after pneumonia
I've been trying to remember the name of that banana milkshake flavoured antibiotic that gave me a rash when I was a kid for years. It tasted so good.
J. Schuberth
Your post made me think of a passage from the book "Legal Tender" about East German love stories and the State. The analysis of the film "The Lives of Others" talks about the Stasi and the ideology of its surveillance apparatus. Then concludes: "indeed, the new way (computers, big data, our way) seems more moral, or at least less ruthless. There are no secret agents---no human agents at all, in fact. In a sense, though, this might be even more frightening. Perhaps at some level we prefer to be watched than to be ignored. Our watchers might be leering with a voyeur's lascivious gaze, a sadist's obscene intent; or as even the antiheros [in the Lives of Others] did once, they might be falling in love." Human psychology might be against us on data privacy.
Re: "I have this theory about how we find it really really hard to understand that other people haven’t been exposed to the same information we have, so we read ignorance as culpable." More than once, I've caught myself learning something new or watching a movie for the first time and immediately afterwards thinking, "Well, this is common knowledge."
Excellent! Drop me a DM so I can keep it all in the same place
I'd like to join the UK time zone one please Alice.
