Excerpts (guess this is gonna be censored soon)
这篇书评可能有关键情节透露
My generation was the last in American and perhaps even in world history for which this is true — the last undigitized generation, whose childhoods area’s up on the cloud but are mostly trapped in analog formats like handwritten diaries and Polaroids and VHS cassettes, tangible and imperfect artifacts that degrade with age and can be lost irretrievably.
When your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions will possess you.
I’d never before experienced anything so consistent and fair, so unequivocally unbiased. A computer would wait forever to receive my command but would process it the very moment I hit Enter, no questions asked.
While sometimes this was true, we all remember those other times when it wasn’t — when “because I said so” wasn’t enough and “you’ll thank me one day” rang hollow. If you’ve ever been an adolescent, you’ve surely been on the receiving end of one of these cliches, and so on the losing end of an imbalance of power.
To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a moment’s notice. There were even some rules that you’d only find out about after you’d violated them.
At a certain point, the denial of agency becomes a license to resist, though it’s characteristic of adolescence to confuse resistance with escapism or even violence.
But even the smartest among us rely on assumptions that we’ve never put to the test — and because we do, the choices we make are often flawed.
When people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities.
As in any process of encryption, the original material — your core identity — still exists, but only in a locked and scrambled form. The equation that enables this ciphering is a simple proportion: the more you know about others, the less you know about yourself.
Everything gets subsumed by the job, which begins with a denial of character and ends with a denial of conscience.
The best account that someone can ever give of themselves is not a statement but a pledge — a pledge to the principles they value, and to the vision of the person they hope to become.
Cut off from the world and stalled bumper to bumper, even though I was in the driver’s seat, I was just a passenger.
I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance.
The most corrosive precepts of online life: Nobody is ever allowed to make a mistake, and anybody who does make a mistake must answer for it forever. To erase those comments would have been to erase who I was, where I was from, and how far I’d come. To deny my younger self would have been to deny my present self’s validity.
All we can do is control our reactions — whether we let the past oppress us, or accept its lessons, grow, and move on.
My mind was a mash-up of the values I was raised with and the ideals I encountered online. (Youthful imprinting)
We learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults around us, and in the process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions, until we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the words we’re using are our own.
A system is just a bunch of parts that function together as a whole, which most people are only reminded of when something breaks.
He used to say that “contracting was the third biggest scam in Washington,” after the income tax and Congress.
Not everyone is possessed of a sincere curiosity.
There is a depersonalization of experience fostered by the distance of a screen. Peering at life through a window can ultimately abstract us from our actions and limits any meaningful confrontation with their consequences.
Something that is devastating for the public canoe, and often is, beneficial to the elites.
China: Explicitly antidemocratic single-party state; an authoritarian hellhole.
The fundamental rule of technological process: if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly already has been.
China’s Great Firewall was domestically censorious and repressive, intended keep its citizens in and America out in the most chilling and demonstrative way, while the American systems were invisible and purely defensive.
Content: something that you knowingly produce.
Metadata: the activity records that allow them both the “big picture” ability to analyze data at scale, and the “little picture” ability to make perfect maps, chronologies, and associative synopses of an individual person’s life, from which they presume to extrapolate predictions of behavior.
It would be a tragedy if, by the time we’d finally resolved to resist, such resistance were futile.
The repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority.
Authoritarian states are typically not governments of laws, but governments of leaders, who demand loyalty from their subjects and are hostile to dissent. Liberal-democratic states, by contrast, make no or few such demands, but depend almost solely on each citizen voluntarily assuming the responsibility of protecting the freedoms of everyone else around them, regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed, ability, sexuality, or gender. Any collective guarantee, predicated not on blood but on assent, will wind up favoring egalitarianism — and though democracy has often fallen far short of its ideal, I still believe it to be the one form of governance that most fully enables people of different backgrounds to live together, equal before the law.
This equality consists not only of rights but also of freedoms. In fact, many of the rights most cherished by citizens of democracies aren’t even provided for in law except by implication. They exist in that open-ended empty space created through the restriction of government power. For example, Americans only have a “right” to free speech because the government is forbidden from making any law restricting that freedom, and a “right” to a free press because the government is forbidden from making any law to abridge it. They only have a “right” to worship freely because the government is forbidden from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, and a “right” to peaceably assemble and protest because the government is forbidden from making any law that says they can’t.
It’s because of this lack of common definition that citizens of pluralistic, technologically sophisticated democracies feel that they have to justify their desire for privacy and frame it as a right. But citizens of democracies don’t have to justify that desire — the state, instead, must justify its violation. To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it, either to a state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a “private” business.
Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say… Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor — o to the crowds of principles dissidents.
Like all UN declarations, this aspirational document was never enforceable, but it had been intended to inculcate a new basis for transnational civil liberties in a world that had just survived nuclear atrocities and attempted genocides and was facing an unprecedented surfeit of refugees and the stateless.
In the US, data is usually regarded as the property of whoever collects it. But the EU posits data as the property of there person it represents, which allows it to treat our data subjecthood as deserving of civil liberties protections.
We are the first people to be burdened with data immortality
If we don’t act to reclaim our data now, our children might not be able to do so. Then they, and their children, will be trapped too — each successive generation forced to live under the data specter of the previous one, subject to a mass aggregation of information whose potential for societal control and human manipulation exceeds not just the restraints of the law but the limits of the imagination.
Predictability is actually manipulation… A website that tells you that because you liked the book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.