The first picture that comes to our minds when we think about censorship is censorship by force.
An evil Orwellian government sending the police to knock down the doors of those who do not comply with the current speech law, regardless of that law being good or bad.
But there’s a less discussed yet maybe even more pervasive phenomenon, self-censorship. When we’re being observed, we behave differently. Privacy is the freedom to try things out.
In many ways, we already live inside the Truman Show. Once you realize that, how much would you stop being yourself? How many things would you like to try, but won’t because of that peer pressure?
Why is this important? Because trying stuff is essential to discover new things. Even AI works like this. It makes errors all the time and corrects course until it finds an outcome that works. AI improves so far because it’s not only a tireless human, it’s a shameless human.
But trying things in the clear, completely naked, set the risk too high for most people. Is that ability to try new things in a permission-less way (that means without the approval of someone already more powerful than us) makes us resistant to central planning.
That decentralizes things. Decentralization is important for optimizing the outcome of our very lives. Nobody is individually perfect. But collectively we get closer to getting things right.
In the future, more and more of that aggregated set of guesses will be recorded and analyzed. They will be part of our profiling, and we will be very aware of that. That will cause us to not answer truthfully individually. And so we’ll get it wrong collectively.
We’re voting all the time with our money.
We already learned that anonymous voting is the best voting. We need to preserve that anonymous voting when it comes to our money. Because that right to be wrong more often, will allow us to get it right together.