Prepping, peeping and piling on.

I 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.

Xx

A