I wish people were more public

I used to be very public, just as the author prefers. However, as the amount of surveillance on the internet increased it eventually reached a tipping point for me and I switched to being much more private as a matter of self-protection.

There's no way I'd be comfortable going back to the way things used to be unless the web becomes better -- and I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

Until someone evil uses all that to investigate you or do something against you...

Beautifully written, and something I resonate with. But I find myself wanting to read other peoples thoughts and peer at what they are doing. But I do not want to share any of that from myself because the internet is to permanent. I do not want to create an online footprint on this internet.

I resonate with this. I enjoy reading people's technical, artistic and personal writings. How they built, solved, or learned something new. Their favorite tools, workflows. Favorite authors, concepts, interests. @simonw is a great example of this kind of openness and working in public. I'm learning how to do that in my own way.

It makes the world friendlier, more welcoming for beginners and life-long students. It also creates a sense of community and human connection, which is often cynically exploited in today's society.

"And beyond my selfish curiosity there’s also the Fedorovist ancestor simulation angle: if you die and are not cryopreserved, how else are you going to make it to the other side of the intelligence explosion? Every tweet, blog post, Git commit, journal entry, keystroke, mouse click, every one of these things is a tomographic cut of the mind that created it."

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Historians pour over this sort of stuff. If a historically interesting figure wrote a letter to their neighbour to complain about a noisy dog, it's been carefully preserved and obsessively analyzed. Historians want to get inside their subjects' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they did that big, important thing, and every scrap of remaining written material helps.

We live in a period that is going to be real tough on historians studying it. Over the last few decades, physical correspondence (i.e. letters, etc.) has mostly died out. A lot of people still journal, but on their computer. Will that folder of old journal entries be found by whoever inherits your house full of junk or will it be tossed? A dead-tree diary is pretty easy to recognize for what it is. A computer's contents are comparatively easy to overlook.

Most people who have lived over the last few decades have had multiple email addresses that, at first, they eagerly used for personal interactions and then, over time, more and more only for professional/commercial correspondence. At the same time, people started writing for fun and passion under anonymous pseudonyms in a variety of online forums. Some remain online and still operating. Some have been curated and remain online. Some are archived. Some are just gone. Then came social media and texting. A huge proportion of people's most intimate interactions are in texts now, but for how much longer? We seem to be on a novelty treadmill when it comes to personal interaction mediums. Yesterday's source of joy is today's chore.

Imagine that you do something really significant in a decade or so, and some historian a hundred years from now is trying to figure out why you did it. Getting access to as much of your written output as remains and correctly associating the anonymous stuff with you is going to be a tough problem. How much of what is online today will remains? How much of it will be possible to associate with you, and not a pseudonym? Even if they speak your native tongue, they'll have to learn how to interpret your slang and texting shorthand. This sounds almost impossible today, but what kind of tools might they have in a century?

My suspicion is that history is going to remain remarkably unchanged in a very specific way: For some historical figures we'll have mountains of material. Others, despite their importance, will be complete enigmas.

I still love the era when everything online was text-based.

Post brought to us by the NSA

" I say reading in private is solipsistic"

Only if you don't apply anything you learned publicly.

For example, I read " evil is suffering passed on" and was able to relay that quote to an entitled friend to help hen change hens perception of how hens impositions affected others.