Went to A.C. Grayling lecture tonight. He quoted Benjamin Franklin, 1775: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
He says we should resist having Google and Facebook harvesting all our details, and governments being able to read all our emails. What if our govt isn’t benign one day?
Also, people from conservative cultures might become the dominant online force — maybe we will be made to go back to the days of Mad Men and a lack of equality?
He said some countries (eg. Russia) don’t even have a word for “privacy”.
He told some scary anecdotes about people from countries where privacy doesn’t exist and the govt monitors everything — I won’t mention them here, as he’s on tour in Sydney for the Writer’s Festival and you can see him yourself.
Right to Life: he means quality of life. So, actually: a right to die with dignity when the quality of life plummets.
A pretty radical character with an interesting history.
Cotton Ward 