[liberationtech] Commercialization makes your online rights irrelevant, more thoughts from my talk with @ioerror at #rp12

[Meredith L. Patterson]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Dmytri Kleiner <dk at telekommunisten.net> wrote:
> On 20.05.2012 23:54, StealthMonger wrote:
>> Speak for yourself.  Others simply go their own way in peace, perhaps
>> occasionally temporarily detouring to cooperate with others in some
>> mutually beneficial endeavor.
>
> Nothing I have read from anthropology nor psychology bears this out, both
> portray us as a deeply social species

While the species as a whole is deeply social, the degree of
sociability for any given *individual* is highly variable, and indeed
varies along more than one axis. Some of its axes have extrema that we
recognise as pathologies, e.g. the profound disregard for others that
the DSM-IV identifies as "antisocial personaity disorder". But there
is plenty of healthy natural variation between, e.g., extroverts and
introverts. Thoreau, for instance, qualifies as someone who fits the
description StealthMonger gave.

> and suggest that our primary motivations are social ones, not individual utility maximization.

If _Walden_ isn't about individual utility maximization then I don't
know what is.

--mlp