Maxistentialism: Julian Assange: [Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen] offer an…
The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. While Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones.
