If anyone did this in front of me I would smack them in the mouth.

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Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.

You’re completely missing the more useful point. The right says “woke and political,” implicitly referencing the complex change I described above. The left quotes the right saying “woke and political” as an implicit dismissal of civil rights, diversity, representation, etc. Both of these lazy-ass anachronisms suck big huge elephant dicks and ruin the political discourse in the media.

I’m not defending the straw man in this screenshot of a tweet, but this is a bad comparison. Roddenberry created a world in which the ideas of equality, freedom, diplomacy, and justice could be explored organically. He shifted the underlying economic motivations for the existence of political systems. He fought constantly with the studio system and his own writers to bring about a revolutionary vision of the future.

Since Roddenberry’s death, Star Trek: The Franchise has been slowly oscillating downwards: away from a universe whose observation reveals the objective value of virtue into one in which virtue is paid lip service at the cost of strong “physics” – that is, the sense of a coherent universe. Star Trek is now a product researched, marketed, designed, produced, tested, distributed, and defended by committee. Where once we had revolutionary subversions of what was allowed on television, we now find performative affirmations of popular lifestyle. If you have to compare yourself to 90’s broadcast television in order to feel revolutionary, you’re not.

The use of “woke” and “political” in this hypercontextualist style is so vague as to border on non-expression. Reacting to a reaction to a reaction to a reaction to a form of expression in which my reply wouldn’t be allowed due to a character limit is not critical thinking. We can do better than this. Roddenberry already did.

Reddit is dying. Its goals as a growth-oriented corporation are inherently contrary to its original nature as a community center. I have to give them props for dragging it out as long as they have (and will). All the factors that made Reddit possible and desirable still exist; in fact, the ActivityPub federation protocol enables an even more powerful form of collaboration that transcends a lot of the negative aspects of Reddit’s design.

Give it time. Make content! Tell people about this wonderful new generation of media. Consider it an opportunity to engage with the glory days of a new form of internet media. Which it is.