Although I do not argue your main points regarding privacy and security, and the fact that many lack Clue 1 about just how public their information has become, I am reminded again by this final paragraph that we who *are* connected vastly overestimate the impact of the internet on the rest of the world.

The latest stats I can find still show that less than 40% of the world’s population has *regular, reliable* access to a computer. This figure is even lower if you factor in access to the internet, even lower if you add *uncensored*.

Then, there is the issue of language. Having access to material you cannot read is not very useful. With the spectacular growth of the ‘not in English’ internet, a large language and cultural divide is opening on the net — one that will never close.

We do not all live in the same village. Those who do not have access to the net are not affected at all. These are still the majority.

Those who do have access are increasingly splintering into a series of villages, determined by language and government policies. Each village is different. In the English-language village, anything goes, as long as someone can pay the bills, which is why that public space increasingly looks like a cross between television and a highway plastered with billboards.

The Chinese village looks a lot like any other Chinese village, as far as I can tell. Unless you read Chinese (and mine is so rusty as to be useless), it looks like a lot of incomprehensible signs on strange shops, overseen by the watchful eyes of the local Committee. You better be watching what you say, because you know for sure someone else is.

And foreigners are regarded with deep suspicion, by the Committee, and by the locals, who wonder if they are really spies for the Committee.

There is also a substantial Russian village, a Hindi village, an EU village, and so on. There is even a Srbijan village, and boy! does it ever reflect the culture it is embedded in! And each has its own mores, embedded in its own set of regulations.

Despite the dreams of the 90s, the internet is not going to make us all one and free us from the constraints of human nature. Far from it. It is a human space, and therefore it can only reflect what we are.

And we are a species given to splintering, to us versus them, to power relations and hierarchy and a myriad other traits that have kept us from realising our own dreams of utopia.

Sure. Common sense tells us to watch what we say and do in any public space, and the issues of privacy and security are particularly acute in the English language village.

But human nature makes sure that what can be said around this fire is heresy at that one, that the questions asked over here make no sense to the people sitting over there, and that, at any given hearth, someone will remark upon the weirdness and threat from the people at other hearths.

The more it changes….