> Benjamin Franklin would probably be really angry about how normalized it has become to give up liberties for some false sense of security.

I honestly think it's even worse than that, because the status quo has made it so we don't even have the courtesy of knowing we're giving up as much as we are.

IMHO, the substance quantity of what is being lost is on the order of an entire language. "Privacy" means something totally different today than what it used to :(, and we've all but lost the very element of *pause, consider* that would be our way back to where we used to be.

I have to admit I'm looking at Europe with a bit of a wobbly mentality these days; the EU is not a panacea but the GDPR has had some really interesting ramifications, and France's position to ban GA recently (if that's what it actually was) was... well it'll be interesting to see how that goes down...

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> The unintentionally worst people are the ones who think this is all a great idea. Because security. Fact of the matter is, though, that if people had to actually know and understand what they're using and doing, we'd not be in the mess we are today.

I wrote something a while back about end-to-end encryption that also touches on the danger of cargo-culting a "yay! security! awesome"-by-default ideology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25522220

It's not really a first-class substantial "oooh, thing" perspective, more just unimpressed grumbling about the status quo. But it's a bit of anecdata that does agree with your position.

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> This reminds me of my friend. He insists on having his AV and cookie blocker running. He thinks that's super important. Every new site he manually blocks everything. This same guy also insists on continuously installing all kinds of stuff, and after just two months his new notebook took 20 seconds to boot. When he got it, it were two.

(This sort of thing is really interesting to me but I'm really bad at talking about it concisely. Apologies.)

A contributory perspective:

The moment I saw "Every new site he manually blocks everything." I immediately jumped to a mental reference point that might be called the "manual drive fallacy". If you give someone a bunch of knobs and settings to tweak, and the knobs and settings induce ideological changes that are not mechanically/concretely measurable, and all this happens within the context of "control" and "freedom"... in certain people, I think the brain can start going very very loopy, in a very specific way. It never gets into a state that would ever be classified as "unhinged", but it's like the brain "discovers" this alternate pathway that satisfies both our intrinsic desire for control while short-circuiting past the "proof of work" feedback loops of self-reflection, critical thinking, engagement in depth, etc that keeps that control harmonically resonant with its environment, in that unexplainable way that makes the influence meaningfully productive at both the micro and macro scale.

It's kind of like if bikeshedding were put in an infinite feedback loop and left indefinitely. Stuff just folds in on itself. Perpetual motion machine meets black hole. Meep.

I call this a "manual drive fallacy" because I personally equate the mindset you describe with having a pathological affection for "manual drive" processes.

I read a while back that the Air Force crashes many more UAVs and drones than the Army and Navy do (or at least they did a little while back) because the latter depend very heavily on autopilot, whereas the incumbent Air Force has always justified its existence by performing those processes manually. At the micro scale both approaches make sense - the Air Force exists predominantly to train amazing pilots, who are going to make mistakes; the Army/Navy exist to defend land and sea, and need unspecialized local air superiority as part of their own bigger pictures. Insights like "computers are actually way better pilots than humans" can only emerge when when a macro scale focus is introduced that is able to laterally make comparisons across verticals while maintaining sight of a bigger picture. (Reproducibly coordinating such focuses is of course the billion dollar question...)

In a similar sort of way I've come to think that there are a similar organization of internal processes and balances that happen in the individual brain that influence the "functional level" or "watermark" of insightful impact and control a given human can have. We all fundamentally want to control, and organize, and achieve cohesion. But the underlying mechanics we use to achieve that can involuntarily affect how efficient we can be overall. If mental functioning is very high, these mechanics can integrate a lot of input, and our control/organization/cohesion will be very efficient, cohesive, and resonant. If mental functioning is low, significantly less input can be integrated into executive output, and the result will be very fragmented and micromanaged.

A person that can only model the effects of control in their environment to a low level may constantly be in a state of disorientation as they continually send their mental models of their environment back to the drawing board to start again as their attempts to summarize the world around them do not integrate sufficient substance to be useful. I'm reminded of mental health advice that generally recommends to patiently remind a person having a panic attack about their environment and what's going on around them, in the hope this encourages distraction from painful mental feedback loops.

I wonder if there's a correlation between fragmented integration and an obsession with mechanical, concrete, "manual drive" processes and procedures. In much the same way there are unexplored knock-on effects from poor social engagement, I think a similar magnitude of impact may result from poor executive engagement, and perhaps one of those effects is a strong affection for tinkering with stuff that has things you can open and shut at a surface or aesthetic level.

Broadly speaking, creative coordination almost seems like a human mental attribute or quality that we imbue into the things we create. We design things according to some intrinsic sense we don't even realize we're following half the time as we simply concentrate on getting stuff done. Good design - perhaps the epitome of "10x senior engineering" we all strive to reach for - is to recognize the need to weave a sort of structured permeability into the things our ambition creates, so our creations can bend and stretch with the wind, and let others' influence in.
It's really sad to see this dynamic fall apart. There really seems to be something critical about our brains' ability to "slice and dice" the input we receive, and the functioning of that underlying capacity is what sets the pace.

I've seen a couple of really bad Windows 9x/XP simulators out there that barely let you do anything beyond opening the Start menu. I've long noodled over the idea that the core motivation driving these sorts of projects stems from a sort of focus-affinity that sadly bottoms out at that predominantly aesthetic, surface-depth level of coordination, potentially coupled with nostalgia from a time when these executive handicaps had less of a perceived impact. Maybe the person wants to remember that time, but emotional processing issues make it hard to recall the memory with sufficient fidelity to achieve nostalgic closure, and some frustrated consideration about what might nip this in the bud leads to the conclusion that remaking Windows might fix the problem (coming solely from a surface or aesthetic position - not even remotely close to considering the kernel design or hardware targets). And then maybe the person realizes soon after commencing the project that even just cloning the UI is too much work and will not help them get closer to closure, and they soon give up.

I think everyone wants to express their coordinational capacity and style; and because the brain's comprehension cannot extend beyond its own limits, this capacity and style is never intrinsically wrong.

As a form of human expression and communication, I think coordination's significance is woefully undocumented. We imbue how we see the world, and the fidelity of the mesh we use to integrate our perceptions, into how we express coordination.

(Incidentally, accomplishing this in the digital realm, where we have absolutely nothing to cue off of ("here's the instruction set manual for your 5GHz calculator"), making the inventions all around us the byproduct of an ideological collective sensory deprivation tank: we cue off of our brains. This is both terrifying and inordinately interesting IMO.)

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> The worst part about this is that he's so brainwashed into believing that he really needs this, despite me being living evidence that he doesn't, that there is actually no way of educating him. The fear machine has dug too hard into him and, unless they stop, there's actually no way of getting rid of it.

Alternative possible perspective (I could be wrong): you operate and exist outside of the scope of his cognizance of control. You don't exist. You're like the syllables of a brand name or jingle his brain just memoizes without considering.

> Not gonna lie, I actually think this is amazing. On one hand he's extremely cautious about security, which is not unreasonable per se, on the other hand he installs all kinds of shit because he's an idiot who doesn't actually know what he's doing.

(Continuing above theme) Or there just might be some totally concidental "miraculous" overlap between his actions and best practice :( and his perception of security might be uselessly broken.

> He's just doing what he's being told to do.

I actually agree here, with the caveat that "understanding is in the eye of the beholder" :v