Privacy is well on course to being the major social issue of the next decade on a number of levels. It’s being suggested that what we do on the internet should be constantly monitored, because we might be doing something illegal. And Eric Schmidt up there believes that if we’re doing something that would bother us if it became public, then we should not be doing that at all.

Any of you know someone who’s in the closet? Any of you know someone who is, at the least, not out to a certain group of their friends or acquaintances? Any of you have a fetish that you’d rather not admit to any of your friends? Any of you have a fetish you’d rather your work colleagues did not know about? Yeah, I know – there are none of us who could really withstand the level of public scrutiny that Mr Schmidt and our lawmakers think we should be able to endure.

Now, I’m sure there are people out there who might be thinking “if only people were more able to be open about sex – I do nothing I am ashamed of. I’m not even ashamed of the thing with the wetsuit, the goat and the tub of creme fraiche” and heralding the end of privacy as a sign of increasing social enlightenment – if everything is public, there’ll be no need to be ashamed, and so on.

Those people are wrong. Privacy is vital. I only used sex as an example there because it’s one everyone can relate on a very basic level, regardless of social, economic or technological status. I’m going to continue using it as an example, because I think everyone can relate to it, but the need for privacy could equally apply to health issues, money, politics, religion, or really, anything that is a common experience, but that could also be used to mark us out as different. But to return to my point: on a very basic level, we also need privacy, and I’m going to waffle on at length about why.

Human beings are social animals. It’s why we worry about things like “fitting in”. Fitting in, being part of the herd, has both evolutionary advantages and some serious drawbacks. Obviously, you get the bonus of strength in numbers, and readily available sexual partners, but the flip side is too much pressure to fit in has the unfortunate effect of stifling innovation. And so we’ve adapted – we do need to fit in, we need to affirm our place within society, and we also need “alone time”. As much as we need to fit in, we also space, both physical and cognitive, that is defined as our own, space away from the crowd.

One of the ways we secure that space, particularly cognitively, is by managing information according to a level of trust – we reveal what we are thinking only to those we trust, as a means of testing out our ideas, before bringing them into the wider social unit – to check that those ideas won’t have negative consequences for our place in the group dynamic. And depending on how important, how personal those issues are to us, we reveal them to fewer and fewer people.

To return to my earlier example I, personally, do not think anyone needs to know what I might enjoy getting up to in the bedroom, so I generally keep my mouth shut on the subject. My closer friends may have picked up some hints, here and there, but I doubt any of them could tell you in any detail about things I enjoy, or experiences I have had. Which is the way I want it – not because I am ashamed of it or uncomfortable with the topics, but simply because most people have no need to know. And if they don’t need to know, why would I tell them? Telling people things they don’t need to know isn’t “being open/liberated/free/honest/insert word that hippies like here”, at least not as far as I’m concerned. I file it under “being pointless”. It’s tipping the signal to noise ratio in favour of noise.

There’s also a broader social management going on in what we chose to reveal to who – it’s partly a combination of trust, and partly to do with the ways we categorise the people we know.

On the trust front, if someone else displays a willingness to be open and public with certain information about their life, then I am going to think twice before I share information about myself on related topics with them. Whether I can trust them or not is irrelevant – they clearly don’t accord it the same level of importance that I do, and might therefore share my confidence with someone else, without stopping to think about whether or not I would consider it appropriate. And I am likewise made uncomfortable when others share information with me that I would not share with them – to me it speaks of a level of closeness that I do not wish to have, or perhaps do not wish to have yet – they may not consider a certain level of detail to be an intimate confidence, but I do and it is the perceived imbalance that is the source of my discomfort, rather than the topics themselves – it is as if they are presuming a level of friendship without going through the steps that would normally build that same level, skipping the intermediate levels of confidence, proclaiming a level of trust in me that I feel unable to reciprocate.

But that’s all to do with levels of trust. But there’s also kinds of trust. My clients at work need to be able to trust that I will work hard on their behalf, with honesty and discretion. Which means, in fact, that if they learn about my personal life if I share to a level they consider inappropriate, then they’re going to doubt my discretion. And the same is true of my friends, who need to be able to trust in other things about me, so it’s appropriate to share different things with them, and the same is true of my family, or even just something as simple as the players in my roleplaying games, who may be my friends, but who also have to feel able trust in certain of my character traits, so I need to present myself in certain ways to them.

All of which will be undermined, if, as Mr Schmidt is suggesting, privacy goes the way of the dodo, because if I can nothing my clients won’t approve of, then I can’t do much that my friends will like, either.

Now, most of what I’ve talked about here goes on at a level below conscious thought. By the time we reach adulthood, it is learned, and long practiced social behaviour. We do it without thinking – I’m only spelling it out here because it’s relevant to the subject of privacy, because if we have no privacy, then we lack the means to manage our social bonds in the way we choose. Without privacy, you don’t get intimacy. If you share everything with everyone, willingly or otherwise, without thought for context, then what you share with your nearest or dearest is no longer special.

I have no idea if any of that was sensible, or even coherent. But I need got get this posted today, so that’s what you’ve got for now. I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s thoughts on the subject.

When I was younger, I was a boy scout. Stop laughing at the back – I looked good in a woggle. The scout master may have been a little archaicaly homophobic, but he ended every meeting with the words “You live as a result of your actions, and you are judged by the company you keep.” It’s something that still informs how I pick my friends.

So what does friendship means to me? Well, to state the obvious, every friendship is different. Some of my friends, I see once in a blue moon, and it’s like no time has passed – we fall easily back into our friendship, and the conversation flows freely. Other friends, I see regularly, and yet every time, there’s a certain hurdle of not really quite knowing how to start talking to be overcome – like we’re both looking for the level, and not quite sure where it is.

I’ve got friends where I feel like I put more effort into the friendship, and friends where I know they’re the one doing all the work (and I feel bad about that). There are people I’ve met in the last year who are close friends, and friends I’ve known for a very long time who I keep at arms length.

One of the ways people define friendship is how far you would put yourself out for another person. Like, I think, most people, I have a small group of people that could call me up at any time, and I’d drop whatever I was doing if they needed a hand. Except, well…

Everyone says things like that. The truth, I think, is more complex. Because it’s easy to drop things if they’re just things for me, but as soon as other people are involved, well, that changes the equation. And that’s where friendship comes into it. Because honestly, if any of my friends asked for my help, my time, and giving it wouldn’t interfere with any plans but my own, well, how could I refuse? But suppose that interferes with plans made with another friend? Or more complicated yet, what if it interferes with helping another friend. Or with plans with groups of friends?

It’s not just about how your prioritise your own time – it’s about how you prioritise other people’s time and needs. And honestly, that’s the measure I tend to use for friendship – I try to place the same importance on someone else’s time that they appear to place on mine. So that means there are people I see once in a blue moon who are still very close friends, because I know that while neither of us has lots of time to see the other, when we do make the time, it’ll be a solid priority for both of us, and if they called up needing a hand, I’d clear my calendar for them. And there are people I see regularly who clearly can’t be arsed to actually make time, who routinely show up late, or cancel at the last minute, and while they’re still my friends, they’re not people who I would cancel plans for except in direst need.

There’s a chance that that last line has stung a few people reading this. It’s happened to me a bit of late, friends not showing up when they said they would, so if you’re worrying that this bit was aimed at you, well, you’re wrong. It wasn’t aimed at all. I don’t like you any less, I’m not having a dig. I really am just answering a question, and explaining a bit about what friendship means to me. I am absolutely certain that I fall short of my own standards, and that I have friends who think that I’m unreliable, that I’m never around, or things like that, and I am sorry for that (but on the other hand – make actual in-the-diary plans with me, and you’ll probably find I show up). This is not about what anyone else does, it’s about what I try to live up to.

Ultimately, friendship means being someone that someone else can rely on. Common interests, a shared sense of humour, these are the things that start a friendship, and without them, there’s not likely to be one. But if I am to be judged by the company I keep, then I want the company I keep to be reliable. You don’t need to always be around, you don’t need to expend lots of effort keeping in touch, because god knows, I probably won’t. But you do need to be someone who can be relied on to hold your end up when it actually counts.

“I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I can bang on about this quote in any number of ways. And I’m going to, so settle in.

We’ll start with the most basic: answering a question about quotation with a quotation that proclaims my hatred of them is, well, I think anyone that knows me would agree that that’s very much in line with my sense of humour. I don’t intrinsically hate quotation, but the circular nature of that response is sufficiently pleasing to me that I Iove to use that quote.

But further: I do hate over-use of quotation. It can be used as a substitute for one’s own thought, creativity and self-expression. I would far rather hear someone restate an idea clumsily, but in their own words, than have them use the most perfect and elegant quote in the universe. I also dislike the traits in people that lead them to use quotes from literature, or from other people, all over their internet profiles. It reeks to me of a bad combination of some or all of insecurity, false modesty, self aggrandisement, and a poor capacity for self-reflection. If you can’t talk honestly about yourself in your own words, then there’s something wrong, in my view.

And even getting away from the use of quotation as a crutch for creativity and self-expression, I particularly hate the trick of quoting some other source to shore up a weak argument. Religious arguments are particularly bad for this, referring to their holy books as if those books carry some intrinsic weight, but it can happen in plenty of secular arguments, too. But it’s in the religious context that I particularly love the seldom-seen full version of this quote.

“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”

If your argument is weak, referring to another, older, or cleverer source who appears to be saying something similar may make it sound stronger. And frankly, that’s cheating. Now, I’ll grant that if you’re caught by someone who is more familiar with the work you’re attempting to (mis-)use, then you might well find your entire argument being knocked down at a stroke. But if you’re not, then well, being deceptive like that in an argument is pretty shitty, and drives me up the wall.

So, when do I like quotation?

Well, one of the reasons most quotations survive is that they’re pithy statements of interesting ideas. They’re generally quite simple, clear, and memorable. That can be good. They’re a good way to make a theme or idea clear, in support of one’s own words. And yes, properly used in a debate, they can add some useful weight. And, as was pointed out to me in conversation over breakfast this morning, quotation is the basis of all satire. And we all know how I love satire. (I also like remixes, re-appropriations and re-interpretations. Can’t do any of those without quotation…)

But there’s another reason I like them, and that is that I like context. I like the fact that works and ideas exist in a wider web of thinking, expression and human experience that has gone before, or come after them. Quotations can provide a sort of cognitive hyperlinking, a means to indicate that if you like a particular line of thought, you can see where it’s born from and what was born of it. And I think that context for one’s thoughts is one of the most useful things one can provide as one goes.

For example: one of the other reasons I like that quote is because it is Emerson’s. I quite like Emerson. I’m a lot more of a socialist than he ever was, but his lack of socialism comes from his strong belief in “the infinitude of the private man”. He, in this case, is talk about the single individual being more important, and in many respects stronger than society. I don’t believe that’s the case, but I do believe very strongly in both privacy and individuality of thought, and the power of the individual when they stand up for they have come to believe for themselves, rather than been taught by some outside force. My socialism, I guess, comes from the idea that society is the place where our individual selves, and all our private thoughts come together for the advancement of all, to enable us to all go off and better be our private selves. I don’t think he’d have had a problem with that.

But then we got onto the issue of what it is possible to consent to (the context, of course, being that there are certain acts that law says it is not possible to consent to, and that list will get broader in a week or two). Now, as I say, if you want to let someone at your reproductive bits with any sort of implement, then that’s fine by me. All parties around the noodles were definitely agreed on that. But I do, for example, believe that it should not be possible to give your consent to being killed. (I am of course, thinking of the case of Armin Meiwes in German a few years back.)

Except that I believe in assisted suicide. My friends picked me up on this. And my response was that well, I believe in assisted suicide when someone’s quality of life is so awful as to be unbearable, and, in the opinion of a trained medical third party, is unlikely to improve. But if there’s a chance someone’s life could get back to bearable state, then they ought to keep going and that the urge of a person with a reasonable quailty of life (or a reasonable hope of same in the view of a third party) to simply end was the product of an abberant mental state that could be reasonably held in invalidate consent. (I should make it clear: this is not a judgement on people who feel like this, I simply feel that it is society’s duty to help people who feel like this to not feel like this, rather than to help them to shuffle off.)

“Why?” I was not unreasonably asked. Because, when you get down to it, I am a big communist hippy. Someone dying for no other reason than “just because they wish to right now” removes not just themselves, but all that they might ever be, from the world, and I think we owe it to our fellow man to hang about in case we can be useful later.

“Ah!” my friends then said: “So you’re pro-life?”

But I am not. I’m a good pro-choice boy, thanks. But, of course the death of a foetus deprives our fellow man of all they might be.

Bollocks. So, how do I reconcile this? Honestly, I think it has something to do with sentience. But I don’t seem to be able to nail it down very well, because, well, a foetus in sentience in potentia, isn’t it?

So, either I need to reconcile these views somehow, or I need to admit that it’s OK to help someone top themselves just because they’re having a bit of a bad day. But then, so does our justice system, so I’m hardly alone. But while I’m mulling it over, I wondered if anyone had any clever thoughts on how these positions could be made to fit together?