I see two ways in which legal blackmail can actually reduce regular gossip.
First is the one discussed in the article, where people don’t gossip because they can’t get money for that instead.
The second is that blackmailers have an incentive to destroy all forms of sharing negative information that aren’t blackmail (As well as destroying other blackmailers to become a blackmailing monopoly.). Why? Because they want everything to be maximally embarrassing and harmful. Whenever a bad thing is revealed about someone, that person is harmed, but the thing also often becomes more normal and thus less harmful.
If someone comes out as homosexual, he hurts the blackmailer’s profits by normalizing homosexuality, and they will destroy him for that (completely unrelated to their views on homosexuality, professional blackmailers don’t have “views”).
Same for anyone who reveals embarrassing information about others for nothing. They’re straight up destroying their profits, and they’ll make sure to get them. Other blackmailers are similar, but in that case it’s competition. In the case of gossipers and people who self-reveal, blackmailers have a joint interest to get rid of them.
As i noted in this comment, social privacy becomes more important the more other people have it. So blackmailer’s have an incentive to increase social privacy to the extreme, such that everyone will keep everything to themselves—as long as they still have methods of obtaining information on people so they can blackmail them.
The blackmailed have an incentive to destroy all privacy (at least that of other people) so information on them won’t be as harmful.
Legal blackmail taken to the extreme creates a tension between a no-privacy dystopia to an atomized dystopia where all information is kept hidden except in the cases someone can’t pay for it.
This doesn’t seem like the sort of tension between two extremes that creates a good middle ground.
I see two ways in which legal blackmail can actually reduce regular gossip.
First is the one discussed in the article, where people don’t gossip because they can’t get money for that instead.
The second is that blackmailers have an incentive to destroy all forms of sharing negative information that aren’t blackmail (As well as destroying other blackmailers to become a blackmailing monopoly.). Why? Because they want everything to be maximally embarrassing and harmful. Whenever a bad thing is revealed about someone, that person is harmed, but the thing also often becomes more normal and thus less harmful.
If someone comes out as homosexual, he hurts the blackmailer’s profits by normalizing homosexuality, and they will destroy him for that (completely unrelated to their views on homosexuality, professional blackmailers don’t have “views”).
Same for anyone who reveals embarrassing information about others for nothing. They’re straight up destroying their profits, and they’ll make sure to get them. Other blackmailers are similar, but in that case it’s competition. In the case of gossipers and people who self-reveal, blackmailers have a joint interest to get rid of them.
As i noted in this comment, social privacy becomes more important the more other people have it. So blackmailer’s have an incentive to increase social privacy to the extreme, such that everyone will keep everything to themselves—as long as they still have methods of obtaining information on people so they can blackmail them.
The blackmailed have an incentive to destroy all privacy (at least that of other people) so information on them won’t be as harmful.
Legal blackmail taken to the extreme creates a tension between a no-privacy dystopia to an atomized dystopia where all information is kept hidden except in the cases someone can’t pay for it.
This doesn’t seem like the sort of tension between two extremes that creates a good middle ground.