I’m not sure how this fits into this schema, but there was an argument I found fairly compelling about how-to-think-about-copyright-infringement awhile back, which goes:
if you drop a feather on me, that does not hurt me even slightly and in fact is maybe even enjoyable. If you drop 700 tons of feathers on me, I will suffocate and die. It’s reasonable for the thing that makes something bad, and worth making illegal, is scale. If I borrow my friend’s book the world is clearly better off. If nobody ever buys a copy of that book again the world is not clearly better off. Maybe it is, maybe not. But it’s clearly a very different situation.
(This is not an argument for any particular position on how to handle copyright infringement, just that the situation actually warrants thought)
So, part of the deal with adding-money-to-blackmail is that it enables and incentivizes scale in a way that non-money-facilitated-gossip doesn’t.
I think the analogy is too distant to be evidence. The feather problem isn’t one of scale—it’d be fine if almost everyone had a feather dropped on them, it’s one of concentration—it’s harmful if too many are on the same person/place. And I’m not sure how that translates to this case.
The thing Zvi pointed at in the essay: if there are blackmail industries, and if the average person has to spend their life carefully not exposing anything vulnerable because being blackmailed is a live option they have to live in fear of, the world gets worse in a way that is more than the sum of the parts of each individual person getting blackmailed,
I’m not sure how this fits into this schema, but there was an argument I found fairly compelling about how-to-think-about-copyright-infringement awhile back, which goes:
(This is not an argument for any particular position on how to handle copyright infringement, just that the situation actually warrants thought)
So, part of the deal with adding-money-to-blackmail is that it enables and incentivizes scale in a way that non-money-facilitated-gossip doesn’t.
I think the analogy is too distant to be evidence. The feather problem isn’t one of scale—it’d be fine if almost everyone had a feather dropped on them, it’s one of concentration—it’s harmful if too many are on the same person/place. And I’m not sure how that translates to this case.
The thing Zvi pointed at in the essay: if there are blackmail industries, and if the average person has to spend their life carefully not exposing anything vulnerable because being blackmailed is a live option they have to live in fear of, the world gets worse in a way that is more than the sum of the parts of each individual person getting blackmailed,