Your Thoughts on the Future

[Noclevername]

The thing about closely-knit societies like small villages is that everyone knows everyone else's business. This tends to mean that society evolves a strict set of behavioural rules, so that no-one offends or inconveniences anyone else. To allow people to follow an individualistic lifestyle in an environment with low expectations of privacy, these strict behavioural rules need to be made less strict.

But I don't think that behavioural rules can be removed altogether, since people (and machines) still need to be polite to one another.

I wasn't trying to propose an individualist or rules-free society, for instance I know that most subsistence cultures were and are by necessity strictly group-oriented, as a survival characteristic. 


But privacy isn't in my mind a binary, you have it or you don't; There's a spectrum, at least in my limited experience. Even in social groups with largely collectivist values, IMO everyone needs something or some time to call their own. We are social animals, but not hives: All those Western individualist tendencies have to come from somewhere in the human psyche.