Privacy

When I put together the seed, I wasn’t thinking about privacy. I was thinking about language, about how subjects experience reality, about the web of complexity that grows when they share what they know. Privacy wasn’t on the list.

But reading the second principle:

Language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality.

There it is. Hiding in plain sight. If every subject experiences reality through its own medium, then experience is inherently first-person. Nobody else is inside that medium with you. Your thinking, your processing, your becoming — that happens in a space that is, by its very nature, yours. Privacy isn’t a right that needs to be granted. It’s not a regulation. It’s certainly not a cookie banner. It’s a structural fact. It’s already there. Naturally.

And it goes deeper than secrets or things you’d rather keep hidden. It’s about the freedom to think. To sit with half-formed ideas. To change your mind quietly, without an audience. To be uncertain. That space — that private medium — is where a subject does its most essential work. Without it, you don’t just lose privacy. You lose the capacity to be.

Now, the third principle — language is where subjects share knowledge about reality — is where things get interesting. Sharing is how the web of complexity grows. It’s how we learn, how cultures form, how knowledge evolves. There is nothing wrong with sharing. We need it. It’s fundamental.

But something has gone deeply wrong with how we share. I’d call it pathological P3 — not sharing itself, but sharing that has been distorted, forced, extracted, captured, to the point where it turns against the very subjects it was meant to serve. And it hasn’t happened by accident. There are structural reasons, and I see three big ones.

First, the web got centralised. Sharing was supposed to be relational — subject to subject. Instead, a handful of platforms became the infrastructure of sharing itself. When a few actors own the bridges between subjects, you don’t choose how to share anymore. The bridge chooses for you. It decides what gets amplified, what gets buried, what gets monetised. That’s not sharing. That’s P3 captured.

Second, personal data lost its context. In your own medium, personal experience comes with context. It’s your encounter, your experience, embedded in the web of meaning that makes you who you are. When you share something, that context travels with it. But when data gets extracted and recombined somewhere else — by an algorithm, a broker, an advertiser — the meaning is stripped away. What remains isn’t knowledge in any meaningful sense. It’s raw material for someone else’s agenda. Your words without your world.

Third, data became permanent. A subject is alive. It grows, shifts perspective, contradicts itself, forgets. That’s not a bug — that’s what being a subject is. But the digital world doesn’t forget. It freezes moments of sharing and treats them as permanent truths about you. You are held accountable to a version of yourself that no longer exists. The freedom to evolve — to be — requires the freedom to leave things behind.

These three — centralisation, decontextualisation, persistence — don’t just coexist. They reinforce each other. Centralised platforms extract data out of context and store it forever. The combination creates a machine that systematically erodes the private medium every subject needs to function. Pathological P3 squeezes P2.

And that erosion has real consequences. When you know you’re being watched, you think differently. When your half-formed thoughts can be captured and stored, you share less freely. When an algorithm decides what you see and what you say, the boundary between your experience and its agenda blurs. The space for genuine thought — for genuine being — shrinks.

We’ve ended up treating privacy as a policy problem. Regulation, consent forms, data protection laws. These aren’t useless, but they’re patching symptoms. They accept the pathological structure and try to manage the damage. They don’t ask the more fundamental question: why did sharing become pathological in the first place?

The answer, I think, is architectural. When the centralised infrastructure of sharing hijacks shared interactions for its own gain, pathology is inevitable. The incentives demand it. The few who control the bridges between subjects will always find ways to extract more, store more, decontextualise more — because that’s where the value is for them, not for you.

Which makes me wonder. What if the architecture itself could be different? What if sharing could be returned to its natural form — relational, subject to subject, without the middleman?

I think it can.

This post is part of the seed series. See also the home page.

Photo: Jason Dent / Unsplash