While this may sound weird under /c/privacy, it captures what I also feel at the heart of privacy in society — sustainable of diverse individual perspectives. When surveillance succeeds in shaping our thoughts and hence actions, we end up with centralized ways of thinking. 3 billion internet users but perhaps only 3 million different perspectives (and increasingly narrowing down). Lack of social diversity weakens social capacity to fight back against social threats.
Genetic diversity gives species the tools to tackle new challenges such as disease or a changing climate. The uniformity of macadamia orchards leaves cultivated trees vulnerable. In contrast, wild macadamias are very genetically diverse, so protecting wild trees is critical to the survival of the species, she says.
This (i hope) supports what i was saying in a different post earlier. That we can use different lemmy instances to experiment with different voting systems and posting rules.
Different kinds of ideas will flat to the top, and different cultures will develop, depending on the voting rules and algorithms.
We could have instances which encourage fringe ideas and provocative and offensive people, and others which are “save spaces” and others which are different again.
Flexible enough to adapt, and just organized enough to be a community.
Wow, i was initially confused and going to comment about how this wasn’t suitable for /c/privacy, but this is interesting!
Lack of social diversity weakens social capacity to fight back against social threats.
The fact that people might just click downvote on reddit for this kind of post rather than the different perspectives on lemmy lol.
At least you found it relevant. I wondered whether I used the body part of the post well to quote the necessary part of the article.
bananas also aren’t genetically diverse, all the bananas you can buy at the supermarket are genetic clones.
there are plantanes though.
yeah, that’s what immediately came to my mind, there’s also now a fungus called Panama disease that is rapidly infecting banana plantations
and because only a single variety is cultivated in such huge quantities it’s now a huge issue
Exactly. And this shows the difference between biological and social evolution mechanisms. Biological is physical (material reality of plants being genetically similar). Social evolution mechanism involves ideas + material base (bodies). It may help us understand why increasing number of people using the Internet may in practice reduce social diversity IF the ideas are centralized.
