The art sector here is mostly publicly funded. This too has advantages for our gov: no artists will criticize the subsidizer of their lifestyle, so no real anti-authoritarian culture takes hold. Don't bite the hand that feeds.

You'd think Belgium would have some impressive world-class artists, since so many can work unbothered by the oppressive forces of market trends. Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.

The problem is, I guess, that in times of multiple crisis which only seem to get worse, people worry about other things.

I am sad though that I agree, the fight for digital liberty and authority over your own data has largely been lost for the majority of people, and they don't seem to understand or care enough to change it.

The whole understanding about digital freedoms and rights changed. It was like they changed their values over night and appealed towards completely different issues. Some even demanded more surveillance because "hate speech" was all the rage in this changed party. This new outlook was not only not attractive, it suddenly became quite repulsive.

While a party like the pirate party probably has difficulties to consolidate opinions in other fields than net policy, it wouldn't have been impossible. But it was done with a strange fervor around sometimes completely arbitrary and artificial issues not related to net policies.

It’s a combination of two things:

1) the law comes to the rest of the world from Europe. We (rest of the world) didn’t vote in the people who brought it. We’ve had quite enough of Europeans making rules for the rest of the world in the past few centuries thank you very much.

2) GDPR encodes an expectation that may or may not be common in the EU, but certainly isn’t common elsewhere. I don’t have any expectation of privacy when I walk in public or when I give any information at all to a business. My solution to this is: a) I wear pants outside, and b) I don’t give out private information. Whether the business ecosystem knows their age and purchasing patterns is largely immaterial to virtually everyone I’ve ever met.

And don’t show me a survey showing people don’t like it - if you prime people with the question, of course they will respond that way. They know their info is being gathered, and they just don’t think it’s as big a deal as GDPR would like it to be.

KingOfCoders/amazingcto, of course you are technically correct but Paul Graham wasn't talking about the letter of the law.

Instead, you have to interpret his complaint with the lens of game theory. I.e. The Law of Unintended Consequences that takes into account what companies actually do in response to laws instead of what we hope they will do.

Your blog post focused on good intentions of the law. PG's tweet focused on actual outcome.