Well you raise a lot of points there, most of which can't be replied to in a succinct way. But at least one point can be dispensed with quickly:
In what state of nature was everything open ever?
If you know your anthropology, you know the answer is "every single state of nature ever". Not much you can hide from the 50 or so other people who comprise your group. Even in my modern lifetime, because I'm from Cyprus I've experienced the "small village" structure where basically everyone knows everything about everyone. There's little else to talk about, so people talk about other people. That's how our intelligence evolved. It's not like we needed to communicate with other animals. We needed to know what others were doing, so that we could safeguard our interests, and make sure no one is one-upping us, much like Dan's post says.
The other subjects are really huge to go into. But I'll make a brief comment on subjectivism. In philosophy we sometimes refer to it as student relativism, because it's an affliction most first-year students have. But they're quickly cured of it within a year usually.
I've read people who claim to be subjectivists in books, but in real life I've never met a philosopher who claimed to be one.
But I do meet many people from other disciplines, smart people, e.g. scientists, who defend subjectivism.
I think that's just because they haven't really thought about it. Among people who have thought about it, you'll rarely find it, just like you'll never find scientists who don't believe in evolution, save a few coo-coo ones.
In a group of 50 then you have a point but people didn't stay in that same group of 50 for their entire life. Tribes would form and dissipate. Some tribes were nomadic and would move while others not so much. Dunbar's number is the hard limit of nature determining how many relationships we can maintain without help. Even in the past, to say people didn't keep secrets is not honest, as even when people were naked, if they wanted to keep something secret they simply did not speak about it and it would be secret.
We didn't have sensors everywhere. We didn't have Google. We didn't have social network platforms allowing people to go beyond Dunbar's number. We didn't have the "global village" effect, because when you moved across town you literally could start over back then, unlike today. People also being human tend to be forgetful, and what you did wrong last year or the year before will eventually be lost in time, but not today.
There is no objective right and wrong. There is right for me and right for you, wrong for me and wrong for you, based on what each of us determine we value. We don't necessarily value the same things so we can never have an objective sense of right and wrong. We also don't have the same to lose, so even if we had the same sense of right and wrong, we don't share the same risks in our decisions.
I need to know only enough to protect myself. I don't nor does my brain have the capacity to know everything about anyone. The idea of sizing a person up, or determining if someone is a threat, is legitimate, but it's not about radical transparency because there really are only a few specific questions that need to be answered in order to do a risk assessment, and not an analysis of someone's entire life.
Even if we do need that kind of analysis, such as for a background check, why would you assume human beings are capable of doing it fairly, without bias, and without abuse? Do you have faith in the crowd not to misuse the information they discover to ruin lives, to damage people psychologically?
We aren't debating evolution. We are debating the fact that when you have total transparency you create merely another hierarchy. We are debating the fact that in my opinion there is no objective right and wrong, because if there were then everyone would know exactly what to do to have their behavior always match up to the expectations of public sentiment. The fact is, almost no one is able to do this, and no one can do it without help. Politicians rely on data scientists, polls and other tools to figure out which behaviors to adopt, what to say to maintain their public image, etc, and what you and others propose is to make everyone live like these politicians.
No I do not promote student relativism. The ethics I believe in is called consequentialism where the individual has the goal of protecting themselves from the least desirable consequences while pursuing the most desirable consequences at all times. Because values are subjective rather than universal it is not possible for me to tell you what you should do without knowing what consequence you are seeking to produce.
From an anthropological perspective, you have a point, it's hard to keep important details from your neighbours in a small community. However secrets are still possible and in fact this is what gossip is, sharing knowledge which is not intended to be public, or which is not socially "okay" to share. This is what people become interested in.
There is a wealth of ethnographic research on this but unforunitely I can't access it, those damn academic paywalls ($36 for 24 hour access of one paper!). I found a few abstracts that looked interesting, such as this one:
This is what it boils down to in a way. @dan is not suggesting that some of us allow our homes to be open, but that we all must, in order to defeat the government. Is core contention is relevant (government has privacy from public, public has no privacy from gov) but we literally cannot have complete openness. There is always more to know, more to gather, analyse.
I saw The Circle also and while I would have given it a very mixed review it is good to see movies at least attempting to grapple with this issue. The real interesting part of the movie is what comes next though, how can the world of radical transparency be imaged? The movie ends before we find out.
Yeah the movie qua movie wasn't great. But through it I could sort of see the issues Dave Eggers probably was trying to raise in his book. I appreciated it philosophically if not cinematically.
There's an undercurrent of inevitability I think running beneath Dan's whole argument. He's sort of saying that, due to human nature, privacy is impossible: the question is who do we prefer being spied by.
Like I said in my reply to Dana above, I think people are quite willing, even eager, to spill the beans. They're desperate to get noticed. I think this, again, is due to our ancient nature as it evolved in small groups, where we were known and respected by every single member of the tribe. Whereas now, the tribe is global, and we're painfully aware that we don't exist for most people. Hence the appeal of fame. People don't wanna hide. They want to be their own Truman Show, with the whole world watching, being witness to every triviality of their life, Kim Kardashian Show-style.
Thats only because people are getting rich doing it. I don't think people actually desire it as much as you make it out.
People are presented the upside of fame by the media but the downside is hidden until a person truly becomes famous and figures out their life is ruined.