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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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On a side note (deliberately avoiding the morality-side discussion):

It is interesting to watch the back-and-forth between "everything social you do is potentially publicly visible forever" and various attempts to allow social contact without said permanency.

In this case, you can view this as an attempt at "you can't share this publicly without running afoul of explicit content laws". Not a particularly successful one.

Other attempts I can think of offhand (not from Kanye West in particular, just in general):

  • Always wearing the same outfit. (Daniel Radcliffe did this a fair bit IIRC.)
  • Loudly playing copyrighted music so recordings get copyright-striked. (copyright-struck?)
  • Sending voice calls instead of text to make it more difficult to search through after-the-fact. (This one is rapidly becoming dated.)
  • Sending videos of text instead of text; ditto.
  • Copyrighting your name or likeness and then suing if someone uses it to refer to you in a negative light. (Doesn't tend to work, but the act of suing even if it doesn't win is often a deterrent.)
  • Deliberately including PI in communications and then using GDPR if necessary.

I do not think that this was the intend. I mean, it would be trivial to put black bars over the naughty bits and then you can share the photo on prime time TV.

Personally, I think that different settings have different expectations of privacy. A bedroom is different from a private party, which in turn is different from the streets, which is then different from big entertainment spectacles. If you run naked across the field in the middle of a big soccer game, you can hardly argue that your privacy has been violated when people take pictures.