Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
Never in human history have there been so many ways for privacies to be violated – or, often, just given away freely and without much thought. Using the thinly veiled metaphor of an animated alien planet teeming with terrible hovercar drivers, this animation from TED-Ed explores the value of privacy, and especially what we can lose or gain when we relinquish it. Spanning the work of philosophers ranging from Plato, who saw little value in the concept as we understand it today, to modern thinkers like the Israeli philosopher Ruth Gavison (1945-2020), who believed that certain privacies were necessary for modern democracies to function, the short asks viewers to consider both privacy’s worth and its very meaning in the modern world.
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