Loss of self

In his opinion piece on “Privacy and the Threat to the Self” in today’s NY Times, Michael P. Lynch discusses how information technology, including megadata analysis, potentially alters the existence of independent selves.

Will be interesting to compare this loss of self with the loss of self that occurs with enlightenment, in Buddhist terms, and the expansion & connection with the larger world in Aikido, and with the communal functioning of insect colonies. And yet Buddhism, Aikido, Christianity, etc., each feature selves who individually achieve and are the paradigmatic exemplars. Same in Nazism.

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