For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.

A trip to the capital of Yemen.

Privacy, memory, data and advertising—how the modern web has become a Ponzi scheme and how we might be able to fix it.

On simplicity, self-reliance and refusing to cooperate with “the apparatus of secrecy” that surrounds online surveillance.