The Rule of Privacy

People want to control their own resources
and what they are willing to share.

What do town commons, the evolution of object orientated programming, the failure of mass transit in the United States, the Failure of the big computer companies of the sixties and seventies, the organization of the work place, and the way our homes are organized, all have in common?

• Town commons where resources are shared still allow for families to own their own homes, where they and control their lives and property.
• In the work place, cubicles can be personalized and then there are conference rooms and libraries where ideas can be exchanged.
• In our houses, there are the bedrooms where we can be private and the common rooms where we share and interact. A child’s first claim of independence is to claim privacy in “their” room.
• Object oriented programming allows the programmer to control what and how data is shared. Even programmers cannot escape their humanity.

Any system that ignores this principle is doomed to failure—or at least serious problems.

Homesteading, the assigning of different cubicles each day, is an example of how to waste time and energy (Law 1) causing people to spend personal energy fighting their human nature to personalize their work space.

In the late 1980s when networks first became common, many companies came up with the idea of the “e-Machine” where the applications were run off the network. Users, who until that point had difficulty in turning on their systems and did not understand directory structures, would try to download the applications from the net so that they could be run from their systems. Remember the first two laws? Also see the Rule of familiarity below. People overcame the fear of new things because they wanted control.

They did not mind sharing the data up on the network.

The big computer companies failed to realize the impact of the PC. What people wanted was a workstation at their desk that did everything. Again, sharing data on the network was acceptable.

We evolved this way.

If I need to explain the problems with mass transit in this country, you are not paying attention.