On Confronting the Opposition

I don't think this is in fact about me at all. I'm not sure why casting the ideas expressed as a criticism of my failure to confront some objection to my arguments helps. Someone having ideas like mine could also have the ideas being expressed here, but I don't. And whether those ideas are compelling on their merits, or for some other reason, has nothing to do with whether I ought to hold them in order to respond to an objection.

So I think the best route to improvement of the essay would be to remove me and my work from it altogether, and express whatever the idea is here net of the idea that I should have had it. In that form, I gather it would stand for the advantage of having "an aesthetically pleasing form of terrorism in the name of digital liberty," with which to displace a negative, dark and aesthetically (I don't know what, "displeasing") form of terrorism currently being used to campaign against digital liberty.

Another route to improvement, I suppose, would be to discuss my ideas. I think it's less interesting—probably not a completely idiosyncratic view on my part—and it's harder. That's because discussing my ideas is not the same as discussing something I am alleged to have left out. The Snowden lectures were not about terrorism because Snowden wasn't about terrorism. (Those are the much longer lectures from which the Guardian pieces were condensed; the length of the condensation, 10,000 words, was chosen by my editor, the Guardian's editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. Why he wanted to run the pieces so long is a long historical story.) What I am writing now is not about terrorism, either. It is fine, so far as I am concerned, for other people to write about terrorism, and to either use or reject my ideas in connection with whatever they write about terrorism, but that doesn't mean I must do so too. To discuss my ideas, then, is to grant them the context in which they exist, as well as whatever context you might also want to put them in. It is not sufficient to say that the major fault of my writing is that it isn't the writing you would have done if you were writing about my subject.