Wednesday I was part of a forum at the Getty Center on the future of public space in the digital age. Cosponsored by Zócalo Public Square, it was me, architect Mia Lehrer, and Robert McGinn, an STS professor from Stanford (and with whom I worked ages ago).

Zócalo has a recap of the event, as well as several essays on the subject. Worth reading. There's also a video of the whole event; for some reason, embedding here isn't working for me. Sorry.

Occasionally at these events you think of things on your feet (or sitting in front of the audience) that are worth remembering. This time, during a discussion of technology and privacy (a subject that almost always comes up in public discussions like this), I realized that we shouldn't confuse the exponential growth of means for invading our privacy, or convincing us to give up incremental bits of it for some theoretical convenience, with the death of privacy. The concept pf privacy doesn't disappear when the tools to violate it become more powerful, any more than property becomes irrelevant when thieves learn how to pick locks.

And Los Angeles was a good time.