We are all made according to the same blueprint, in the same image and likeness. The same ideas, inventions, and formulas come to different minds with astonishing synchronicity. This is why there are so many laws and formulas in science with double or even triple names. Residents of almost every sufficiently ambitious country are convinced that all the most interesting things were invented by their compatriots, while competitors from neighboring countries simply copied everything. In reality, the same radio was invented by several dozen people around the world almost simultaneously.
Due to such uniformity, sprawling “bicycles” are being created every minute—solutions and concepts that are nine-tenths a repetition of something someone else has long since invented. As Ostap Bender said, “What a blow from the classics!” And it’s all the more pleasant to encounter thoughts in someone else’s mind that closely resemble your own, but are not yet fully formed, not yet transformed into something tangible, substantial, worthy of a separate entry in an encyclopedia. After all, this simultaneously provides confirmation that you are not alone in your fantasies, which means that perhaps you haven’t come up with something as absurd as it sometimes seems on particularly unlucky days, and there’s a chance to go down in history as a pioneer of something significant and necessary, as it appears on fortunate days. And, of course, it also gives you the opportunity to correct a bunch of mistakes and inaccuracies that the other person made in your idea out of oversight.
This is how this book came to be. At some point, both authors discovered a striking similarity in their views on the issue of privacy and the vector of social evolution, despite the almost complete absence of anything finished and concrete on the same topic in the surrounding information space. At the same time, ideas were clearly in the air. Here and there, independently of each other, different people in different places were behaving as if they had already read the book we had yet to start writing. The universe was transparently hinting that it was high time. So we rolled up our sleeves.
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The authors would like to thank their friends, family, and acquaintances who read this book at various stages of its writing and provided valuable feedback: Alexander Dovnich, Dmitry Dubin, Nikolai Kravchenko, Anastasia Moskalyuk, Andrey Muzhuk, Alexey Nacharov, Ekaterina Strelnikova, Denis Syroporshnev, Svetlana Tolmacheva, Mikhail Yanchuk, and Maxim Yashchenko.