Arvid Lunnemark, one of the 2022 MIT mathematics graduates behind the Cursor product that may be looking at all your code, in 2021 wrote about achieving “complete privacy” through cryptographic means. Looking at his published engineering principles reveals exactly why his approach to privacy is so concerning:

1. Deal with the mess.
2. Let different things be different.
3. Always use UUIDs.
4. Delay serialization.
5. Look at things.
6. Never name something `end`. Always either `endExclusive` or `endInclusive`.
7. When a method is dangerous to call, add `_DANGEROUS_DANGEROUS_DANGEROUS_BECAUSE_XYZ` to its name…
8. Good tools are critical… If there isn’t a good tool, make one.

This reads like an inexperienced life answer to happiness. It’s the least compelling answer to privacy: clean, organized, tool-focused, and utterly disconnected from reality of real world communication.

The tone is reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” where the supercomputer Deep Thought calculates the answer to life, the universe, and everything as simply “42”—technically “correct” and yet so obviously fundamentally useless without understanding the question.

Lunnemark’s approach to privacy embodies this same catastrophic mistake, openly and proudly (hey, he was still a student, stretching his new wings).

His principles show a mindset being taught or schooled that believes complex problems are to be reduced to technical solutions by building the “right” tools and labeling dangers “explicitly” enough. This isn’t just naive—it’s potentially harmful in tautological fallacies.

Privacy with better UUIDs or cleaner method names is like a bank vault with cleaner threads on its screws. Revolutionary? Pun intended, but not really. Safety from loss of privacy exists within centuries-old power struggles between individuals, economic or social groups, and states. It operates within power systems that incentivize imbalance for reasons well known. It functions very, very differently across cultural and political contexts.

When someone who graduates from MIT in 2022 proclaims the year before that they’ve found the answer to privacy through better cryptography, they’re giving us their “42”—a solution to a problem they haven’t properly understood.

Such technical reductionism has real consequences. The whistleblower who trusts in “complete privacy” might face legal jeopardy no cryptography can prevent. The activist who believes their communications are “cryptographically completely private” might not anticipate physical surveillance, economic coercion, or infamously documented rubber-hose cryptanalysis.

The inexperienced quick-fix engineering mindset that treats privacy as primarily a technical problem is dangerous because it creates false security. It promises certainty in a domain where there is none, only trade-offs and calculated risks. It substitutes a fetish for mathematical proofs for proper sociopolitical understanding. You want more confidentiality? You just lost some availability. You want more availability? You just lost some integrity.

History repeatedly shows that technical absolutism fails. In fact, I like to point to neo-absolutist secret services (meant to preserve elitist power) as a great example of important history overlooked.

…the regime rested on the support of a standing army of soldiers, a kneeling army of worshippers, and a crawling army of informants was exaggerated but not entirely unfounded.

The German Enigma machine notably was undermined 10 years before WWII by Polish mathematicians because they understood and exploited weak supply chains and other human measures. PGP encryption has been theoretically secure while practically abused for being unusable because who has invested in the real issues? End-to-end encryption protects message content but still leaks metadata—as Lunnemark correctly identifies—but his solution falls into the same trap of believing the next technical iteration will be the first one to “solve” privacy.

Young engineers aren’t wrong to build better privacy tools—we desperately need better things. They’re better! But they need to approach measuring concepts of “better” with humility and interdisciplinary understanding. What’s good for one may be bad for many, good for many bad for one. Engineers in other disciplines have to sign a code of ethics, yet a computer engineer has none. They need to recognize that they’re not the first to think deeply about problems like privacy, and that philosophers, historians, economists, and political scientists have insights that algorithms alone cannot provide.

Key management is a much more interesting problem of social science than the mathematical properties of “better” material for making locks strong, or even the finer threads on a vault screw.

The answer to privacy isn’t 42, and it isn’t “complete cryptographic privacy” either. It’s a complex, evolving negotiation that requires technical innovation alongside deep understanding of human systems. Until our bright young minds grasp this, they risk creating even worse problems rather than real solutions.

Honestly, I’d rather be riding a mechanical horse than driving a car because legs are “better” than wheels in so many ways I’ve lost count. The “automobile” rush that pushed everyone and everything off roads has been a devastatingly terrible idea, inferior in most ways to transportation much older. Those promoting the “king’s carriage” mentality often turn out to be aspiring kings, rather than solving problems to make transit “better” for anyone but themselves.

Since we’re in the world of agentic innovation, and I suspect a 2021 MIT student blog post never saw a proper review, here’s an AI take on “what would they say”:

• Elinor Ostrom: “Lunnemark’s proposal demonstrates the danger of assuming universal solutions to complex governance problems. Privacy is not merely a technical problem but a common-pool resource that different communities manage according to their specific needs and contexts. It ignores polycentric systems through which privacy is negotiated in different social and political environments. Such a cryptographic approach imposed from above would likely undermine the diverse institutional arrangements through which communities actually protect their information commons. Effective privacy protection emerges from nested, contextual systems of governance—not from mathematical proofs developed in isolation from the communities they purport to serve.
• Hannah Arendt: “Lunnemark has mistaken a technical problem for a political one. Privacy is the precondition for political action, beyond the curation of an investigation’s authority. When he speaks of ‘complete privacy’ through cryptographic means, he betrays a profound misunderstanding of how power operates. Privacy exists in the realm of human affairs, not in math. The rush into ‘cryptographically complete privacy’ would be the illusion of protection while doing nothing to address the fundamental power relationships that determine who can act freely in the public sphere. Technical shields without political foundations are mere fantasies that distract from the real work of securing human freedom.”
• Michel Foucault: “How fascinating to see power’s newest disguise. This discourse of ‘complete privacy’ merely gives authority a new look, obscuring their unnatural role expanded. The author believes he can escape the panopticon through mathematical means, yet fails to see how this very belief is produced by the systems of privileged knowledge that determine what ‘privacy’ means in our epoch. His solution doesn’t challenge surveillance—it normalizes it by accepting its terms. True resistance requires not better cryptography but questioning the entire apparatus that makes privacy something we must ‘solve’ rather than a condition we demand. His technical solution doesn’t escape power; it merely reconfigures how power is exercised to likely benefit the shovel manufacturer in a graveyard.”

We need to find and fight against not just one specific proposal such as Lunnemark’s, but the entire mindset of technical solutionism whenever it creeps into technology circles that continue to operate without any code of ethics.

Trump first said it was illegal not to buy a Tesla, then he said he was buying a Tesla, now he has slapped a 25% tax on anyone buying a car that isn’t a Tesla.

To be clear, the Trump Tesla Tax was designed to penalize all car companies other than Tesla. And not surprisingly Tesla put out propaganda saying it would be hurt by the thing designed to help it, because that’s how gaslighting works.

• Trump says he’s helping the people he hurts.
• The people being helped by him say they will be hurt.

And up is down, down is up.

The disinformation doctrine is that nobody can stop a dictator when there is no truth left but whatever the dictator says in the moment.

All that anti-vaccine propaganda? It was strategic, meant to destroy faith in experts and scientific/critical thinking. It reconfigured society to be far more vulnerable to simple attacks, easily exploited by the biggest con artists unafraid to lie. That’s how we end up with the damage of a Trump Tesla Tax, expected to be as effective as Trump’s instant cure for COVID that killed millions instead.

For those watching the world reject the Tesla since January, and rightly so in places still able to think clearly, the defective and dated sub-par vehicle (the state-sponsored Trabant of America) has seen sales drop 90% while other EV sales are up, way up. Yet, there’s been one place notably still buying the Swasticar.

The UK.

Experts attribute this holdout, a bizarre remaining market for a Swasticar, to extremist right wing groups in the UK (white supremacist cells) who see a Nazi-saluting Tesla CEO as symbolic of their mission and beliefs.

In the rest of the world there simply aren’t as many extreme right wing activists as normalized in England. And to be fair, the English are not hesitant to call out their own Nazis.

Kudos to the Brits who studied history.

Now, in an ironic twist, the new Trump Tesla Tax meant to artificially juice American Swasticar sales, is instead immediately winding up resentment from the UK.

We are looking at the zero emission vehicle mandate which is why some of… that money goes to Tesla, and looking at how we can better support the car manufacturing industry in the UK.

UK finance minister Rachel Reeves is saying Tesla should be banned from any more government handouts. Makes sense, of course. The bogus “green” marketing loophole was allowed to dominate the Swasticar sales discussions before. Yet now the ugly Nazi reality of an aggressive foreign interventionist, imperialist tin-pot dictatorship, throwing dumb taxes around, is simply too hard to ignore anymore.

The Tesla Trump Tax is backfiring, and is likely to make Tesla about as popular as when the East Germans (DDR) under the KGB (e.g. Putin) built a wall and mandated that everyone had to buy a Trabant.

In a recent national security group discussion I was asked what Americans can expect of a regime that sees itself in an existential war. It reminded me how too few people study history, and that most (if not all) security professionals entering the workforce these days look at the Cold War as prehistoric, like when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

With that in mind, some members of Congress have just this week launched 1960s-sounding baseless attacks claiming “communism” in children’s programming commonly known as Sesame Street.

Committee chair Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republican members accused the networks of brainwashing viewers and children with a “communist” agenda…

Was a brontosaurus elected into office? Do not underestimate the return of a Nixon, or a McCarthy, given how clear it is that their false “agenda” saws never really entirely went away.

So, I am increasingly being asked what will a bunch of salted nuts in government, the return of ghosts long past, do next? What happens when an unstable genius decries communism around every corner or under every rock? What happens to the violently superstitious when a Black man crosses their path?

Cultural battles are always going to be a messy target, of course. Our expectations must look towards the even more dramatic and dangerous resource competition fights related to technological superiority.

I say people should plan for the future based on what’s happened in the past, to paraphrase Churchill warning early that Hitler was a threat. Look at 1960 for a sense of what American hawks were up to before they were reigned back in a decade later (by Senator Church and President Carter).

To be fair, I’m talking about looking back at the shadows of the Cold War. A disturbing pattern aligns from certain “accidents” across the global chessboard of 1960-1961, not saying we have evidence sufficient to claim proof. These are shadows by design, because we’re talking about the worst days of the CIA, after all.

First: February 1960, Adriano Olivetti dies suddenly from a heart attack on a train to Switzerland. The visionary Italian industrialist had just purchased Underwood in America and was developing the world’s first transistorized computer, with plans to potentially share technology with Communist nations.

Here’s a typical insight to be found in Meryle Secrest’s book “The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti“.

The move to contact Russia and China has to be seen as a political miscalculation of major proportions on Adriano’s part. If he still thought that Allen Dulles and the CIA were kindly disposed toward him and his ideas, he was deluding himself. After the abysmal showing of Comunità in the 1958 elections, Adriano Olivetti went from being a possible ally to a Socialist whose party had allied itself with the Communists. That loss of influence could well have led to a series of well-coordinated and highly sophisticated efforts to stop him and his company in its tracks. Whatever the cost.

Second: January 1961, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, is assassinated. Declassified documents have revealed CIA “involvement” in Belgians ruthlessly killing him, motivated to block Soviet influence in resource-rich Congo, home to uranium and other strategic minerals.

Third: September 1961, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane “mysteriously” crashes (shot down) in Northern Rhodesia while on a Congo peace mission. Evidence suggests it was not an accident, as the U.S. continues to block investigations.

Fourth: November 1961, Mario Tchou, head of Olivetti’s groundbreaking electronics lab, dies in a suspicious car crash. He had been planning meetings with Chinese officials about computer technology. Secrest again:

The accident is reminiscent of a similar, so-called accident involving a truck that took the life of a famous American general. This was, for many years, also judged to have been the fault of his driver. The case is the death of General George Patton at the end of World War II in December 1945. Like Adriano Olivetti and Mario Tchou, General Patton had formidable enemies.

Resource Control as a Parallel

These targeted killings reflected the same facets of American war planning applied in two different battlefields.

Physical resources in Africa were demanded by Western powers. America was determined to maintain control of Congo’s vast reserves of uranium, copper, and cobalt by any means necessary. Mining was seen as critical for weapons and industrial dominance. Lumumba was perceived to threaten this access; Hammarskjöld threatened the narrative. The French even deposed the Congo’s next leader when he dared to suggest European military control over the country wasn’t wanted by them.

Technological resources arguably, and far less controversially, faced a similar fate. Olivetti’s breakthrough computing technology represented a different kind of strategic resource. Its potential transfer to Communist nations would have undermined American technological superiority at a pivotal moment in the computer revolution. Secrest concludes:

The problem is as valid today as it was during the height of the Cold War, and for the same reason. Of China’s theft of intellectual property, The Economist recently observed that what is at issue are ‘the core information technologies. They are the basis for the manufacture, networking and destructive power of advanced weapons systems.’ A country with the most sophisticated solutions establishes ‘an unassailable advantage.’

By 1964, Olivetti’s electronics division had been dismantled through an engineered and artificial financial crisis. It had hallmarks of the Western-aligned leadership installed in mineral-rich African nations.

Different continents, different resources, same playbook of asserting violent control through civilian assassinations to destroy targets of America’s most extreme politicians.