There was something very odd about the bedroom of Ryan Cleary, the young man arrested over allegations of computer hacking. It wasn't the neatly framed pin-up or the two computer screens but the absolute tidiness of this teenage space. He has been bailed on suspicion of a crime that most members of the public would be hard-pressed to explain.

Arrests have been made in the US and the hacking collective LulzSec says it has disbanded. "Lulz" means laughs. I guess some of what they did was clever, but not really funny. The Lulz are pretty Dulz: hacking into sites to disrupt services. Hackers may know their systems, memes and modes, but often come up with morally specious claims for the cyber equivalent of kicking in a bus shelter. You do it because you can. Because you are bored. Because you hate everything. LulzSec were not so much into hacking the CIA but more in the business of bombarding Sony and gaming sites with so much traffic they would collapse. This made them unpopular even with other hackers, who certainly don't want their porn and games ruined.

We don't really know how to regard such people. The idea of putting Gary McKinnon in prison in America remains fundamentally ludicrous. The brilliant writer William Gibson – please let's drop the sci-fi label – wrote about such people as connoisseurs not of objects but of data. But they are criminals. They respect no boundaries. They steal. Privacy is violated. Something must be done! But what?

Hackers are extreme disrespecters of any notion of privacy. Arguably they cause harm to those in power, not individuals. This is what supposedly drives Wikileaks. I hope no actual humans were harmed in the latest fundraising ad for WikiLeaks, yet another supplication at the feet of St Julian of Assange. Still most people make a distinction between the underworld of hacking and bad people who just try to steal your bank account details.

Most people use computers for more and more transactions with little idea of how they work. But then do I know how my dishwasher works?

Yet I am a total fan of what this technology enables me to do, even with all its privacy implications. I love social media. Facebook. Twitter. For their silliness, and for their seriousness. Twitter operates as my main news feed. But often it's watercooler chat. If you don't like Twitter, then don't use it. Just don't try banning watercoolers. Twitter was the thing that busted the Ryan Giggs injunction. This mangled attempt at privacy was shot to pieces.

I was debating press privacy this week at an event organised by the excellent Index On Censorship to launch its new issue Privacy is Dead, Long Live Privacy. Much has been said lately about the use of injunctions and superinjunctions not just by footballers, but by companies such as Trafigura. The concern is, surely, that any creeping legislation is enforceable. This is why I began this piece talking about hackers. Sure enough, I was in august company, but felt I was on another planet to someone like Max Mosley. He is a persuasive speaker whose private life has been terribly invaded, and he has gone to the European courts to get newspapers to give notice of stories. I feel if you buy sex off a number of women at once, then pragmatically privacy may be harder to maintain. Actually, I care little about what he does in private, but totally disagree about what he wants in public life. Look at the French, who have a privacy law that means their politicians and journalists form an elite that keeps the public out of the loop.

The injunctions that bother the public are mostly those concerning the affairs of famous men. We perfectly understand the need for injunctions taken out by local authorities to protect the identities of children. The feral press, on the whole, is not trying to bust them.

Somewhere between the extremes of hackers who recognise no boundaries and the activities of Giggs's lawyer Hugh Tomlinson, who was also speaking at the event (and who makes a fine living from trying to maintain his clients' privacy), I felt something was missing.

That is, the simple reality of the cultural and technological shift we have lived through. Yes, I think people are entitled to private lives. No, I don't think footballers are role models. But yes, people do want to read about sex and celebrity. Broadsheets pick up tabloid "scandals" two days later for their postmodern postmortems. Mosley's case is a muddle between libel and privacy law. Phone-hacking is desperate stuff and a crime that does not require new legislation to deal with.

Basically though, I do not want what I read dictated by a carve-up between judges and media lawyers. They do not understand that the means of production of celebrity, or the means of production of information, are now in so many hands.

It is appalling that the judiciary and the politicians are engaged in an argument without bothering to understand the basics. Twitter, said Max Mosley, is not to be taken seriously. He sneered: "Anybody can write it." This, of course, is the actual point if it. The idea that any privacy legislation may stop online communication is simply unworkable. Once a name has been online, it is very hard for any court to say that this information is not already in the public domain. Tomlinson argued vaguely that eventually, technically, we can somehow regulate the internet. Sarkozy wants the G8 to act. How? Are we to be like China? Maybe instead of locking up hackers, we get them to bring down servers?

More importantly, we need to understand a generation that defines privacy differently. Any overheard conversation about "the night before" on any bus will tell you that. Social media, alongside the projection of personae encouraged by reality TV, mean boundaries are changing. This is really not even a generational argument. You get it or you don't. The wonderful Zygmunt Bauman, not perhaps in his first flush of youth, wrote this week of the death of anonymity online: "Or perhaps we just consent to the loss of privacy as a reasonable price for the wonders offered in exchange."

This is so unless you are super-sussed and have bought anonymity software that hides your IP. Any talk of privacy and press regulation cannot ignore the internet. When I told Mosley the press was mostly online, he just said it wasn't. What can you say? These "Who are the Beatles?" judges have now been replaced by the "What is Twitter?" brigade. It matters when Cameron sits bemused by laws being broken and Prescott blusters about "mass civil disobedience" by the twits.

Laws work when a pact is made, when a consensus had been reached. This does not exist around privacy, or even piracy, as it is sometimes called.

We live in a world where younger people have simply been able to divert and bypass the rules of their elders by using technology. It was ever thus. The ruling class is ridiculously legislating about something it is almost proud of not understanding. Do I want a world where I choose to invade my own privacy, where there is too much information, a lot of oversharing, lots of daft gossip and sometimes facts and news that no official body is telling me? Do I want too much freedom? Yes. Because the opposite is unthinkable.