I was a spectator to an incident that involved someone violating someone else’s privacy online and then using the excuse (in public, mind you) “nothing is really private on the Internet anyway.” Now this is interesting because, on the one hand this is effectively true — there’s never a guarantee of privacy online. But it’s also a pretty shitty excuse for not respecting privacy when you should. I once knew a guy many years ago who said “you can’t ever really keep someone from stealing your things if they really want to.” My husband heard this and said “that’s the attitude of a thief.” Well, “nothing is really private on the Internet” is the attitude of someone who cant be trusted to respect privacy at all.
Welcome Home
I think that we’d all say that we’re suffering from a lack of privacy in the modern world. CC cameras, social media, the surveillance state. Certainly, we need more privacy, don’t we?
But in truth, it’s not the amount of privacy that’s the problem, it’s the type.
See, society has always relied on a balance between public and private life. Public life allows us to live and work together in wider groups than just families. It allows us to collectively determine what our values and norms are. It embeds us into a web of mutual obligation and support. It encourages commons and communal spaces and community engagements. Private life allows us to retain sovereignty over our hearts and minds. It allows us the space and peace to think and dream and form opinions. It’s also a critical outlet for the stresses caused by public life. Throughout history, groups of humans have experimented with adjusting this balance. Some societies have a greater public component and others private. Small towns are notorious for everyone being in your business — public gossip is almost a moral obligation. That said, there’s a lot more physical privacy in a small town where houses are far apart and fields and forests encourage solo ranging. In cities, population density generates strict respect for private spaces as they are few and small. But classically, cities were also designed to encourage public life, with central squares, markets, events, and activities.
Without some balance between the two, society cannot function. Too much public (not enough private) life leads to a lack of inner meaning and fulfillment. Too much private life leads to social disintegration.
For the first time ever, it seems, we find ourselves suffering from both too much and too little privacy. Let me explain…
When it comes to social privacy (not to be confused with social media privacy, more on that below), we have too much. We don’t know our neighbors. We don’t really have a lot of close friends. We don’t really know our online acquaintances. Our families are scattered. We don’t partake in social activities. And we are isolated and insulated from people around us. Whenever you see some news story about adults locking people up in their suburban homes, you have to wonder how that even happens. These aren’t weirdos living in the deep woods, these are people in neighborhoods keeping other people prisoner, sometimes for decades. You gotta think that maybe they could have used a bit less privacy.
Where are the nosy neighbors, dropping by with their baked goods? Where’s the gossip? Where’s the annoying family who’s all up in your business? Where’s the back fence neighbor with who’s always got advice for any problem — gardening or marital? These things are looked down on, the fodder of sitcoms, but they’re also becoming increasingly endangered. And that endangers our social fabric. Like prisoners in the panopticon, we don’t interact with one another. We are isolated in our little worlds.
At the same time, we’re dealing with too little privacy. Our online lives are sold to the highest bidder. Our activities and interests are harvested by advertisers, hackers, government entities, and other bad actors. Our every interaction can be filmed and shared with millions with the click of a button. People can be spied on in public, their information shared to the entire world, and far from just being passive voyeurs some will actively stalk and harass those people without any sense that this is wrong behavior. A teenager can get drunk and entitled on a plane and have their real permanent record — the record of public opinion — sullied FOREVER. Did you ever do anything embarrassing, rude, or even illegal when you were young and stupid? Aren’t you glad it happened before social media?
Once upon a time, if you acted badly in public, your neighbors would shame you and you’d lose reputation. Now one outburst captured on video can ruin your entire life and get you death threats. Sure, I cheer when some racist gets caught on video and lose their jobs and have to move. We need to be intolerant to intolerance. However, would I feel the same if it was someone filmed at a Pride parade? Or picketing an ICE detention center? Or trying to get medical care at Planned Parenthood? I think this is worth some deep consideration. These tools (ubiquitous filming, social media, the court of public opinion) can be used by anyone, against anyone. And it’s overwhelmingly and increasingly used in only a negative way. You never know who’s watching.
We like to blame the government for spying (actually, those on the right are prone to blaming the government while those on the left prefer corporations — despite those entities being the same) but aren’t we all complicit? We gripe, but we still share, share, share. We give permission for the intrusions, we are free with our personal data, we want the world to know what we’re eating and where we’re going and how we’re feeling. Our neighbors don’t know our name, but we’ve Instagrammed every second of our recent vacation and spread our opinions far and wide. We’ll gleefully pile on when the new video of some idiot comes out. We aren’t prisoners, we’ve volunteered for this.
But Who’s Watching the Watchers?
Note, I’m not talking here about filming public officials in the course of their duty. I’m not talking about citizen journalism. I’m not talking about the importance of speaking up against intolerance in our communities. I am, however, speaking of a very disturbing trend in society where we seem to given up on privacy as something that’s inherently valuable, while at the same time being increasingly isolated from one another in a physical, human sense. We may be being watched at any time, but we don’t seem to care.
So welcome to the panopticon, because nothing is really private on the Internet anyway.
