Why does privacy exist?
Posted on Wed Jun 20 12:27:00 UTC 2007
At the simplest level privacy exists because the personal information others possess about you tangibly affects the way they act, think and feel towards you. People look at you differently if they know you’re into furry porn. For the practitioner of Falun Gong in China or the homosexual in Tehran the knowledge of their personal activities can have extremely serious consequences.
The thought occurred to me as I was pondering the curiously flat affect of most livejournal entries. If you didn’t know their were actual real people behind these keyboards you might be forgiven for thinking we were reading about the fantasy world of porcelain dolls – Ms. Marmalade goes shopping, Ms. Marmalade takes her tea – whose inner mental states can be adequately described by simply pasting poorly drawn emoticons on their faces: happy, sad, etc.
Of course this isn’t true. From a phenomenological standpoint human beings always lead extremely rich lives. What are these forces then that keep us from revealing ourselves and seem to make most of our existence constantly “f-locked”? Fear of social censure, fear of criminal liability, fear of giving other people leverage that they can use against us. Fear that on the inside we are ugly and repulsive. Putting aside for the moment considerations of legal liability and other purely pragmatic secrets such as the fact the second hand car you want to sell is actually a lemon, I am left to wander the truly bizarre paths of trust and the social network, the maze with no exit we walk in our everyday lives.
When you get into a relationship it seems to me you go through this process of slowly letting the other person see the real you a little bit at a time. Let me tell you something. Am I repulsive? No. Good. Let me tell you some more. It’s the same with being friends with someone. Friendship is a fruit that ripens over a long period, we gradually build up our mutual trust and acceptance. It’s interesting, where we draw that line, what are we willing to tell people, why this and not that.
Imagine as a thought experiment a world with no privacy. Say you could subscribe to an RSS feed of what anybody was doing or feeling or thinking:
3:35 AM Caleb lies in bed scratching asshole.
3:41 AM Idly considers jacking off, too lazy
3:45 AM Speculates on the social and privacy implications of revealing the above
…
Etc etc
Maybe this would create a lot of problems, but maybe it would solve a whole lot more. I tend to think that people are a lot more similar than we think, that the human condition is, when we are honest, very universal. I am all for a more open universe, a more interesting, bright and colourful universe, less flat, with more towering pillars and caves and crevices and gods and monsters and heroes and a whole lot more soul in it.
Be more open.
The thought occurred to me as I was pondering the curiously flat affect of most livejournal entries. If you didn’t know their were actual real people behind these keyboards you might be forgiven for thinking we were reading about the fantasy world of porcelain dolls – Ms. Marmalade goes shopping, Ms. Marmalade takes her tea – whose inner mental states can be adequately described by simply pasting poorly drawn emoticons on their faces: happy, sad, etc.
Of course this isn’t true. From a phenomenological standpoint human beings always lead extremely rich lives. What are these forces then that keep us from revealing ourselves and seem to make most of our existence constantly “f-locked”? Fear of social censure, fear of criminal liability, fear of giving other people leverage that they can use against us. Fear that on the inside we are ugly and repulsive. Putting aside for the moment considerations of legal liability and other purely pragmatic secrets such as the fact the second hand car you want to sell is actually a lemon, I am left to wander the truly bizarre paths of trust and the social network, the maze with no exit we walk in our everyday lives.
When you get into a relationship it seems to me you go through this process of slowly letting the other person see the real you a little bit at a time. Let me tell you something. Am I repulsive? No. Good. Let me tell you some more. It’s the same with being friends with someone. Friendship is a fruit that ripens over a long period, we gradually build up our mutual trust and acceptance. It’s interesting, where we draw that line, what are we willing to tell people, why this and not that.
Imagine as a thought experiment a world with no privacy. Say you could subscribe to an RSS feed of what anybody was doing or feeling or thinking:
3:35 AM Caleb lies in bed scratching asshole.
3:41 AM Idly considers jacking off, too lazy
3:45 AM Speculates on the social and privacy implications of revealing the above
…
Etc etc
Maybe this would create a lot of problems, but maybe it would solve a whole lot more. I tend to think that people are a lot more similar than we think, that the human condition is, when we are honest, very universal. I am all for a more open universe, a more interesting, bright and colourful universe, less flat, with more towering pillars and caves and crevices and gods and monsters and heroes and a whole lot more soul in it.
Be more open.