- Thu Jun 13, 2013 2:20 pm
#368524
“The strict surveillance that states once maintained over the activities of the citizenry have been shifted to other centers of power technically able (although not always legally) to find out to whom we have written, what we have bought, what trips we have taken, what our encyclopedic interests are, even our sexual preferences. The big problem facing a citizen’s private life is not hackers, which are no more frequent than the highwaymen who beset travelling merchants, but cookies and all those other technical marvels that make it possible to collect information about every one of us.
If in Orwell’s novel Big Brother was an alegory for Stalin, the ‘little father’, the modern Big Brother watching us has no face and is not an individual, it is the global economy in its entirety. Like Foucault’s Power, it is not a recognisable entity but the combination of a series of power centers that accept the game, backing one another up reciprocally. The member of one center of power who spies on others making purchases in the supermarket will be spied on in turn when he pays his hotel bill with a credit card. When Power no longer has a face, it becomes invincible. Or at least difficult to control.
Who wants their privacy defended? Those who have secret busines dealings, those who wish their personal correspondence to remain personal, those working on research that they do not yet wish to make public. We know all this perfectly well, but how many people call for this right? It seems to me that one of the great tragedies of mass society, of the press, television, and Internet, is the voluntary renunciation of privacy. The extreme expression of this renunciation is, at its pathalogical limit, exhibitionism. It strikes me as paradoxical that someone has to struggle for the defense of privacy in a society of exhibitionists.
The fact is that the authorities who watch over our privacy need to defend not only those who wish to be defended but also those who no longer know how to defend themselves. It is precisely the behaviour of exhibitionists that tell us how much the assault on privacy has become -more than a crime- a social cancer. First and foremost, we should educate children to save them from the corrupting influence of their parents.
But it’s a vicious circle. The assault on privacy accustoms everyone to the disappearance of privacy. Little by little we become exhibitionists, having learned that nothing can be kept confidential anymore and that no behaviour is considered scandalous. Those who are attacking our privacy, seeing that the victims themselves consent, will no longer stop at any violation.
We must learn to work out, spread, and reward a new sensibility towards reserve, to educate people about reserve for themselves and toward others. Regarding respect for our own privacy, I’d like to quote the last phrase from the brief note left by Cesare Pavese before he committed suicide: “Don’t gossip too much.”
Umberto Eco ‘The Loss of Privacy’ conference speech, Venice, Sept 2000
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