The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
Private Notions (2025-02-03)
The challenge of fending off the various hucksters claiming that "privacy is dead" and "you don't care about privacy unless you have something to hide" or "you don't really care about privacy or you wouldn't be using [X]." As is too typical of hucksters, they are full of babble intended to encourage our insecurities and spur us to a minor form of panic, which renders us into easy marks. In spite of myself, I occasionally find myself feeling frustrated by the waste of the real talents of these fast talkers on such miserable and socially destructive activity. Certainly I was prone to this in my younger days, thanks to less experience and not having much information for or against what they were saying, apart from recognizing the mannerisms and speech structures so typical of hucksters of all kinds. I suppose though, that in a backhanded sort of way a huckster can indicate something socially useful: what the latest authoritarian angle of attack is. Those attacks always start small and apparently unimportant, to see if we're asleep on a convenient topic. They don't intend to wake us up, but often the hucksters do. The latest huckster round of flailing as some struggle to maintain the veil of marketing and other lies meant to distract us from massive government surveillance which is now so tidily outsourced to marketing corporations with diverse camouflage is especially desperate because actually, people are emphatically not going along with having effectively no privacy. It is striking how powerful the push back is growing, including in the homeland of one of the most obsessed surveillance organization in the present time, the united states. It is striking, yet on checking some diverse books and readings from both my research and coursework, it turns out that the struggle to create and maintain general privacy in the united states specifically is not new, and as we would reasonably expect, overlaps with similar struggles in other places. However, since the rich and their enablers in the united states like to make their problems everyone else's, it is worth parsing some of what I learned out here.
To begin with, I was reminded again of the importance of religious extremism as an impetus for eventual emigration to the americas – one of several, of which I suspect getting rich quick was often more important, nevertheless. It seems to me the prominence of the puritan "pilgrims" is more revealing and actually more honest than many united states historians might have expected. Puritanism is one of many protestant forms of christianity accepting a belief in predestination, convenient for interpreting class divisions and financial success as evidence of divine grace, and a famous hatred of images, bright colours, and music. Less talked about today is their determined early efforts to control all thought via such means as limiting all reading to a specific edition of the english translation of the christian bible and demands for conformity in public and at home. This tipped over very easily into what today seem appalling levels of bluntly, spying, eavesdropping, and the dangerous deployment of rumormongering and accusations of lapses from acceptable behaviour, especially should a person or persons try to get away from prying eyes and ears. What many of us today would understand as privacy is a problem for any person who wants to hold coercive authority over us. After all, such a person does not and cannot trust us, because apparently they don't trust themselves. But if they could somehow know our minds and all the things we want to do or could want to do, well, then they could manage us for our own good. Well, that's the religious version of this dishonest rationalization. It isn't hard to find examples of the religious, political, and parental equivalents.
Then, my reading of Feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye's work came back to mind. She wrote a brilliant essay on separatism, noting among may other important points, about how the master is allowed to walk into the slave's hut at will and do as he pleases. Within a slave society, a slave is forbidden to bar the master entry, and is certainly not allowed to make free with the master's "property" or entry into the master's house. Note, this means among many other things, a slave has no privacy. As far as possible in the case of plantation slavery, the united states slaveholders and their counterparts in the caribbean were determined to keep levels of slave education as low as possible, assuming that basic illiteracy would prevent them from organizing to resist or from otherwise undermining the process of making profits. They were quite sure without access to writing and with fierce punishments for illicit literacy, it would be impossible for enslaved people to keep the security necessary to resist, survive, and escape. They more than half believed, as too many people still do today, that any person who cannot read or write also cannot plan or reason. They were wrong, and even their ability to search homes and destroy the meagre belongings of their captives at will did not work to maintain their power for long.
There is a sadly hypocritical quality to the ways in which united states media likes to trot out caricatures of the east german stasi or the soviet-era kgb as examples of obsessive, ultimately ineffective, but of course dangerous enactors of surveillance states on a day to day and household to household basis. They trot these propaganda images out to distract us from the ways in which they are advocating the very same surveillance they claim to despise, apparently because they can pretend it's "nothing personal" and just part of "good capitalism, not bad communism." Authoritarianism is bad no matter how it is dressed up, and no matter how much effort its proponents put into hiding their actions to support and enact it. Only people desperate to impose total control because they can't trust anyone try to force everyone to have such things as constantly internet-connected monitoring devices in their homes, or try to fob off alarm and anger when people find out what was supposed to be an innocent application on their phone monitors and uploads recordings of all their doings on a near-realtime basis.
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