In Sam Harris’ conversation with General Stanley McChrystal and ex-Navy Seal Chris Fussell, co-authors of “Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World” (Making Sense podcast #195, April 2020), one of the guests said something that really stuck.
The dialogue was focused of SARS-CoV-2 and the privacy-threatening measures that might need to be put in place to fight off the pandemic. It was then that one of the two guests –can’t remember which of the two– said, and I quote from memory, that on reflection, the approximate last 150 years will be remembered in history as a true exception.
The point being made was that privacy is more or less a zombie already. The advent of digital technologies, with the internet systems architecture put in place starting in the 1990’s, has practically emptied it of real content. And the perceived trade-offs between privacy and security that we are facing right now, to effectively fend off a gigantic world health crisis, will most probably put it to death for good.
It was argued that this inability to keep one’s activities and whereabouts fully private pretty much aligns with the entirety of human history too. Tomorrow when we look back, the commentator speculated, the relatively short period between emergence of the conurbation-based highly industrialised world and global spreading of the ubiquitous web 3.0 will be interpreted as a rare and exotic social construction.
The thought really stuck with me because I think that the prognosis is extremely likely to be right. I think that as a society we will gradually edge towards the path of no return sealing a pact with that devil of sorts. From an economist viewpoint, I guess that the it boils down to the costs of individual personal privacy unfortunately being considered as an unaffordable collective luxury.
Back in 2012 I could be accused of reductionism by equating privacy to opacity, without taking into account the importance of preserving a sacrosanct, freedom-filled private individual sphere. My privacy-in-contrast-to-transparency ideas at the time focused more on debates such as the public’s access to coronavirus scientific advice to government.
However, and I fully recognise it now, a world where the triumph of transparency means the demise not only of public-sphere opacity, but or private-sphere privacy too, would indeed become a brave new world. And whilst I vividly remember the brilliant Tomás Pueyo advising me that we should just stop worrying about it, when we met in San Francisco in 2015, reasoning that if we all adjust in sync the new norm should be pretty painless to anyone in particular, I am far from ready to accept that such massive paradigm shift will be for the better. I do not think our social animal nature will adapt well to it.
Thus, it is incumbent upon us, all of us who feel the same way, to fight hard to preserve (at least what is left of) the ongoing right to individual private-sphere privacy, as consecrated both actively and tacitly by our fellow citizens during that luminous c.150 year time span. If not to turn back the tide!
