Part 1: A Pocket History of Privacy 

As I try to put my finger on privacy in its purest form, I’m transported to a moment several months ago, when—away from my family and after hours of academic gab—I said goodnight to my hosts, went to my hotel room, and locked the door behind me. In total silence, solitude, security, and ease—unencumbered and uncompromised—I yielded to the underlying “Yes, still I am.” Here I found myself, alone. There was something choice and wanton in the pleasure of it, like that of a miser clinking his gold coins for sheer pleasure: the treasure of my life in secret.

The monastic cloister, the privy, the opera box, the train car, the automobile, the voting booth, the bedroom, the study of one’s own—at the root of all privacies, there is a cell. 

This cell is at once completely material and figurative (as when we ask someone to “give me some space” or criticize someone for being “too distant”). The cell is the infrastructure of the private self’s metaphors. We tend to think of privacy in negative terms, as an absence. Yet it is an inner space that is at once sustained and accomplished by external architecture. 

The inner space self-enclosed is what is individual. Privacy is the point of coincidence between our sense of self and our form of ownership. Our form of privacy is our form of self-possession. 

Privacy is, therefore, also the way we possess ourselves in body and carry ourselves in person. If one travels abroad, one becomes abruptly sensitive to differences in how far away people stand from each other in conversation, how and when they make casual physical contact, what is regarded as an appropriate question, and whether people count on having their own room, their own bed, their own space and time—in sum, how they are alone, together, apart. 

Having privacy in your own property is a property of your own privacy. Having a place to yourself is a condition for being a place unto yourself. 

The possibility of such space rests on our political assumptions. Norbert Elias’s History of Manners shows the progress from the looser, Rabelaisian manners of feudal life, to a condition in which natural functions are hidden by the new virtues of decency and politeness. To show yourself as bodily (say, belching, breastfeeding, or baring all) is an act of vulnerability or of aggression toward others, depending on the context. 

But in a situation in which all understand ourselves as equals, we each may by rights withdraw to our own space. Where equality becomes a ruling passion, so does privacy. I don’t know of another culture in which kids are given the space to post “Keep out!” on their doors. 

Under these circumstances, privacy has become what we desire and dread. What is the greatest luxury money can buy? Ways of being out of reach and out of sight from others. What is the worst punishment we imagine to devise? Solitary confinement. “Paradise” is derived from an Avestan word meaning “enclosure.” “Hell” comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning “concealed place.” Opposites converge in private asylum. 

Punishments so often entail de-privation. The carceral confinement, like the parent’s stern “Go to your room,” is an attempt to sting the mind into a specific psychic conformation: the autonomous space of conscience. That such strategies are not reliably improving should not surprise us: they reveal more about the metaphorical power of our cell than about rehabilitation itself. 

Latin privo first meant “to bereave” or “to rob.” It then came to denote what is set apart or released from public obligation. We might still say: “She was there in a private capacity.” What is private is abstracted from what is held in common: to be set aside from all the rest. 

Privacy has always been defined and redefined in relation to what threatens to trespass onto it. The American “right to privacy” was first formulated by Louis Brandeis as a legal protection against nosy paparazzi. No one living in a permanently inaccessible place would think of themselves as living “in privacy” or claim that right. Your fancy getaway becomes “private” only when there is someone who might want to ferret you out, someone you need to—and can afford to—keep at arm’s length.

Our own sense of privacy is a skein woven out of several dissimilar strands, centuries in the making and progressively overlain. In Cicero and St. Augustine we find the Stoic and Christian understanding of the soul as an “interior palace,” a place of impregnable and inalienable freedom. The early-modern understanding, Protestant and liberal, placed property at the centre of the pursuit of private happiness. The home, not the self, became everyman’s castle, religion a matter of private conscience. The Romantic bourgeois view then shifted the private emphasis toward interiority and authenticity. As Kierkegaard, dramatizing this position, put it, “My grief is my castle.” Finally, the technological private mediates a publicly performed self, one whose experiences are authorized by my own terms of self-disclosure. (My cell is my castle.) 

But how are these privacies actually exercised? What are their focal points, their purposes? 

Privacy makes room for experiences of heightened inwardness, communication, and intimacy. That is, by raising walls around the self’s inner sanctum, privacy raises new questions about what it would take to make the will acquiesce to capture, rapture, possession. Consider John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . . for I, / except you enthrall me, shall never be free, / nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” We are still apt to speak of infringements of privacy as “invasions” or “violations.” 

This association of books with the private interior dates back to early Christianity. The Virgin Mary has been depicted reading by many painters over the centuries—as a way of showing what cannot otherwise be seen, how she is pondering many things in her heart (Luke 2:19). And St. Augustine was astonished to discover St. Ambrose reading silently to himself at a time when even solitary reading was done out loud: “He drew his eyes over the pages and his heart fathomed the sense, while his voice and tongue were silent.” Ambrose appears to Augustine here as a wonder not just of mind but of absorption, fully present and self-contained. And it was in a divine command to “take up and read” that Augustine found his own conversion. 

The novel is an art of privacy. Walter Benjamin notes that the novel is the first form of literature about and for private enjoyment. Its full-bodied emergence in the early nineteenth century coincided with the time in which the living spaces of private citizens were crowded together into cities and separated from their place of work. Unlike older, oral forms, the novel was conceived from the needs and possibilities of private enjoyment. Novels require reading room, a space apart. 

Far from being cast aside or forgotten, the association of books with depth has only intensified through our digital encounters. For Cal Newport, Nicholas Carr, and many contemporary critics, the epitome of the attention we feel we have surrendered online is sitting down alone with a book. Meditating on the printed word remains a way for us to figure a state of heightened inwardness. The book is a technology through which privacy—and therefore human depth—is envisioned and epitomized. Reading a book alone with your thoughts and in silence self-contained is our clearest shared image of a secular prayer. 

Many of the most popular novels of the eighteenth century were epistolary. The imagination of reading the intimate correspondence of others—of seeing their privacies unseen—was central to their public enjoyment. They were mainly or mostly stories about affairs of the heart. The German word for “novel” is Roman—a “romance.” This is the word from which Schlegel coined the term “Romantic.” And this is the core sense of Romantic privacy: the imagined privacies of others made public for private enjoyment. 

Brandeis’s “right to privacy” was a response to a new problem: the ease with which the press could steal a photographic glance into private space. The blurred lines between the act of sex and its mechanical reproduction (through film) marked the beginning of the transition from “Shall I draw you a picture?” to “Pics or it didn’t happen.” 

Privacy became about shielding what might be disclosed to peeping eyes—that is, it became a matter not just of tangible property or intangible inwardness but of optical information, of what could otherwise be captured by device. It thereby literalized what you do with your space into “what you do in your own bedroom.” It is no coincidence that roughly during this period the term “sex” was conceived as an impartial, quasi-scientific description of the deed. 

The subsequent familiar legal uses of the right to privacy extended this shielding principle to the ways in which other technologies—like birth control or abortion—might be strictly bedroom matters or not. But these new extensions have reinforced two old associations. 

First, that privacy is sanctified. The status once enjoyed by temples as sacred space—ground marked off from public land for ritual use—has been gradually reassigned to the inner self, to the bedroom, to the body, and (more recently) to our data. It is not uncommon to read that the right to an abortion or to control one’s own data is “sacred”—in other words, that which would be desecrated by political control because purely one’s self and ultimately private. The power of choice itself has been recast as sacred. 

Second, that privacy is in some sense feminine. Not only in that it pertains to what is denigrated as merely domestic or excluded from public consideration—novels, again, were considered a singular threat to young ladies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—but in that what defines what is private, the ultimately secret locus, is the womb: the place where one becomes two, two three. 

Just as the photograph was a new kind of object that changed our view of privacy, so too the screen. The screen is a new kind of space in fluid and real time—a cache that’s neither here nor there. Because the screen is virtually immaterial, our new cell is also in some sense everywhere at once within and without us: hand-held yet dislocating, disconcerting. When someone is looking at my monitor as I type or browse, I feel as if they are directly inspecting the contents of my mind. As our cell is now virtually nowhere, our self too is all over the place. 

Digital technology has put our privacy (sort of) within our power at each moment. And this means that it (sort of) never is. Unlike the words on a page, digital information is intrinsically such as to solicit your response here and now. There’s no end to it. 

The deepest promise of this informational space, its psychological catch, is that something else is always on its way, something else is coming right up, something else is about to happen to you. So far from being inert, digital devices have a quasi-personal presence of address. They are full of voices. They bode disquiet. We are never alone with them, but so lonely. To paraphrase Nietzsche’s quote about the abyss: As you gaze long into the screen, the screen also gazes into you. 

Our digital fascinations derive from the fact that we are working with an apparatus pregnant with the possibility of being completely and rapturously seen. Just as Christian inwardness was founded in relation to “thy Father which seeth in secret,” so too every digital act is encoded with the promise of total revelation. Our digital mind space is only ever charged with the thrilling danger of this ecstasy, this private apocalypse latent in our “sharing.” 

There are two basic wishes at play in all our privacies: the desire for solitude and the desire for society. We wish to be left alone, but it is hell to be alone. We wish to break the spell of solitude, but hell is other people. Digital technology promises to resolve this problem by affording us both. 

But instead of both, we got neither. In contemporary laments about the erosion of privacy, it is easy to assume that the less is private, the more is public. But there is no digital “public” now either: no shared reality of perception or solemnity of purpose transcending private life. Rather, there is an unholy and amphi-mix: the public on demand, fluxing scrimmages, the social dissociated. We are neither alone nor together.

Part 2: A Dialogue on Privacy Between Barba-Kay’s Persona and the Selfsame Antón 

Barba-Kay: Enough of these fancies; let’s have a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Should we be sorry about the end of privacy? It seems to me that just as the logic of emerging markets created modern privacy—spacing us out in order to create new needs and to disembed us from communal life—so now the same logic of consumption has rendered privacy obsolete. So? Privacy is not good in and of itself, right? 

Antón: I would add that privacy entails forms of evil—perhaps the distinctive forms of American evil. When the press interviews the killer’s neighbours, the answers are chillingly the same: nice guy, pretty quiet, kept to himself, didn’t bother anyone, barely noticed him, we are all so shocked by it, so nuts, who knew. No one ever sees it coming; no one knows what lies under this bland all-American niceness that acts as our firewall—that keeps others in the dark as to what is happening right now in basements, sheds, and browsers. 

Barba-Kay: But, again, where does this put us? Is privacy simply a matter of technological concessions from generation to generation? Or is it worth standing for? 

Antón: I take it for granted that we want to keep others out of our business—that data is property and that we don’t want to be hacked into and gazed at. It can be oppressive to be looked at, to be attended to in such a manner—some part of oneself is not at home while under witness. Privacy is a refuge, a withdrawal. It is a condition for the solitude in which we collect our thoughts and rest assured. I also take it for granted that the greatest threat to privacy now is not prying eyes, so much as our own desire to be pried into. In other words, the greatest threat to privacy is that little itch in our palms that makes us reach for our phones to document anything out of the ordinary—the itch to see ourselves seen, to take in and be taken in by others. 

Barba-Kay: Okay, but why must it be good to turn ourselves off, if we prefer to be on? What would be the matter with a completely documented life, so long as we consented to it? 

Antón: One answer: because publicity can diminish meaning or destroy it. 

It is not only the innermost life that is invisible but the outermost too. Paradoxically, that is, what is a matter of the body alone—the moments of total intimacy, the endmost events of birth and death—cannot be grasped by merely speculative scrutiny. To the computing eye, the eye of forensic curiosity, we are just meat going through the motions. Coverage falsifies the body alone, the times where soul happens into matter and where those in presence are rendered speechless at the terrible mystery of this contact. Such boundaries have always been shrouded from common view—this is the point of ritual space and time: the sense of an occasion. Where all is present to the solicitations of the eye, nothing can materialize as meaningful.

Footage and depiction—of certain attitudes and situations—are dehumanizing. Cameras have frequently been barred from courtrooms in order to protect the dignity of the defendants and proceedings. Just so, there is still a taboo against livestreaming the moment of death or of disseminating pictures of corpses or mutilated bodies. The sense of this is that it would be too easy to do so in a way that demeans what we see: that a photograph of someone puts them into circulation as an object of trivial preference and consumption, alongside an infinite series of others. And the significance of our ultimate vulnerabilities lies outside our capacity to consent to them. 

It is not uncommon to give voice to the worry that big tech is totalitarian. The worry should be, rather, what condition it is that both totalitarianism and big tech fantasize to approximate: the exposure of all secrets, the internalized compulsion to bring the unspoken to light—to turn human beings inside out to total view. 

Pornography is the ultimate expression of this wish for total transparency: the desire to literalize human eros, to identify the privacy of soul with what is body alone, in order to thereby capture the imagination of it. Pornography’s greatest sleight is to cause people to forget that it does not depict sex at all. 

The totalitarian wish is to eradicate what is human mystery in private. 

Barba-Kay: But you are again trafficking in extremes. Most of our ordinary truck is as humdrum as email or posting to the comments section. What’s at stake in privacy in general? Or what are you looking not to show? 

Antón: A second answer: What’s made public contrives meanings into being. 

What trickles out as our data is supposed to disclose what was there “all along” (the truth about our convictions, our preferences, our desires). But, in codifying them into being, these data points constitute an artifice of you. As Lowry Pressly argues in The Right to Oblivion, all data is a photograph of mind—like photographs, data’s trick is to produce the illusion that what you see is what is the truth of the matter (even as it defines this truth into being and in no uncertain terms). Whereas in fact data is to meaning what pornography is to sex: a form of explicitness so beguiling as to blind us to its simplifications. 

The word “person” is from a Latin word meaning “mask.” It assumes a distinction between the inner and the outer, the actor and the role. It assumes, that is, that there is a basic yet creative difference between what is outer and what is inward—that there is more to someone than is accounted for. Not because inwardness is information hard to measure, but because it is not a matter of information at all. The word is, at last, a form of light uprising: the expression of I am that calls seen to unseen out from fathom to response. 

To the degree that they allow or urge or compel us to perform our preferences in public at all times, our digital uses are a form of psychic violence: they rid us of the fig leaf of our personhood. When I reach for my phone in the middle of the night or right upon waking, I am blazed awake to speed. 

The speed of light annihilates distance. But human depth, the inner dimension, is distance too. And without the ability to cultivate the capacity to bide and tend our time, we are not thinking persons, but users, influencers, triggers, nodes, clockworking jerks, dead predictables. 

Just as a human being must sleep in order to live, just as the roots of a plant are blasted when unearthed, just as no life is possible on earth without an atmosphere, a person must live by turns of closure and omission. Every birth is the outcome of a confinement. 

Barba-Kay: Sure, yes, but I am very much a person over here. (Or what are you saying—that customer-service surveys are a human rights violation?) If data is not us, then it doesn’t ultimately make the kind of difference you’re saying. So I ask you one more time why I should care for privacy. 

Antón: A third answer: because it’s almost impossible to believe anything I’m saying (and this shows just why I am right). 

It’s true that we don’t feel surveilled unless someone is watching us in real time. Our digital cell lends itself to the sense that we are ever watchers, never watched. It’s true that, because it is an artifice, we seldom feel as if data gets to the bottom of us—as if we are really at stake in it. And so, never feeling at stake while always screened, we play into its hands. 

But we do not apply this exemption—this “not really us”—to other people. The more information I have about people on the whole—about undecided voters, say—the more I disdain them. The more information I have about institutions, the less I believe in their authority. When I look at the comments section, I see the moves of sympathy and antipathy all mapped out in cretinous simplicity. The terms of “traffic” mean that I am automatically given to know all I need about you. 

Data is an apparatus for breaking down words and deeds into automatic behaviours. It produces a knowing emptiness that makes meaning disappear into glare: a lidless seeing, searing vision. And when this is how I think of others, this is how I come to think of myself too. In other words, it is not because data is wrong about us that it is a threat but because we are constantly tempted by contempt to prove it awfully right. 

Is it that we will forget that we are persons or that it becomes harder to treat others as persons? (Is there a difference?) The distinction between automata and persons is not that automata don’t feel like they are not people. To soul is to matter love in deed. 

Privacy affords us the inward clearing within which we can make out what’s beyond us. Such soulspace is a condition for acquiring a mind of one’s own, for respecting the inscrutability of others’, and for being able to heed the still, small voice. To be a person—a creature fleshed out and graced with dignity—is to be finally a mystery, to be possessed of a secret still, unreckoned, and untold. 

Only secrets kept are kept alive.