The Privacy Dilemma (Part II)
these oats are made for sowing
Sex is the reason.
Have you ever considered why privacy matters? Why it is not normal, but bizarre and anti-social to be an open-book? Like so many things, it all starts with a little bit of ... rock and roll. Sowing oats. Honky tonk.
"Today,” writes Caroline Kennedy, “we have less privacy now than ever.” This view embodies the American consensus— and I believe it is wrong.
The Social Dilemma and America’s mental health crisis, is not from our lack of privacy, it’s from having too much privacy.
Believe it or not, there is a one-size-fits-all solution to the Privacy Dilemma. It’s not going to inspire you. It’s not going to have you waking up with a smile tomorrow. And, if I had to guess, it’s probably going to piss you off a bit.
First, let’s talk tangled sheets.
Where did humanity’s privacy impulse come from?
Most animals have no interest of privacy. When sex comes, it is urgent, immediate, and anywhere goes. Unlike almost all other animals1, every human society, from 1st century Africa to 19th century France to modern Sweden, has sought privacy when the time comes to 'hit the home run.’ (RoyalSociety)
Thousands of years ago, our ancestors discovered that bundles of straw, tied together and smeared with mud makes for a nice roof. Did we stop there? We built higher, scraping skies, until we reached the limit of how high a building can safely stand.
Mankind has a tendency of going from 0 to 100, fast.
The same is happening, I think, with privacy in the modern world. Sex is inherently pleasurable, so we falsely associated pleasure with privacy too. We thought “hey, privacy works over there, why not over here? And over here? And over there?
Zero to one-hundred, until life became a 24-hour-private-party.
In Anton Chekhov’s short story In the Cart, a lonesome schoolmistress is returning to her village from the town where she has collected her meager salary. On the way home, Marya meets a once-charming landlord who has turned into something of a window-licking dolt.
In 2020, we were all separated from our friends and families to the point where "being close to another” felt like a distant dream, a past life, like we had been trapped in a global zoom-room with beach-level dress-codes.
Some people loved wearing sweatpants 24 hours a day, zooming around the world from the privacy of their homes. I did not. It wasn’t the scarcity of extroversion in our lives, but the overabundance of comfort. Comfort loses its value unless there is something to stack it up against. If everything is comfortable, life is boring. Likewise, if everything is uncomfortable, life is miserable.
So where is the mid-point between comfort and discomfort? The private space and the public?
Now it’s time to go outside. Lace up those boots, snap on your Rollie, throw on that new jacket. It’s Saturday afternoon. Let’s take a stroll down 5th Avenue, New York City, 1950.
A woman passes you on the right. She’s in a red cocktail dress with a pearl necklace and platform heels. And another, she's in cowboy boots and an orange sundress. Then a mid-thirties man, floating along the pavement in his navy suit and polished shoes.
City streets were once a promenade—a place to see and be seen.
For a while, museums, gyms, ball games, offices and restaurants were opportunities to announce to the world that you’ve got sharp new shoes, that you were just promoted, that you love the girl across the table from you.
But one by one, they were picked off. One by one, devoured by the Privacy Monster.
Now pause and dial the clock to 2021.
People still buy new shoes, slip them on, and go for a promenade, but does this parade of publicity have the same effect?
In 1950, you saw the stunning woman the red cocktail dress. Maybe you even followed her and struck up a conversation and, if you were lucky, she let you buy her a drink. Classic romance.
What makes this scene so obviously seventy years old?
In 2021, she never even saw you. She was busied by real public life. Who sees her in the streets of NYC no longer matters. What matters is who sees her on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter. Bumble.
Public Space (1950): a place where anyone is permitted and privacy is absent or significantly diminished.
Public Space (2021): A place where you could (maybe) be seen by millions watching you through silicon-peepholes around the world.
In the virtual world, anyone is permitted. To gain “exposure” people, myself included, show off things they otherwise never would or could have in the past. The public space has been turned inside out and replaced by a semi-non-existent that’s always on us or in reach.
When we put up photos and videos on social media, it pulls on the same sexuality-riven heartstrings as the 1950’s promenade.
And what’s so deceptive is that these platforms create in us an illusion of seeing and being seen, making a flattened out private space feel public virtually.
The platforms fire up the same hormones and neurons that fire on our 5th avenue stroll. We feel the public spotlight, but it’s a lie. Recall in the cartoons when a little crook would stand on his lackey’s shoulders, and wrap them both in an overcoat. That’s your Feed.
Your Feed is a flattened out version of reality, like paying for sex is a flattened out version of love. Your Feed is the prostitute, the social climber, the gold digger. She says she loves you, and the next thing you know, your wallet is gone.
Who needs love anyway when there is Bumble, TikTok, and YouTube?
When you have a feed, who needs to see and be seen?
Privacy2, it seems, has become synonymous with technological progress. Global high speed internet, more affordable devices, cryptocurrency, streaming services, video-conferencing software, virtual reality. Take Peloton, for example. They turned a public spin class and took it to your home.
Is it laziness? Efficiency? A desire to “make” more time?
Without a doubt, more good than harm has come from mankind’s sky-scraping mindset. Just imagine how much harder the recent crisis would have been without these in-the-home bastions of privacy. Having to spend 18 months confined to homes without telephones and home entertainment might have shattered the economy and.or torn apart the world's social fabric, leaving behind a ship with tatters for sails.
But our gadgets have bcome too good for our own good
People once had to go out in public to enjoy movies, music, conversation, sports, exercise. What’s happening is like replacing all of nature with fake house plants and trees and astroturf. The more real they become, the better they simulate reality, the more OK we are using them.
The same can be said for our private devices.
The more we use them, the more privacy exists in the world. The more privacy, in my view, the more depression and pain and anti-social behavior.
There’s a reason the worst prisoners are sent to solitary confinement. Too much privacy is alienating, damaging, dehumanizing.
All this is not hate for privacy. It’s worry. Worry for how much more isolated we might become, how much more depressed, and how lost our mental state might be if the privacy war continues.
Think back to when you were a kid. How much was public then? How did your parents punish you? Did they send you off to your room, or in the corner, to be alone?
Kids are completely open books with open minds. When we’re kids, everything—emotions, feelings, ideas, desires—is public.
Wasn’t life fun? Didn’t you love going out and climbing on rocks or jumping in puddles with a sometimes bored, but more lively, spirit
Publicity is the puddle-jumpers you used to wear as a kid.
Privacy is the drainage run off that will soon make every puddle too gnarly to jump in.
When we grow up, adults help us close those open-books and turn us into privacy loving creatures. When you meet someone who is a completely open-book, you might consider them bizarre, irreverent, inappropriate.
Being unapologetically open is not bizarre. It’s youthful.
And youthful is how we need to be. Open-minded, energetic, a beginner’s mind.
Public spaces are youth and open-minded. Private spaces are age and skepticism
It’s just about the hardest thing, I think, to do in today’s society. But here are three ways to guard against the Privacy Dilemma.
To reclaim your public spaces: when in public, no phones allowed.
The phone is an escape from discomfort
To see and be seen: put on some pants, go out to the party, and maaaybe sow some oats.
To live a little better: go be a kid, go play in the rain, go practice the beginners’ mind
I’ll finish with a riff on the ending to Nabokov’s In the Cart:
🙋🏼♂️ Appreciate the read
Did you enjoy this email? This newsletter is ideas I am testing. They’re early versions of what I plan to write about further—in online mags, essay anthologies, future books, etc. If you enjoyed, hit the ❤️ below, comment, or share, so I know it was an interesting idea.
If you missed Part 1 of this series, you can read it here.
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Ciao for now!—
Take care and stay steely,
—Jer
A handful of birds, chimps, and humans are alone in private honky tonk
It’s the topic for another post, but I believe that Podcast and YouTube are direct results of the Privacy Dilemma. Podcast is a private conversation made public. Anti-private.