And before I could write this comment, Substack had to "authenticate me"... so that I could share this: when I was 29 years old, in 1981 -- flew to Las Vegas (where the airfare was cheapest) and rent a car, drive through barren Nevada in the middle of the night to get to a room I had reserved via telephone, on way to the panhandle of Idaho to visit my oldest friend. No cell phone, hardly any phone booths, gas stations few and far between. Once I got to Idaho I was back in "civilization." I didn't think twice about it. My friend has passed away but the pictures exist that prove I was there.
Glad you’re authentic! I know the roads in those regions. A few years back, my wife and I drove north along the shores of Lake Mead. I commented that if the sky were a bit different in color, we could be on Mars. When we got home. She framed a photo from that drive and a 1950s sci-fi painting of Mars by Chesley Bonestell. Today, they hang side-by-side in my office.
In 1991, I went on vacation to Utah (flew in and out of Vegas). While driving through the south-central region of the state, I was low on cash, so I stopped at the one small town on the route with a bank to get cash from an ATM. Except they didn't have one; they said they'd been trying to get one, but for some reason hadn't been able to. I had to get a cash advance on my Visa card (first and last time).
Delightful and insightful as always, Bob. Thank you.
In keeping with theme du jour, I share the following.
About twenty years ago, while on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, I received a call from my largest client. In anticipation of his call, I had borrowed a bulky satellite phone from a colleague. I strolled back on forth on the upper deck for about 45 minutes answering my client’s questions. When I had finished, I discovered I had the worst sunburn in my life and was miserable for the rest of the trip.
A couple of years later, my wife and I spent a week in Yellowstone, the Tetons and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. One beautiful evening at sundown, while watching Old Faithful do its thing, my cellphone rang. It was a collect call from a client in a federal penitentiary awaiting trial for murder and tax fraud. He was calling to complain about my last bill. I was in such a mellow mood, I gave him a 10% discount.
When I first went out to Burning Man, we referred to it as dropping off the face of the planet, as there was zero cell (or other internet connectivity) once you were up a few miles from I-80. Today, the event is saturated both with cellular and satellite connectivity and people wander around with their faces buried in their smart phones. Of course that does enable a few conveniences, but at a noticeable cost in lost direct human interaction.
I hear Burning Man old-timers complaining that the current manifestation has virtually nothing in common with the original. That it’s just some combination of South by Southwest and the Consumer Electronics Show these days.
Burning Man old-timers love to complain about many things. Considering that that demographic has been aging, some of it comes down to "kids these days". There is also the problem when what was once novel becomes beloved but jaded.
I literally could not have my job without a cell phone, because of required security authentication using it. Granted, I'm a software developer, but everyone in my company, no matter the position, is in the same boat.
Bob, Not without some irony I am on a laptop screen to read your essay and type out an immediate response. Cell phones are now little more than incredibly powerful, compact personal computers that, incidently, can also make phone calls. I did a Zoom call yesterday and connected with distant relatives on Messenger. Like the apocryphal frog in the pot of water on the stove, the invasion of our privacy has occurred so insidiously, if not exactly slowly, that we accept as normal things that would have stirred outrage and furious pushback less than a generation ago. I know that when I look at anything on the internet, that will be observed, documented, stored, and, wherever possible, monetized. While I love the many conveniences of modern life and cannot imagine a life without the internet and all that goes with it, I also realize that we have entered a dystopian world which may ultimately be our undoing. Direct personal human interaction and contact have been replaced with virtual communication (like this). The contagion of social media may just destroy an entire generation of youth with depression, anxiety, gender confusion, ideological indoctrination, and more. It is my Christian faith that sustains me in those darker moments with I feel the world is spinning out of control. God remains in charge and nothing happens that does not work in some way toward an ultimate good, even if I don't see it in this life. Meanwhile, I am trying to simplify and, as soon as I finish this, I am going to go read a book. Rick
Glad you took the time to reply—even reflexively. :)
I have a considerable number of people who are really good friends—and whom I have never met in person. You are one of them. On the other hand, I have noticed that such friendships can vanish in a puff when the two friends shift platforms and organizational memberships. I once read a profound question that has stuck with me—“How many of your Facebook friends will attend your funeral?”
Seen another way, there are people I do not know personally and about whom I will learn they have left this world only on Facebook or some other platform and I will with difficulty restrain myself from hitting "like". That's the electronic version of what Bette Davis said about Joan Crawford: ". . .you should never say bad things about the dead. You should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good."
is the lack of privacy in todays society a loss of liberty? I wonder if there is a trade off between liberty and progress. technology has improved lives in so many ways, but in return we sacrifice privacy.
My office emails during snow days to remind us that there are no more snow days. We are expected to work from home instead.
It is, to some extent, a voluntary or semi-voluntary SURRENDER of liberty. Whether that is permanent or temporary will be a fascinating question Those of us in this discussion are unlikely to live long enough to know the answer.
But the world was already changing in 1984. My wife was then flying for Air Canada and was doing long, long and far away cycles: 11 days total, Toronto, to London, to Bombay, to Singapore and return. A couple of nights in Bombay each cycle as the Singapore return was only 2 days a week. She had tried to call me from Bombay, but could never schedule an international line, or get a call through. In Singapore, she picked up the phone in her hotel run, dialled me in Toronto, and I answered in 25 seconds. And I had been dead asleep in bed! it was 7:20 am, on my birthday. The satellite latency was weird, but Singapore was now a first world country (ok, city, then). India was still a third world country as far as communication goes.
A thought test: the next time you are cursing at your computer for taking too long to do something, please remember that you are likely doing something that could not have been done, 10 or 20 years ago. Now you do from your cell phone... We forget that change is everywhere and everywhen. Neil Young was nearly correct: it is not rust that never sleeps, it is change.
Great stuff! And yes, it was beginning to change. On that 1984 trip to Africa, my access to world news in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Malawi was limited to the BBC's daily short-wave radio broadcasts, which I believe lasted 15 minutes. And I could get a Wall Street Journal 3 or 4 days after it was printed. When I got to South Africa, on the other hand, the TVs in my hotel received CNN--then just a couple of years old and still a revolutionary product. During those weeks, Indira Ghandi was assassinated. Seems to me it happened when I was in one of the news-starved countries and I could finally get the scoop when I arrived in South Africa. (Or, she may have been killed while I was in South Africa, with the news flooding in via CNN and a couple of other international channels (probably the BBC, again). The next time I was out of the Western World was in 2000, when I visited Kazakhstan for the first time. By then, world news and international phone service were abundantly available.
Long ago in a galaxy far away... I spent my student summers at university working as a geologist in various northern nooks and crannies of Canada. 'News' was never 'abundantly available' out there. My parents noted my comments about the isolation in the bush in my first summer (north shore of the St. Lawrence River, Quebec, 250 km east of Sept Iles). For my second summer (north-east of Red Lake, Ontario) they bought me a battery operated Zenith Trans-Oceanic 7000 series shortwave radio. It was a big beast, probably weighed 12 pounds, but it was an excellent short wave receiver. It was such a good radio Zenith produced thousands of them for years.
CBC and BBC news every night, about 9pm local time, just after dusk seemed to be the best time to start listening. From northern Saskatchewan I even often got US mega-watt AM stations on skip. And of course, it pulled in all sorts of shortwave stuff. It was a lifesaver for 7 summers in isolation! I finally sold it, my last year of law school to a second year geology student who had lined up a summer job with the Iron Ore Company in Schefferville, PQ for his summer (where I had worked summer of 1971, before entering law school). That radio was a lifeline. And I sold it for more than my parents had paid! When things are commonplace, we don't notice them... until they are gone!
Excellent read. My oldest child remembers when the family entered the computer age when we got our first computer, a Commodore 64. Our youngest doesn’t remember a time without any computer I am not sure he remembers pre cellphone days. I was an early car phone user as I would get beeped and need to call the hospital sometimes in inconvenient places. I think he may not remember that phone but I know the oldest does. The age difference is 12 years and it seems as if a technology generation separates them.
My wife and I lived in rural India 1965-67. We called home occasionally on holidays. That required arranging with the local post office (booking a call) and standing beside a red metal phone booth until the phone rang and the operator would call us to say we were connected. $6 a minute, if I recall correctly. We did not talk long.
My last international posting was Lima, Peru, in 1997. We could call home from our home phone by direct dialing.
Now I have a friend in rural Kenya who calls and texts with me regularly. Some latency, but not much, and otherwise the quality is very good. Autocorrect does not do well with Swahili, BTW.
Thank you for another enjoyable story. I enjoy them.
On a related note, I insisted until I retired a couple years ago on carrying a pager rather than being called at night, much to the scorn of my younger colleagues. But it had two advantages a phone call does not: 1) you can decide for yourself whether a call is an emergency, and if not answer at leisure, and 2) when it wakes you at night you can pause to shake out cobwebs before having to speak live with someone.
In the TV series The Wire, much is made of the use of a drug gang's use of pagers as a means of maintaining secrecy and privacy. It begins in this video around 4:16: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7nUGeawmds&t=311s. Throughout the series, pagers are plot points.
Come to think of it, Hezbollah liked the idea of pagers for the same reason you and the gangs in The Wire do. :)
I love your post but I really enjoy reading all the comments on it.
I particularly find this issue—privacy—compelling. Most Americans find it outrageous that their privacy is at best an illusion and at worst nonexistent. This amazes me because once you leave your home you expose yourself to your local community. You have no right to go unobserved or unseen. Anyone has the right to become a recluse of course and live without people (except whenever you need something or someone).
I guess I fail to understand why this raises such alarm. This issue has nothing to do with liberty or freedom because no individual has the power to control the actions of others (only the right to control their own actions).
The internet is just another place that, if you choose to enter, you cannot control the actions of other users. And if you visit their websites, why would you expect to go unseen?
That seems like an obvious disanalogy. Unless you’re quite literally “exposing yourself” when you leave the house, you maintain a much greater degree of control over the degree of self-disclosure, if only because you maintain the ability to be forgotten and your thoughts and actions cannot be preserved in order to be monetized.
You disclose more than you know: the clothes you wear clothes indicate your income (shoes, handbags and any jewelry, etc.). Likewise when you get into your car, where you shop, not to mention where you live or work or go to school. I could go on but I think you get the point.
You’re right. But (for now), those things are seen mainly by those present, and not necessarily absorbed by the internet panopticon and used to turn your inner life into a consumer product. Therein lies the big difference I think.
And of course, using the internet is a choice, to a degree, as you say. One could disconnect. But the incentive structure of the world is such that this is… not easy. Also, the idea of consent is misleading in my opinion. There’s no easily accessible list of “things you are agreeing to by using the internet” - and I think most people are not necessarily aware of the extent to which they render themselves vulnerable in so doing. By contrast, embodied life in a real community is something we’ve been doing for long enough that we know what is and isn’t safe to do, generally speaking.
Finally, today’s Internet is monopolized by huge platforms that monetize you precisely by concealing the extent to which they invade your privacy and reinforce your dopamine driven use cycles. That can’t be said about normal body life.
There's also the factor that when you do check off access limits on some platform or software, the next upgrade conveniently "forgets" your preferences and changes those switches
I’m enjoying this conversation, so I hope this doesn’t come across as haranguing or being unable to just let it go.
Anyways, how is it that something could be both limited and a myth? Without getting into some abstruse literary theory, it seems like it needs to be one or the other.
Maybe what that comment exposes is that there is some equivocation going on in this conversation with regards to the notion of “privacy“.
Maybe we can divide the notion of privacy into two types.
P1: the ability to completely conceal oneself from the world in which one lives.
P2: the ability to selectively disclose, or not, the details and dynamics of one’s inner life.
P1 is obviously a myth, as you say.
The “pain point” here is P2. The world of “The Machine”, to borrow from Paul Kingsnorth, egregiously violates P2, and, adding insult to injury, does it while monetizing every detail of our inner lives that it can extract from us. Turns us into a product, and what’s more, it does it under the veil of supposed “progress” and inevitability.
Keep at it. I believe he said privacy was EITHER a myth OR limited—not that it was both. I think he’s positing a spectrum, with one end representing TOTAL privacy and the other end total LACK of privacy (e.g., privacy is a myth). By my reading, he’s ruling out total privacy as nonexistent and saying either we have partial privacy or no privacy at all. The latter is the panopticon society where there is no escape from the prying eyes of others. (Think of this as Truman Burbank in THE TRUMAN SHOW. 24/7 TV cameras on him. Off-the-chart realization of a paranoiac’s worst fear.) The former says that sometimes we’re observed, and other times not.
When I was thinking about leaving New York City for my childhood Virginia, I told me boss that I wasn’t sure how much privacy was right for a child. I said that, l;Irving on 116th Street inNYC, my son could set fire to all the buildings on 115th Street, and I would never hear about it—no one would know him. But, I said, in Petersburg, VA, I never had any privacy. Anything I did got back to my parents. My boss said, “Bob, it just hasn’t hit you yet that you are now a parent. Eventually, you’ll realize that the optimal percentage of time when your son is under observation is 100%.”
My answer will sound like a cop out because how one person views this reality will really depend on whether they are evading reality or staying in focus. I don’t know how anyone could say that they have anonymity from their world which is what many people believe “privacy” means. So if you agree that privacy falls way short of anonymity, then you should agree that it’s really a myth. Now we could spend a lot of time harkening back to our childhoods (I’m 60) so I remember a much different world where not many people had any access to dynamic information. But I would still maintain that no one thought about their privacy in the way that we say we do today.
As an aside, I am among other things a retired lawyer who can remember when the courts used “privacy” in lieu of individual liberty to nullify intrusive laws. I believe that was the wrong rationale for protecting individual rights, but our courts constructed the myth of privacy to shield us from the coercive power of the state.
Yes. It's just a quantitative change--which becomes a qualitative change. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the Richmond Fed, where I worked at the time, became concerned about similar terrorist activities. At roughly that time, they were rolling out a new website. One of the senior managers was waxing rhapsodic about the fact that senior officials' photos would be online. I said that if they were so worried about security, they might want to omit the photos and limit some of the other info. The higher-up--who didn't typically listen to anyone else--rolled his eyes and said that they weren't posting anything that was already obtainable. If someone wanted to target an SVP, he said, they could come to the bank, get a brochure with the names, go to City Hall or DMV or newspapers at the library and dig up info on them, pictures, etc. etc. etc. I said that if someone with murderous intent has to go to all that trouble, they might just cool off and rethink what they were doing. The web info would allow such a person to act immediately and impulsively. He didn't see it my way.
I was correct in my warning. But my proposed solution would be obsolete within months, as info on the web exploded and rendered my privacy ideas moot. And. indeed, that particular fellow became the target of some hate groups at some point afterward. But, by that time, my idea of privacy was laughably obsolete.
Thanks! I actually enjoy being proven wrong and admitting it publicly. I will soon have a post on Debbie Harry's upcoming 80th birthday--and how she has disproven a flippant comment that my wife or I made 45 years ago. Also, in my doctoral dissertation, I set out to prove a particular point and, after working through the math, found that the opposite was true. Nothing could have pleased me more.
I also like your essay, but this may be intrusive. What was the plot point in My name is Asher Lev, that you were curious about. The reason being I am Orthodox and have a knowledge of his world. Or what he wants to portray.
Not intrusive at all, thanks. It has been 25 years or more, so you made me realize that I made a mistake in the essay. Our question was about The Chosen, not My Name Is Asher Lev. (We read both.) in the book, Reb Saunders raises his son in silence, except for studies. We asked Potok whether there is any factual or historic basis for such an action. He wrote back to say that he prefers to let his readers interpret his writings as they wish. We found his answer to be irritating, as we weren’t asking him to interpret anything. We were merely asking whether the practice he described was an artifice of his writing or whether such a custom existed in real-life. My family and I knew many in the Orthodox community, but not in the Hasidic community (until some years later).
How I love your essays.
And how I love to hear comments like yours. :)
And before I could write this comment, Substack had to "authenticate me"... so that I could share this: when I was 29 years old, in 1981 -- flew to Las Vegas (where the airfare was cheapest) and rent a car, drive through barren Nevada in the middle of the night to get to a room I had reserved via telephone, on way to the panhandle of Idaho to visit my oldest friend. No cell phone, hardly any phone booths, gas stations few and far between. Once I got to Idaho I was back in "civilization." I didn't think twice about it. My friend has passed away but the pictures exist that prove I was there.
Glad you’re authentic! I know the roads in those regions. A few years back, my wife and I drove north along the shores of Lake Mead. I commented that if the sky were a bit different in color, we could be on Mars. When we got home. She framed a photo from that drive and a 1950s sci-fi painting of Mars by Chesley Bonestell. Today, they hang side-by-side in my office.
In 1991, I went on vacation to Utah (flew in and out of Vegas). While driving through the south-central region of the state, I was low on cash, so I stopped at the one small town on the route with a bank to get cash from an ATM. Except they didn't have one; they said they'd been trying to get one, but for some reason hadn't been able to. I had to get a cash advance on my Visa card (first and last time).
Good read.
Thanks!
Delightful and insightful as always, Bob. Thank you.
In keeping with theme du jour, I share the following.
About twenty years ago, while on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, I received a call from my largest client. In anticipation of his call, I had borrowed a bulky satellite phone from a colleague. I strolled back on forth on the upper deck for about 45 minutes answering my client’s questions. When I had finished, I discovered I had the worst sunburn in my life and was miserable for the rest of the trip.
A couple of years later, my wife and I spent a week in Yellowstone, the Tetons and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. One beautiful evening at sundown, while watching Old Faithful do its thing, my cellphone rang. It was a collect call from a client in a federal penitentiary awaiting trial for murder and tax fraud. He was calling to complain about my last bill. I was in such a mellow mood, I gave him a 10% discount.
Great stories. Hope your clients did OK.
When I first went out to Burning Man, we referred to it as dropping off the face of the planet, as there was zero cell (or other internet connectivity) once you were up a few miles from I-80. Today, the event is saturated both with cellular and satellite connectivity and people wander around with their faces buried in their smart phones. Of course that does enable a few conveniences, but at a noticeable cost in lost direct human interaction.
I hear Burning Man old-timers complaining that the current manifestation has virtually nothing in common with the original. That it’s just some combination of South by Southwest and the Consumer Electronics Show these days.
Burning Man old-timers love to complain about many things. Considering that that demographic has been aging, some of it comes down to "kids these days". There is also the problem when what was once novel becomes beloved but jaded.
I don't own a cell phone and I limit my time on the internet. Reality is a choice.
Admirable view. Difficult choices.
I think that depends on how much you enjoy doing real things in the real world. It was automatic for me.
I literally could not have my job without a cell phone, because of required security authentication using it. Granted, I'm a software developer, but everyone in my company, no matter the position, is in the same boat.
Bob, Not without some irony I am on a laptop screen to read your essay and type out an immediate response. Cell phones are now little more than incredibly powerful, compact personal computers that, incidently, can also make phone calls. I did a Zoom call yesterday and connected with distant relatives on Messenger. Like the apocryphal frog in the pot of water on the stove, the invasion of our privacy has occurred so insidiously, if not exactly slowly, that we accept as normal things that would have stirred outrage and furious pushback less than a generation ago. I know that when I look at anything on the internet, that will be observed, documented, stored, and, wherever possible, monetized. While I love the many conveniences of modern life and cannot imagine a life without the internet and all that goes with it, I also realize that we have entered a dystopian world which may ultimately be our undoing. Direct personal human interaction and contact have been replaced with virtual communication (like this). The contagion of social media may just destroy an entire generation of youth with depression, anxiety, gender confusion, ideological indoctrination, and more. It is my Christian faith that sustains me in those darker moments with I feel the world is spinning out of control. God remains in charge and nothing happens that does not work in some way toward an ultimate good, even if I don't see it in this life. Meanwhile, I am trying to simplify and, as soon as I finish this, I am going to go read a book. Rick
Glad you took the time to reply—even reflexively. :)
I have a considerable number of people who are really good friends—and whom I have never met in person. You are one of them. On the other hand, I have noticed that such friendships can vanish in a puff when the two friends shift platforms and organizational memberships. I once read a profound question that has stuck with me—“How many of your Facebook friends will attend your funeral?”
Seen another way, there are people I do not know personally and about whom I will learn they have left this world only on Facebook or some other platform and I will with difficulty restrain myself from hitting "like". That's the electronic version of what Bette Davis said about Joan Crawford: ". . .you should never say bad things about the dead. You should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good."
is the lack of privacy in todays society a loss of liberty? I wonder if there is a trade off between liberty and progress. technology has improved lives in so many ways, but in return we sacrifice privacy.
My office emails during snow days to remind us that there are no more snow days. We are expected to work from home instead.
It is, to some extent, a voluntary or semi-voluntary SURRENDER of liberty. Whether that is permanent or temporary will be a fascinating question Those of us in this discussion are unlikely to live long enough to know the answer.
Always makes me think and learn.
No greater honor than to hear that from someone such as yourself.
But the world was already changing in 1984. My wife was then flying for Air Canada and was doing long, long and far away cycles: 11 days total, Toronto, to London, to Bombay, to Singapore and return. A couple of nights in Bombay each cycle as the Singapore return was only 2 days a week. She had tried to call me from Bombay, but could never schedule an international line, or get a call through. In Singapore, she picked up the phone in her hotel run, dialled me in Toronto, and I answered in 25 seconds. And I had been dead asleep in bed! it was 7:20 am, on my birthday. The satellite latency was weird, but Singapore was now a first world country (ok, city, then). India was still a third world country as far as communication goes.
A thought test: the next time you are cursing at your computer for taking too long to do something, please remember that you are likely doing something that could not have been done, 10 or 20 years ago. Now you do from your cell phone... We forget that change is everywhere and everywhen. Neil Young was nearly correct: it is not rust that never sleeps, it is change.
Great stuff! And yes, it was beginning to change. On that 1984 trip to Africa, my access to world news in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Malawi was limited to the BBC's daily short-wave radio broadcasts, which I believe lasted 15 minutes. And I could get a Wall Street Journal 3 or 4 days after it was printed. When I got to South Africa, on the other hand, the TVs in my hotel received CNN--then just a couple of years old and still a revolutionary product. During those weeks, Indira Ghandi was assassinated. Seems to me it happened when I was in one of the news-starved countries and I could finally get the scoop when I arrived in South Africa. (Or, she may have been killed while I was in South Africa, with the news flooding in via CNN and a couple of other international channels (probably the BBC, again). The next time I was out of the Western World was in 2000, when I visited Kazakhstan for the first time. By then, world news and international phone service were abundantly available.
Long ago in a galaxy far away... I spent my student summers at university working as a geologist in various northern nooks and crannies of Canada. 'News' was never 'abundantly available' out there. My parents noted my comments about the isolation in the bush in my first summer (north shore of the St. Lawrence River, Quebec, 250 km east of Sept Iles). For my second summer (north-east of Red Lake, Ontario) they bought me a battery operated Zenith Trans-Oceanic 7000 series shortwave radio. It was a big beast, probably weighed 12 pounds, but it was an excellent short wave receiver. It was such a good radio Zenith produced thousands of them for years.
CBC and BBC news every night, about 9pm local time, just after dusk seemed to be the best time to start listening. From northern Saskatchewan I even often got US mega-watt AM stations on skip. And of course, it pulled in all sorts of shortwave stuff. It was a lifesaver for 7 summers in isolation! I finally sold it, my last year of law school to a second year geology student who had lined up a summer job with the Iron Ore Company in Schefferville, PQ for his summer (where I had worked summer of 1971, before entering law school). That radio was a lifeline. And I sold it for more than my parents had paid! When things are commonplace, we don't notice them... until they are gone!
Excellent read. My oldest child remembers when the family entered the computer age when we got our first computer, a Commodore 64. Our youngest doesn’t remember a time without any computer I am not sure he remembers pre cellphone days. I was an early car phone user as I would get beeped and need to call the hospital sometimes in inconvenient places. I think he may not remember that phone but I know the oldest does. The age difference is 12 years and it seems as if a technology generation separates them.
My wife and I lived in rural India 1965-67. We called home occasionally on holidays. That required arranging with the local post office (booking a call) and standing beside a red metal phone booth until the phone rang and the operator would call us to say we were connected. $6 a minute, if I recall correctly. We did not talk long.
My last international posting was Lima, Peru, in 1997. We could call home from our home phone by direct dialing.
Now I have a friend in rural Kenya who calls and texts with me regularly. Some latency, but not much, and otherwise the quality is very good. Autocorrect does not do well with Swahili, BTW.
Thank you for another enjoyable story. I enjoy them.
I keep pointing to people how that little silicon chip is changing EVERYTHING. Some Good some Bad, and we're still trying to figure it out.
What amazes me is how so many people are (apparently) Not Amazed.
Indeed.
Another box of chocolates. Thanks!
On a related note, I insisted until I retired a couple years ago on carrying a pager rather than being called at night, much to the scorn of my younger colleagues. But it had two advantages a phone call does not: 1) you can decide for yourself whether a call is an emergency, and if not answer at leisure, and 2) when it wakes you at night you can pause to shake out cobwebs before having to speak live with someone.
I am a fellow in training (ID) and I prefer the pager for exactly the same reasons. Seems obviously preferable!
In the TV series The Wire, much is made of the use of a drug gang's use of pagers as a means of maintaining secrecy and privacy. It begins in this video around 4:16: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7nUGeawmds&t=311s. Throughout the series, pagers are plot points.
Come to think of it, Hezbollah liked the idea of pagers for the same reason you and the gangs in The Wire do. :)
Yes - the wire was great.
And this might be the only issue on which Hezbollah and I see eye to eye.
I love your post but I really enjoy reading all the comments on it.
I particularly find this issue—privacy—compelling. Most Americans find it outrageous that their privacy is at best an illusion and at worst nonexistent. This amazes me because once you leave your home you expose yourself to your local community. You have no right to go unobserved or unseen. Anyone has the right to become a recluse of course and live without people (except whenever you need something or someone).
I guess I fail to understand why this raises such alarm. This issue has nothing to do with liberty or freedom because no individual has the power to control the actions of others (only the right to control their own actions).
The internet is just another place that, if you choose to enter, you cannot control the actions of other users. And if you visit their websites, why would you expect to go unseen?
That seems like an obvious disanalogy. Unless you’re quite literally “exposing yourself” when you leave the house, you maintain a much greater degree of control over the degree of self-disclosure, if only because you maintain the ability to be forgotten and your thoughts and actions cannot be preserved in order to be monetized.
You disclose more than you know: the clothes you wear clothes indicate your income (shoes, handbags and any jewelry, etc.). Likewise when you get into your car, where you shop, not to mention where you live or work or go to school. I could go on but I think you get the point.
You’re right. But (for now), those things are seen mainly by those present, and not necessarily absorbed by the internet panopticon and used to turn your inner life into a consumer product. Therein lies the big difference I think.
And of course, using the internet is a choice, to a degree, as you say. One could disconnect. But the incentive structure of the world is such that this is… not easy. Also, the idea of consent is misleading in my opinion. There’s no easily accessible list of “things you are agreeing to by using the internet” - and I think most people are not necessarily aware of the extent to which they render themselves vulnerable in so doing. By contrast, embodied life in a real community is something we’ve been doing for long enough that we know what is and isn’t safe to do, generally speaking.
Finally, today’s Internet is monopolized by huge platforms that monetize you precisely by concealing the extent to which they invade your privacy and reinforce your dopamine driven use cycles. That can’t be said about normal body life.
There's also the factor that when you do check off access limits on some platform or software, the next upgrade conveniently "forgets" your preferences and changes those switches
My fundamental point is simply that privacy is limited at best and a myth at worst.
Agreed.
I’m enjoying this conversation, so I hope this doesn’t come across as haranguing or being unable to just let it go.
Anyways, how is it that something could be both limited and a myth? Without getting into some abstruse literary theory, it seems like it needs to be one or the other.
Maybe what that comment exposes is that there is some equivocation going on in this conversation with regards to the notion of “privacy“.
Maybe we can divide the notion of privacy into two types.
P1: the ability to completely conceal oneself from the world in which one lives.
P2: the ability to selectively disclose, or not, the details and dynamics of one’s inner life.
P1 is obviously a myth, as you say.
The “pain point” here is P2. The world of “The Machine”, to borrow from Paul Kingsnorth, egregiously violates P2, and, adding insult to injury, does it while monetizing every detail of our inner lives that it can extract from us. Turns us into a product, and what’s more, it does it under the veil of supposed “progress” and inevitability.
Keep at it. I believe he said privacy was EITHER a myth OR limited—not that it was both. I think he’s positing a spectrum, with one end representing TOTAL privacy and the other end total LACK of privacy (e.g., privacy is a myth). By my reading, he’s ruling out total privacy as nonexistent and saying either we have partial privacy or no privacy at all. The latter is the panopticon society where there is no escape from the prying eyes of others. (Think of this as Truman Burbank in THE TRUMAN SHOW. 24/7 TV cameras on him. Off-the-chart realization of a paranoiac’s worst fear.) The former says that sometimes we’re observed, and other times not.
When I was thinking about leaving New York City for my childhood Virginia, I told me boss that I wasn’t sure how much privacy was right for a child. I said that, l;Irving on 116th Street inNYC, my son could set fire to all the buildings on 115th Street, and I would never hear about it—no one would know him. But, I said, in Petersburg, VA, I never had any privacy. Anything I did got back to my parents. My boss said, “Bob, it just hasn’t hit you yet that you are now a parent. Eventually, you’ll realize that the optimal percentage of time when your son is under observation is 100%.”
My answer will sound like a cop out because how one person views this reality will really depend on whether they are evading reality or staying in focus. I don’t know how anyone could say that they have anonymity from their world which is what many people believe “privacy” means. So if you agree that privacy falls way short of anonymity, then you should agree that it’s really a myth. Now we could spend a lot of time harkening back to our childhoods (I’m 60) so I remember a much different world where not many people had any access to dynamic information. But I would still maintain that no one thought about their privacy in the way that we say we do today.
As an aside, I am among other things a retired lawyer who can remember when the courts used “privacy” in lieu of individual liberty to nullify intrusive laws. I believe that was the wrong rationale for protecting individual rights, but our courts constructed the myth of privacy to shield us from the coercive power of the state.
Yup
Yes. It's just a quantitative change--which becomes a qualitative change. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the Richmond Fed, where I worked at the time, became concerned about similar terrorist activities. At roughly that time, they were rolling out a new website. One of the senior managers was waxing rhapsodic about the fact that senior officials' photos would be online. I said that if they were so worried about security, they might want to omit the photos and limit some of the other info. The higher-up--who didn't typically listen to anyone else--rolled his eyes and said that they weren't posting anything that was already obtainable. If someone wanted to target an SVP, he said, they could come to the bank, get a brochure with the names, go to City Hall or DMV or newspapers at the library and dig up info on them, pictures, etc. etc. etc. I said that if someone with murderous intent has to go to all that trouble, they might just cool off and rethink what they were doing. The web info would allow such a person to act immediately and impulsively. He didn't see it my way.
I was correct in my warning. But my proposed solution would be obsolete within months, as info on the web exploded and rendered my privacy ideas moot. And. indeed, that particular fellow became the target of some hate groups at some point afterward. But, by that time, my idea of privacy was laughably obsolete.
That’s what I like about you. You have turned experience and knowledge into wisdom.
Thanks! I actually enjoy being proven wrong and admitting it publicly. I will soon have a post on Debbie Harry's upcoming 80th birthday--and how she has disproven a flippant comment that my wife or I made 45 years ago. Also, in my doctoral dissertation, I set out to prove a particular point and, after working through the math, found that the opposite was true. Nothing could have pleased me more.
Great. My wife might actually read it because she loves her music. I will definitely look forward to reading it as I enjoy all your writings. Thanks!
I also like your essay, but this may be intrusive. What was the plot point in My name is Asher Lev, that you were curious about. The reason being I am Orthodox and have a knowledge of his world. Or what he wants to portray.
Not intrusive at all, thanks. It has been 25 years or more, so you made me realize that I made a mistake in the essay. Our question was about The Chosen, not My Name Is Asher Lev. (We read both.) in the book, Reb Saunders raises his son in silence, except for studies. We asked Potok whether there is any factual or historic basis for such an action. He wrote back to say that he prefers to let his readers interpret his writings as they wish. We found his answer to be irritating, as we weren’t asking him to interpret anything. We were merely asking whether the practice he described was an artifice of his writing or whether such a custom existed in real-life. My family and I knew many in the Orthodox community, but not in the Hasidic community (until some years later).