Aporia

The exteriorization of our private lives in the Internet age is often treated as a kind of sui generis media development, as though before we began confessing ourselves online the sanctity of the inner self had yet to be violated. This isn’t the case, of course; to whatever extent the erosion of privacy has not always proceeded apace with the increasing density, democracy, and communality of civilization, to whatever extent it’s been a modern phenomenon, it is not the Internet which has brought it about so much as media which reproduce immediate, unplanned human behavior. That is: it is radio and television, which bring into roughly real-time the presentation of a self to many millions, that have shifted our sense of privacy. It is the technology of the 20th century.

They have done so, I think, by displaying spontaneous human reaction and behavior with extraordinary fidelity. Even the realism of literature subordinates accuracy to larger aesthetic concerns, whereas mass electronic media bring us nearer to witnessing humans as they are than was previously possible. This has, among others, the effect of permitting us to judge not just acts but also subjective states in others, as we perceive them; that is, we judge not only deeds –though those too- but also selves, and selves out of their normal, local context.

Milan Kundera recounted, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a clever method used by the secret police to disgrace a beloved dissident: they played tapes on the radio of his personal conversations, captured by listening devices in his apartment:

“…the Czech radio broadcast a series of private talks between Prochazka and a professor friend of his which had taken place two years before… For a long time, neither of them had any idea that the professor’s flat was bugged and their every step dogged. Prochazka loved to regale his friends with hyperbole and excess. Now his excesses had become a weekly radio series. The secret police, who produced and directed the show, took pains to emphasize the sequences in which Prochazka made fun of his friends… People slander their friends at the drop of a hat, but they were more shocked by the much-loved Prochazka than the much-hated secret police.”

Of course, we all “regale our friends with hyperbole and excess”; we all make fun of our friends, saying impolitic things, exaggerating, telling joking lies, blustering, bluffing, and violating basic moral precepts in order to amuse, shock, and enjoy ourselves. Conversational transgressions are utterly universal; who hasn’t joked about sharing with the world a chat, a text, a quote, with the knowledge that what was ordinary amusement would in the public sphere be grounds for mass condemnation?

Years ago, the joke was: I’ll sell this to a newspaper if you run for public office! Now it is: I’ll post this to the Internet and you’ll lose all your ‘friends’! But the point is the same: I will take what was fluidly, immediately provocative and amusing but indefensible from a larger, static context, and put it in that context, then watch as the world judges and demands shame.

But why should the we judge that way? Don’t we understand the importance of privacy? No, and we understand it less every year. We now take it to mean a state information can happen to be in, as though what is private is like a photograph we can place in a drawer or put on the mantle. In fact, privacy ought to refer to a category of information that cannot be understood publicly: a shared remark between a couple that will make no sense to anyone else.

The importance of privacy will be forgotten soon enough, but it is not solely because of phenomena like the Internet; they enable the decontextualization of our utterances and deeds, but they are used for that purpose because privacy no longer accords with our society. We are both progressive and puritanical enough that we cannot restrain ourselves from taking all behavior into the public sphere and judging it:

1. The rebellious, liberated, progressive America wants to know what you’ve joked about, what offensive remarks you’ve permitted yourself in moments of laughter, of wrath, of superficiality. Your reactionary self is revealed in humor and sex and taste; you are not entitled to privacy because only someone with something to hide wants it. Shame is an element of repressive moral strictures you must abandon; shame is itself something to be ashamed of.

2. The puritanical, religious America wants to know whom you’ve slept with, whether you really went to your house of worship, whom you’ve read and associated with, all the small ways in which you differ from their paradigm. Your depraved self is revealed in humor and sex and taste; you are not entitled to privacy because only someone with something to hide wants it. You are concealing your immorality, your deviancy, your sin. Shame is proof of guilt.

And the rest of us feel that anyone in the public sphere, in exchange for the putative benefits of fame -which are amorphous but include elevation into the only remaining pantheon: that of celebrity- loses their right to privacy. It is a transaction like any other, we maintain. How do we know someone has made this exchange? Anyone in the public sphere is deemed to have consented a priori; thus: should you find your texts in a newspaper, you deserve to have your texts in the newspaper.

It’s worth asking: if one has nothing to hide, why is privacy important? If one were ‘liberated’ and not abashed because of ‘outmoded, patriarchal systems’, would one need it? If one were moral, true to one’s professed ‘compass’, honest, would one need it? How could one defend a right to privacy as anything more than a preference, as anything more than a habit, or worse: as a cover for the immoral? Another way of asking this: what would your hero have kept private, what would Jesus or Marx or whomever have wanted concealed?

One answer is that humans know that they have not one self but many, not one morality but many. What they say to their lovers comes from another self than does what they say to their bosses, and what they say in mirth or anger cannot be fairly subjected to public analysis freed from original provocations. When I read the texts of an athlete, I wonder: how easily might I excerpt something from our daily profanities, tantrums, whispers to put online and engender universal judgment?

Perhaps I couldn’t: perhaps many of us have interiorized the view of reality television and rehabilitative documentaries and feel that all behavior is permissible so long as its spoken to an audience. Perhaps some have overcome shame! Overcoming shame is overcoming the need for privacy, since shame is what one experiences when one self is exposed in another self’s context.

(Even now, shame has been largely deprecated: it is a burdensome and incriminating sensation, and, like the idea of privacy, waning. This is why it is now customary to insist one feels no shame: since it is proof of guilt it is proof of one’s reactionary stodginess -guilt is old-fashioned, too- and is to be as hotly denied as any deed).

For the rest of us, though, to avoid shame we practice the lies of privacy, present one face to the world and another to our lover or friends: this is deceit, concealment. But if to pursue what in the 1960s was viewed as a ‘revolutionary honesty’ we discard shame, we abandon a basic moral force of extreme utility. We achieve an culture that honestly understands itself at last: simultaneously shameless and judgmental, exhibitionistic and puritanical, the precise unification of amorality and prudishness we see across our media today.