Re: The End of Privacy ?
dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Tue, 30 Jun 1998 12:10:19 -0700 (PDT)
Isn't part of the problem with privacy debates that they rely on a
private/public distinction (resonating with the image of the "individual"
confronting the "state") that is getting creaky with age? What does
privacy mean in the first place when we're talking about hive minds and
globe-girdling competing PPLs? It does seem that surveillance is only
getting more powerful and more ubiquitous. If that is the case, we may be
able to preserve functional privacy only by multiplying the perspectives
from which we are monitored. We are in a sense veiled when we
are multiply surveilled, precisely because the institutions and
individuals that track us are all *interested* ones and so too their
perspectives will be interested. In other words, "privacy" may come to
mean a space of interpretive indeterminacy produced by the collision of
indefinitely many competing institutional interpreters. Best, Dale