A Self Coerced into Permanent Transparency
By Prof. Joshua Cohen,
Goldsmiths, Univ. of London
I want to argue that the political
stakes of the privacy debate are as much imaginative as they are legal. The case
for the right to privacy cannot rest solely on the demand for legal control and
ownership of one’s data. The various and intersecting intrusions of state,
corporations and the media impinge not only on externally verifiable aspects of
my privacy – the insides of my home, bank account or computer, say – but on the
more elusive and opaque privacy of my inner life.
A self coerced into permanent
transparency, will come to feel constrained not only in what she can say, but
in what she can think and imagine. A surveillance society – not only the
persecutory monitoring of the Orwellian state, but the more tacitly imposed,
mutual monitoring of social media culture – impinges on the interior space of
affect and imagination which ensures I can never be fully transparent to others
or to myself.
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