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Technology, specifically the Web, is a grand theodicy of the early 21st century. In the face of evil and societal failures it gives birth to new identities— souls— for individuals, nurtures the ever so important Libertarian freewill, grants such individuals the power to do great evil, and recognizes postmodern natural laws— a stable ‘natural’ medium/experience of the world from the level of computer code and network protocols to human institutions such as Facebook®.
The omnipresent Web monitors prisoners on parole, notifies neighbors of sexual predators, and tracks children to ensure they don’t wander from where they are supposed to be. The Web finds our pets if they are lost and can tell us if a partner strays. It is a global oracle. It is omniscient. All of human knowledge circulates through its networks and servers as blood flows through our veins and organs. We sacrifice our time to the altars of our laptops and smart phones, and the answers that we want glow before us as if they were the golden halos of angels past.
The evil in the confines of our worlds has been fractured into slivers of darkness; It is no longer a force of darkness battling for our souls. We no longer embody that protestant work ethic to keep evil at bay. That spiritual practice has been replaced with the ethic of the Web. Our practices are intended to keep the specters of evil, those slivers of darkness like inconvenience and boredom, at bay.
In a country in which faith in g[]d and faith in capitalism are cloaked in the same vestment of liberalism, the Christian is a consumer and the promised technological society conflate’s Augustine’s City of Man into his City of God. We have to look no further than the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the President’s call, the very next day, to shop— to keep our economy strong. The attack of evil was an attack on capitalism. Evil no longer the tempts the flesh, evil is that which threatens our materialism. Our City of God is populated with those who do not foresake the sacred rites of property ownership the aesthetic of individualism.
The Web knows you and remembers you. It suggests things that you will like and hides those you will not. It keeps you from speeding on the highway, and hides from you people you hate. It reminds you to keep in touch with family and friends and can always find the best price on what you need to buy. The Commandments that that once promised to make a people righteous have been updated and are now embedded in the technology that mediates our world. Online feedback explaining why something was great or didn’t work are the prayers of today and are answered with the promise that a future release will improve the good and fix the wrong. Comments on the Huffington Post and Fox News are the proclamations of contemporary Pharisees & Sadducees manifested in a power contest between pragmatism and ideology.
Further, consider this recent (1/9/10) quote from Mark Zuckerberg, “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.” He goes on to say that privacy will soon be a term of the past. If privacy is gone and life is increasingly lived in a ‘public’ that is mediated by the Web, what becomes the role of government? In this time, is not using Facebook®, OnStar®, Sirrius®, Blackboard®, or a Blackberry® blasphemy? Does ® now signify the sacred — rites of devotion, passage, and worship? Are we entering into a technological theocracy in which ideology reigns and reasoned discourse is dissidence?
I find it interesting that Mr. Zuckerberg thinks that “privacy will soon be a term of the past.” For those who voluntarily participate and “give up” their privacy through mediums like Facebook, it could be argued that they never really had privacy to begin with. Privacy, like safety (and terrorism, for that matter) are simply states of mind; you can only have them if you believe that you have them. Thus, privacy is not necessarily a social norm that can be removed through participation in a system. Rather, the “devolution of privacy” might simply be the degree to which we consider something to be private, that is shifting.
I suppose David Farmer might say that what is happening is that we need to think of a new term for what the symbol of privacy now means; applied through social (or technological) evolution. In this sense, it may, as Jeff says, “give birth to new identities” and thus what was once considered private is now simply considered a constituent of a new identity created in a world where privacy may hold little meaning.
…or different meaning.
It is interesting that the ‘private’ in privacy today is more associated with liberalism than psychology. Consider the definition from Webster’s 1878 Dictionary of the English language:
1 A state of retirement
2 A place of seclusion; retreat
3 Concealment; secresy
Compared to today (New Oxford American Dictionary 2nd edition):
1 the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people
2 the state of being free from public attention
In the contemporary definition the state, or condition, of being free lends itself nicely to the Libertarian world view of Zuckerberg. Privacy is about being free and not being human. It is political and not existential and such is contingent upon the state. If we consider the hollowing out of the state, the privatization of the state, we see that privacy hasn’t devolved— it has been privatized and the distribution of privacy is now determined by the market compared to guaranteed by the state.
In this, we have sacrificed our privacy to the Web to achieve a lifestyle of convenience and immediacy only known to past generations by the wealthy. Ironically, today the wealthy now enjoy the privacy that we once took for granted and can no longer afford.
That which remains psychologically private… does it remain so only because it has not yet been commodified or because it is not able to become a commodity? What of our self could become a commodity but poses too great a risk, removes something ‘core’ to our personhood?