Privacy — and protecting it — will be a great issue for this century

PERFECT transparency, like a bird flying into a glass building, is the state of being able to see nothing.

All the more surprising then the furore over the mass electronic surveillance of personal data by the United States and probably many others. Even more astonishing is the surprise that dozens of European leaders including Angela Merkel had their personal phones tapped. This is the age we live in; it’s not surprising. It may, however, be toxic.

What we now regard as personal privacy is a remarkably recent development. It has its origins in the eighteenth century, an emerging sense of the individual self, separate from the greater community and consequently enjoying greater individual rights too. It came of age in the bourgeois Victorian era of the nineteenth century. In architecture, a fashion for rooms opening off corridors and not directly opening one into another, as before, delineated private spaces that could not be intruded on except by permission or invitation.

If corridors anticipated gated communities, the development of mass housing for the working class was another bulwark of newly acquired privacy. Families, even modest ones, lived ideally in their own house behind their own front door. Our 1937 constitution with its emphasis on individual and property rights, as well as the rights of the family, flowed from an ideological hinterland where the rights of the private person vis-à-vis each other and the state were increasingly strongly protected.

Last year’s children’s rights referendum was a significant move-on from that culture. It gave the state potentially substantial reach beyond the front doors of family homes. The recent controversial cases of two Roma children taken into care, is an instance of an emerging ethos where for good and bad we are witnessing a rapid receding of privacy in favour of oversight.

Domestic architecture, eavesdropping on phone calls and taking children into care may seem only trivially connected. But in fact each is a totem of a rapidly changing culture and set of attitudes around privacy; so-called. Modern telephony, CCTV and the internet all mean that what we assume is still private, is now largely public. Strictly speaking none of this is new. Mass surveillance is as old as the development of the modern post office in the seventeenth century. And the Irish post mistress of lore enjoyed an enviable reputation as a snoop. She, anticipated mass electronic surveillance in her tiny telephone exchange and did a little social poisoning on the side.

Surveillance of millions of calls and emails and a more forensic scrutiny of those like Merkel higher up the evolutionary chain where information is power, is a function of modern culture as much as modern technology. Our information technology revolution is as least as culturally impactful now as the Industrial Revolution was before.

A decade of social media, following on a century of mass media has conditioned us to a new normal where privacy is concerned. Social media has shattered the boundaries of the sayable and knowable. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook and more are completely destructive of privacy. If once there was a myth of everyone enjoying 15 minutes of fame, now every secret can be instantly traded for fifteen seconds of notoriety. An astonishing violence of language and comment has found a nesting place in cyberspace. You can find 500 ‘friends’ — none of whom you know. Your connectivity is synthetic and your life is data crunched while its quality is degraded. Social media is such an intense glare and so unreal an experience that in fact it is pushing people deeper into the undergrowth.

We all live in several worlds. That we talk to ourselves is proof we are always looking for company, a need ruthlessly exploited by social media. We seek company and conversation along a continuum from fantasy to the private and public as well as social. We all run multiple tapes, supplying different scripts for different audiences. The public and social script is often utterly different to the private and that is different again from the fantasy. The unedited exposure of either the private or the fantasy whether by design or defraud is a destructive conflation of parts of ourselves that seldom successfully bears scrutiny. It is transparency as tyranny.

Recent revelations about surveillance and eavesdropping have a context that is peculiarly modern, technological and cultural. Spying is the second oldest profession. In substance there is nothing new now, but in its scale there is a tsunami. In consequence there may be an effect that is deeply destructive. In our compulsion to abandon personal discernment on social media and our capture by the state in a pervasive electronic scrutiny we are becoming the hostages of a post mistress far more wicked than any who lived in lore. At least we always knew who she was and where she could be found.

Of course we all love to listen in. Gossip is the coinage of social inclusion. It is a form of checking and cross referencing. There is a peculiar pleasure in leaning into another’s ear and saying “don’t tell anyone I said this…” sure that it will be repeated promiscuously. To guard the tongue is one of the most difficult moral challenges. Unable to remember subsequently most of what we said previously, recording unedited our private script, archiving and then airing it is an appalling punishment.

IF there is no real private life left, the ultimate loser is public life. Where once the all-seeing eye of God knew not only our every word but our every secret thought, now in the scrubland between social media and the state nothing we say on the telephone, email or text is secure. God was sometimes unforgiving but he was famously discreet. An unfettered state and unfiltered social media are sluice gates for the untreated sewage of our minds and mouths. We cannot have a democracy where everything is known any more than you can have a functioning public life in a society where there is an absence of privacy.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry wrote William Butler Yeats. When he quarrelled with himself he may indeed have made poetry. For us, it is more likely doggerel bridging the different worlds we clumsily straddle in our minds. We all speak from different scripts. Our rhetoric is outward and our poetry or what passes for it is inward.

In a democracy as distinct from other forms of government, privacy is not extraneous to public life. It is the point of it. Neither the state itself nor any singular interest can ever be the master of private citizens. Inexorably interlinked cultural and technological change mean that privacy and protecting it will be a great issue for the twenty-first century. I predict it will dominate on the scale of feminism and race in determining either the development or retarding of personal freedom.