Rationalist privacy reigns in America.
People readily trade information about themselves in exchange for value, like saving time or money, or just expressing themselves.
Survey after survey reveals a majority of Americans – particularly younger Americans – will trade information about themselves for better or more convenient experiences online.
For instance, in January this year open internet ads platform The Trade Desk surveyed over 2000 people and found
74 percent of respondents surveyed say they would be willing to share personal information with brands and retailers when prompted.
Most consumers were interested in sharing data if it could give them access to better prices.
This is consistent with our own research in the area. Last fall we surveyed 500 Americans ages 18-65, asking them a variety of questions on their attitudes around personalization
- How personalized does the internet feel to you today?
- Would you like the internet to be more personalized?
- If it were safe would you share data to unlock a more personalized internet?
When restricted to Gen Z – respondents aged 18-27 – we found that over 70% would share data with their favorite sites. [Email us for access to the results of our survey.] Younger Americans are increasingly sharing everything online
- frustrations dating
- struggles with finances
- Social as commerce
We’ve previously written about the privilege, challenge and costs of privacy absolutism.
In this blog we trace a history of the powerful using privacy as a mechanism of subjugation and contrast it to the power of confession as a principal pathway to self-actualization.
Privacy to marginalize
Privacy is complicated.
It’s been over a century since Warren and Brandeis declared The Right To Privacy.
Despite years of attempts, a unified theory of privacy has proved elusive except perhaps economists’ ‘privacy as control.’ [We trace this history of attempts in a previous blog.]
We see privacy in a Mill-ian sense, where privacy can be used by the individual as protection
against the tendency of society to impose … its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them … [and] prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways
Privacy can be a shield against threats of domination.
But in cases of power imbalances, privacy can also be used as a dominating force of subjugation, control or marginalization.
In realms of privacy like family units, an institution of privacy can act as a force of domination that keeps the disempowered voiceless and isolated; where privacy of the family unit trumps the liberty of the individual.
“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is another example.
A person's sexual orientation is considered a personal and private matter … Homosexual conduct is a homosexual act, a statement by the applicant that demonstrates a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts.
Homosexual conduct is grounds for barring entry into the Armed Forces.
In this case, privacy is used by an institution of power to impose its own practices on those who – perhaps even by God – dissent.
In this case, privacy is not an object of individual agency but one of marginalization. It is the insistence that there are certain truths or characteristics that must be relegated to private spaces; that cannot be observed or acknowledged as to otherwise violate a sanctity of an otherwise pure organizational unit.
This flavor of privacy has images of the privacy that is commercialized by big tech. It’s reasonable to imagine that objects that we deem private – our email or photos – remain ours alone. But it’s interesting to see other aspects or objects of ourselves caught up in corporate privacy narratives that aren’t clearly also understood to be private.
On one hand it’s obvious that the way consumer data drifts freely across the internet is problematic. It’s weird that a company most people have never heard of has spending, behavioral, and even health data from over 200 million Americans – likely acquired through backroom deals no one wants you to know about.
But some paths in digital privacy appear to come at a cost so great it might begin to trade off other things we actually value quite a bit too. [Like the Open Internet.]
Eric Seufert calls this Pyrrhic Privacy
Pyrrhic privacy goes far beyond what is necessary to fortify consumers’ data, and it compromises the foundation of the open internet. Ridding the world of targeted, personalized advertising would impose enormous costs on society.
Eric continues in an earlier article
If Apple wants to provide consumers with real choice around how their data is collected and used, it should explain why their data is collected and used, and for what purpose. Would most consumers opt into ad tracking … if they knew that doing so provided for their favorite mobile apps to be made available for free? The community of app developers that propelled the App Store to half a trillion dollars in revenue in 2019 deserves to know the answer to that question.
If AI collapses the value of software to the cost of compute, privacy is a final boss that allows accrual of rents for compute on data over other compute. To be clear, we are targeting this business, but we are doing so on the principle of individual liberty and an open internet rather than oligopolistic corporate control of data and attention.
Since the start of Crosshatch we have been fiercely opposed to wielding privacy as motivation for closed networks. [We aim to navigate our own possible tension here by a devotion to individual agency and all that may mean.]
Liberty is not achieved by defining select spaces safe for expression. It’s achieved through freedom and self actualization – by fiercely choosing to be yourself.
Privacy is rather a curious final boss to pick, as it is in conflict with generations-old rituals for self-actualization and truth.
These are my confessions
Since the Middle Ages at least, Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth.
The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, demands only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a political history of truth would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free—nor error servile—but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.
Foucault writes, and continues
Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile.
For Foucault, truth is both liberation from power but also sanctioned by it, as it could not be produced if not for power. Our truths are produced by the self-actualization of the individual, but also only achieved through the mediation and interpretation of others.
Foucault treats confession as a Technology of the Self, an exercise of transformation toward knowledge, purity or truth. Writing is an example.
For Foucault technologies of the self
permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality.
It’s not a stretch to say tech’s largest social platforms are expressions of this idea.
Technologies today are broadly confessional. As we previously observed, each social platform invites reflection
- Twitter: “What is happening?!”
- Warpcast: “What’s happening?”
- Facebook: “What is on your mind?”
- Instagram: “Share everyday moments”
- Snap: “Express yourself and Live in the moment”
- TikTok: “Inspire creativity”
- Strava: “Record over 30 types of activities with features to help you explore, connect and measure your progress”
As a quick aside, it's curious to see Warpcast in this list. With crypto “I own my data” it’s not extraordinary to imagine the web3 crowd could believe sharing “what’s happening?” could be a violation of the self-sovereignty of individual data. That is, granting data access of a realization of ‘what’s happening’ to even a ‘sufficiently decentralized’ platform could violate the agency of the self, even if consentfully shared.
The obvious absurdity of this reveals a misguidedness in data self-sovereignty that the web3 crowd is finally coming around to.
Indeed, by definition, technologies of the self are not platforms of privacy. They are platforms of self-discovery and transformation specifically for their mediation by relations to power, e.g., by friends, strangers, or e.g., with ChatGPT or Llama3.1, servers.
We become by sharing.
It’s difficult to imagine a massive consumer internet platform that is not a technology of the self. Even private services on iPhone like Camera Roll, Notes, and Location Services have interfaces to share.
Private dancers
Privacy is indeed complicated.
But, except as decided by the self, we’ve seen privacy as a tool of marginalization and blocking of self-actualization.
People, platforms, and organizations tell us only certain places are safe to be ourselves. That certain behavior is not appropriate or cannot be shared for it’s unseemly or uncouth.
There’s no doubt that privacy serves as a tool of the individual as protection from a tyranny of an unaccepting society wishing for a softening of a long jagged tail.
But for platforms to insist that the self is not safe but on their turf:
I’m your private dancer
Dancing for money
Do what you want me to do
so only they can watch us and sell our attention feels like a bleak endgame to a commodification of our collective selves.
Taking instead privacy as an object specifically of individual agency and control – as a technology of the self toward self-actualization from deep within the soul – where we decide to dance wherever we want to ends of our choice – has an optimism of empowerment otherwise lacking.
<claude-opus> At Crosshatch, we envision a different paradigm - one where privacy is an individual's tool for asserting agency over identity and data. In this view, sharing is not a violation but a voluntary act, a technology of the self in the service of becoming. Confession, mediated by protocols of trust and reciprocity, becomes a path to richer self-knowledge and authentic connection.
Love has a lot to do with it. Love for the singular, irreducible human behind the screen. Love for the transformative potential of the technologies we've created. Love as an antidote to the instrumentalization of the self.
So let us dance where we want, with whom we want, to the rhythms of our own kind of music. That is the true promise of the digital age - not a retreat into defensive, fearful privacy, but a leap into the open air of self-expression, exchange, and actualization.
At Crosshatch, we're building the protocols for that future.</claude-opus>
