This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Always On
In 1984, the pervasive, intrusive technology could be turned off:
As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
“You can turn it off!” he said.
“Yes,” said O’Brien, “we can turn it off. We have that privilege.…Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.”
Sometimes we can still turn it off today—and should. But mostly we don’t want to. We don’t want to be alone; we want to be connected. We find it convenient to leave it on, to leave our footprints and fingerprints everywhere, so we will be recognized when we come back. We don’t want to have to keep retyping our name and address when we return to a website. We like it when the restaurant remembers our name, perhaps because our phone number showed up on caller ID and is linked to our record in their database. We appreciate buying grapes for $1.95/lb instead of $3.49, just by letting the store know that we bought them. We may want to leave it on for ourselves because we know it is on for criminals. Being watched reminds us that they are watched as well. Being watched also means we are being watched over.
And perhaps we don’t care that so much is known about us because that is the way human society used to be: In kinship groups and small settlements, knowing everything about everyone else was a matter of survival. Having it on all the time may resonate with inborn preferences we acquired millennia ago, before urban life made anonymity possible. Still, today, privacy means something very different in a small rural town than it does on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
We cannot know what the cost will be of having it on all the time. Just as troubling as the threat of authoritarian measures to restrict personal liberty is the threat of voluntary conformity. As Fano astutely observed, privacy allows limited social experimentation—the deviations from social norms that are much riskier to the individual in the glare of public exposure, but which can be, and often have been in the past, the leading edges of progressive social changes. With it always on, we may prefer not to try anything unconventional and stagnate socially by collective inaction.
For the most part, it is too late, realistically, ever to turn it off. We may once have had the privilege of turning it off, but we have that privilege no more. We have to solve our privacy problems another way.
The digital explosion is shattering old assumptions about who knows what. Bits move quickly, cheaply, and in multiple perfect copies. Information that used to be public in principle—for example, records in a courthouse, the price you paid for your house, or stories in a small-town newspaper—is now available to everyone in the world. Information that used to be private and available to almost no one—medical records and personal snapshots, for example—can become equally widespread through carelessness or malice. The norms and business practices and laws of society have not caught up to the change.