How to be Alone. Jonathan Franzen

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СКАЧАТЬ unwanted exposure or intrusion. A proposed national Genetic Privacy Act, for example, is premised on the idea that my DNA reveals more about my identity and future health than other medical data do. In fact, DNA is as yet no more intimately revealing than a heart murmur, a family history of diabetes, or an inordinate fondness for Buffalo chicken wings. As with any medical records, the potential for abuse of genetic information by employers and insurers is chilling, but this is only tangentially a privacy issue; the primary harm consists of things like job discrimination and higher insurance premiums.

      In a similar way, the problem of online security is mainly about nuts and bolts. What American activists call “electronic privacy” their European counterparts call “data protection.” Our term is exciting; theirs is accurate. If someone is out to steal your Amex number and expiration date, or if an evil ex-boyfriend is looking for your new address, you need the kind of hard-core secrecy that encryption seeks to guarantee. If you’re talking to a friend on the phone, however, you need only a feeling of privacy.

      The social drama of data protection goes something like this: a hacker or an insurance company or a telemarketer gains access to a sensitive database, public-interest watchdogs bark loudly, and new firewalls go up. Just as most people are moderately afraid of germs but leave virology to the Centers for Disease Control, most Americans take a reasonable interest in privacy issues but leave the serious custodial work to experts. Our problem now is that the custodians have started speaking a language of panic and treating privacy not as one of many competing values but as the one value that trumps all others.

      The novelist Richard Powers recently declared in a Times op-ed piece that privacy is a “vanishing illusion” and that the struggle over the encryption of digital communications is therefore as “great with consequence” as the Cold War. Powers defines “the private” as “that part of life that goes unregistered,” and he sees in the digital footprints we leave whenever we charge things the approach of “that moment when each person’s every living day will become a Bloomsday, recorded in complete detail and reproducible with a few deft keystrokes.” It is scary, of course, to think that the mystery of our identities might be reducible to finite data sequences. That Powers can seriously compare credit-card fraud and intercepted cell-phone calls to thermonuclear incineration, however, speaks mainly to the infectiousness of privacy panic. Where, after all, is it “registered” what Powers or anybody else is thinking, seeing, saying, wishing, planning, dreaming, and feeling ashamed of? A digital Ulysses consisting of nothing but a list of its hero’s purchases and other recordable transactions might run, at most, to four pages: was there really nothing more to Bloom’s day?

      When Americans do genuinely sacrifice privacy, moreover, they do so for tangible gains in health or safety or efficiency. Most legalized infringements—HIV notification, airport X-rays, Megan’s Law, Breathalyzer roadblocks, the drug-testing of student athletes, laws protecting fetuses, laws protecting the vegetative, remote monitoring of automobile emissions, county-jail strip searches, even Ken Starr’s exposure of presidential corruption—are essentially public health measures. I resent the security cameras in Washington Square, but I appreciate the ones on a subway platform. The risk that someone is abusing my E-ZPass toll records seems to me comfortably low in comparison with my gain in convenience. Ditto the risk that some gossip rag will make me a victim of the First Amendment; with two hundred and seventy million people in the country, any individual’s chances of being nationally exposed are next to nil.

      The legal scholar Lawrence Lessig has characterized Americans as “bovine” for making calculations like this and for thereby acquiescing in what he calls the “Sovietization” of personal life. The curious thing about privacy, though, is that simply by expecting it we can usually achieve it. One of my neighbors in the apartment building across the street spends a lot of time at her mirror examining her pores, and I can see her doing it, just as she can undoubtedly see me sometimes. But our respective privacies remain intact as long as neither of us feels seen. When I send a postcard through the U.S. mail, I’m aware in the abstract that mail handlers may be reading it, may be reading it aloud, may even be laughing at it, but I’m safe from all harm unless, by sheer bad luck, the one handler in the country whom I actually know sees the postcard and slaps his forehead and says, “Oh, jeez, I know this guy.”

      OUR PRIVACY panic isn’t merely exaggerated. It’s founded on a fallacy. Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, in The Right to Privacy, sum up the conventional wisdom of privacy advocates like this: “There is less privacy than there used to be.” The claim has been made or implied so often, in so many books and editorials and talk-show dens, that Americans, no matter how passive they are in their behavior, now dutifully tell pollsters that they’re very much worried about privacy. From almost any historical perspective, however, the claim seems bizarre.

      In 1890, an American typically lived in a small town under conditions of near-panoptical surveillance. Not only did his every purchase “register,” but it registered in the eyes and the memory of shopkeepers who knew him, his parents, his wife, and his children. He couldn’t so much as walk to the post office without having his movements tracked and analyzed by neighbors. Probably he grew up sleeping in the same bed with his siblings and possibly with his parents, too. Unless he was well off, his transportation—a train, a horse, his own two feet—either was communal or exposed him to the public eye.

      In the suburbs and exurbs where the typical American lives today, tiny nuclear families inhabit enormous houses, in which each person has his or her own bedroom and, sometimes, bathroom. Compared even with suburbs in the sixties and seventies, when I was growing up, the contemporary condominium development or gated community offers a striking degree of anonymity. It’s no longer the rule that you know your neighbors. Communities increasingly tend to be virtual, the participants either faceless or firmly in control of the face they present. Transportation is largely private: the latest SUVs are the size of living rooms and come with onboard telephones, CD players, and TV screens; behind the tinted windows of one of these high-riding I-see-you-but-you-can’t-see-me mobile PrivacyGuard® units, a person can be wearing pajamas or a licorice bikini, for all anybody knows or cares. Maybe the government intrudes on the family a little more than it did a hundred years ago (social workers look in on the old and the poor, health officials require inoculations, the police inquire about spousal battery), but these intrusions don’t begin to make up for the small-town snooping they’ve replaced.

      The “right to be left alone”? Far from disappearing, it’s exploding. It’s the essence of modern American architecture, landscape, transportation, communication, and mainstream political philosophy. The real reason that Americans are apathetic about privacy is so big as to be almost invisible: we’re flat-out drowning in privacy.

      What’s threatened, then, isn’t the private sphere. It’s the public sphere. Much has been made of the discouraging effect that the Starr investigation may have on future aspirants to public office (only zealots and zeros need apply), but that’s just half of it. The public world of Washington, because it’s public, belongs to everyone. We’re all invited to participate with our votes, our patriotism, our campaigning, and our opinions. The collective weight of a population makes possible our faith in the public world as something larger and more enduring and more dignified than any messy individual can be in private. But, just as one sniper in a church tower can keep the streets of an entire town empty, one real grossout scandal can undermine that faith.

      If privacy depends upon an expectation of invisibility, the expectation of visibility is what defines a public space. My “sense of privacy” functions to keep the public out of the private and to keep the private out of the public. A kind of mental Border collie yelps in distress when I feel that the line between the two has been breached. This is why the violation of a public space is so similar, as an experience, to the violation of privacy. I walk past a man taking a leak on a sidewalk in broad daylight (delivery-truck drivers can be especially self-righteous in their “Ya gotta go, ya gotta go” philosophy of bladder management), and although the man with the yawning fly is ostensibly the one whose privacy СКАЧАТЬ