How to be Alone. Jonathan Franzen

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      PRIVACY, privacy, the new American obsession: espoused as the most fundamental of rights, marketed as the most desirable of commodities, and pronounced dead twice a week.

      Even before Linda Tripp pressed the “Record” button on her answering machine, commentators were warning us that “privacy is under siege,” that “privacy is in a dreadful state,” that “privacy as we now know it may not exist in the year 2000.” They say that both Big Brother and his little brother, John Q. Public, are shadowing me through networks of computers. They tell me that security cameras no bigger than spiders are watching from every shaded corner, that dour feminists are monitoring bedroom behavior and watercooler conversations, that genetic sleuths can decoct my entire being from a droplet of saliva, that voyeurs can retrofit ordinary camcorders with a filter that lets them see through people’s clothing. Then comes the flood of dirty suds from the Office of the Independent Counsel, oozing forth through official and commercial channels to saturate the national consciousness. The Monica Lewinsky scandal marks, in the words of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, “the culmination of a disastrous erosion” of privacy; it represents, in the words of the author Wendy Kaminer, “the utter disregard for privacy and individual autonomy that exists in totalitarian regimes.” In the person of Kenneth Starr, the “public sphere” has finally overwhelmed—shredded, gored, trampled, invaded, run roughshod over—“the private.”

      The panic about privacy has all the finger-pointing and paranoia of a good old American scare, but it’s missing one vital ingredient: a genuinely alarmed public. Americans care about privacy mainly in the abstract. Sometimes a well-informed community unites to defend itself, as when Net users bombarded the White House with e-mails against the “clipper chip,” and sometimes an especially outrageous piece of news provokes a national outcry, as when the Lotus Development Corporation tried to market a CD-ROM containing financial profiles of nearly half the people in the country. By and large, though, even in the face of wholesale infringements like the war on drugs, Americans remain curiously passive. I’m no exception. I read the editorials and try to get excited, but I can’t. More often than not, I find myself feeling the opposite of what the privacy mavens want me to. It’s happened twice in the last month alone.

      On the Saturday morning when the Times came carrying the complete text of the Starr report, what I felt as I sat alone in my apartment and tried to eat my breakfast was that my own privacy—not Clinton’s, not Lewinsky’s—was being violated. I love the distant pageant of public life. I love both the pageantry and the distance. Now a President was facing impeachment, and as a good citizen I had a duty to stay informed about the evidence, but the evidence here consisted of two people’s groping, sucking, and mutual self-deception. What I felt, when this evidence landed beside my toast and coffee, wasn’t a pretend revulsion to camouflage a secret interest in the dirt; I wasn’t offended by the sex qua sex; I wasn’t worrying about a potential future erosion of my own rights; I didn’t feel the President’s pain in the empathic way he’d once claimed to feel mine; I wasn’t repelled by the revelation that public officials do bad things; and, although I’m a registered Democrat, my disgust was of a different order from my partisan disgust at the news that the Giants have blown a fourth-quarter lead. What I felt I felt personally. I was being intruded on.

      A couple of days later, I got a call from one of my credit-card providers, asking me to confirm two recent charges at a gas station and one at a hardware store. Queries like this are common nowadays, but this one was my first, and for a moment I felt eerily exposed. At the same time, I was perversely flattered that someone, somewhere, had taken an interest in me and had bothered to phone. Not that the young male operator seemed to care about me personally. He sounded like he was reading his lines from a laminated booklet. The strain of working hard at a job he almost certainly didn’t enjoy seemed to thicken his tongue. He tried to rush his words out, to speed through them as if in embarrassment or vexation at how nearly worthless they were, but they kept bunching up in his teeth, and he had to stop and extract them with his lips, one by one. It was the computer, he said, the computer that routinely, ah, scans the, you know, the pattern of charges … and was there something else he could help me with tonight? I decided that if this young person wanted to scroll through my charges and ponder the significance of my two fill-ups and my gallon of latex paint, I was fine with it.

      So here’s the problem. On the Saturday morning the Starr Report came out, my privacy was, in the classic liberal view, absolute. I was alone in my home and unobserved, unbothered by neighbors, unmentioned in the news, and perfectly free, if I chose, to ignore the report and do the pleasantly al dente Saturday crossword; yet the report’s mere existence so offended my sense of privacy that I could hardly bring myself to touch the thing. Two days later, I was disturbed in my home by a ringing phone, asked to cough up my mother’s maiden name, and made aware that the digitized minutiae of my daily life were being scrutinized by strangers; and within five minutes I’d put the entire episode out of my mind. I felt encroached on when I was ostensibly safe, and I felt safe when I was ostensibly encroached on. And I didn’t know why.

      THE RIGHT to privacy—defined by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, in 1890, as “the right to be let alone”—seems at first glance to be an elemental principle in American life. It’s the rallying cry of activists fighting for reproductive rights, against stalkers, for the right to die, against a national health-care database, for stronger data-encryption standards, against paparazzi, for the sanctity of employee e-mail, and against employee drug testing. On closer examination, though, privacy proves to be the Cheshire cat of values: not much substance, but a very winning smile.

      Legally, the concept is a mess. Privacy violation is the emotional core of many crimes, from stalking and rape to Peeping Tommery and trespass, but no criminal statute forbids it in the abstract. Civil law varies from state to state but generally follows a forty-year-old analysis by the legal scholar Dean William Prosser, who dissected the invasion of privacy into four torts: intrusion on my solitude, the publishing of private facts about me which are not of legitimate public concern, publicity that puts my character in a false light, and appropriation of my name or likeness without my consent. This is a crumbly set of torts. Intrusion looks a lot like criminal trespass, false light like defamation, and appropriation like theft; and the harm that remains when these extraneous offenses are subtracted is so admirably captured by the phrase “infliction of emotional distress” as to render the tort of privacy invasion all but superfluous. What really undergirds privacy is the classical liberal conception of personal autonomy or liberty. In the last few decades, many judges and scholars have chosen to speak of a “zone of privacy,” rather than a “sphere of liberty,” but this is a shift in emphasis, not in substance: not the making of a new doctrine but the repackaging and remarketing of an old one.

      Whatever you’re trying to sell, whether it’s luxury real estate or Esperanto lessons, it helps to have the smiling word “private” on your side. Last winter, as the owner of a Bank One Platinum Visa Card, I was offered enrollment in a program called PrivacyGuard^®, which, according to the literature promoting it, “puts you in the know about the very personal records available to your employer, insurers, credit card companies, and government agencies.” The first three months of PrivacyGuard^® were free, so I signed up. What came in the mail then was paperwork: envelopes and request forms for a Credit Record Search and other searches, also a disappointingly undeluxe logbook in which to jot down the search results. I realized immediately that I didn’t care enough about, say, my driving records to wait a month to get them; it was only when I called PrivacyGuard^® to cancel my membership, and was all but begged not to, that I realized that the whole point of this “service” was to harness my time and energy to the task of reducing Bank One Visa’s fraud losses.

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