The Naked Society. Vance Packard

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      The release of The Naked Society was a publishing event: full-page ads everywhere (“VANCE PACKARD ROCKS THE NATION WITH HIS MOST EXPLOSIVE BOOK YET!”); fawning, long reviews in papers like the Wall Street Journal (“We are farther down a dangerous road than it is pleasant to think about...”) and the Washington Post (“The number or people who ‘have a little list’ on which you may find yourself is astonishing”); attention by top columnists booming its themes in magazines and on the editorial pages (Stewart Alsop launched a major exposé on polygraphs, for example, in the Saturday Evening Post).³¹ Many reviewed it alongside another, similar book The Privacy Invaders by a former private investigator. The essays also frequently referred to the fact that 1964 was but twenty years before George Orwell’s 1984.

      What comes across most forcefully from both the book and those reviews is how many revelations were judged outrageous by Americans that are almost entirely taken for granted today. Packard was horrified by a Manhattan district attorney who opined on network television “in favor of an astonishing bill being submitted to the New York State legislature. It gives a policeman who is armed with a search warrant the right to enter a premises, including a home, without saying who he is or what he is doing there.” That is to say, he was horrified at just the thought of a prosecutor suggesting such a law. Imagine his shock if he could learn that, according to Profesor Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, the number of such real-world “no-knock” arrest warrants incrased from 3,000 in 1981 to 50,000 in 2005. I asked Professor Kraska if he could help me find more recent statistics. “No,” he answered, “unfortunately no one keeps track of this.”³² According to the Cato Institute, forty people have been killed in no-knock raids.³³ No one gives a good goddamn.

      Nor do we care much about what Packard calls “the Lively Trade in Facts About Us”—the intrusive collection and sale of mailing lists about what we consume, for instance—or that, “Each month more and more information about individuals is being stored away in some giant memory machine.” The “progressive” candidate Barack Obama built his 2012 reelection campaign collecting just such “micro-targeting” information about voters, to no objection I can find—just celebration of its technological glories.³⁴ Packard was taken aback that, in a survey of 400 companies that check on the health of executives (an intrusion he found offensive in itself) “only one firm in ten permitted the executive to go to a doctor or clinic of his own choice.” (No HMOs in 1964.) Other offenses then that don’t register now: the 35 percent of former FBI agents working in investigation or security, spying on school bathrooms to avoid vandalism, the biographical X-rays people have to submit to for federal employment, “Washington’s Version of ‘This Is Your Life’”—still in effect: a friend of mine, for a minor job with the Parks Service had to submit a list of five people who had known him for at least ten years, complete with phone numbers. “I almost,” he told me, “had to make people up.”

      When people learned about this kind of stuff in 1964, they began indignant. Though, in fact, not nearly enough for the New York Times Book Review’s critic who found “a woefully common lack of indignation on the part of the bugged.” He also quoted the American Civil Liberties Union: “A hallmark of totalitarian societies is that the people are apprehensive of being overheard or spied upon.”

      Well, hardly anyone is apprehensive now. I wonder: if a totalitarian society is one in which people are scared of their privacy being invaded, what do you call ours, in which no one seems much to care?

      —Rick Perlstein

      1. Matt Sledge, “NYPD Muslim Surveillance Report Details ‘Collateral Damage of Progarm,” Huffington Post, March 11, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/nypd-muslimsurveillance_n_2855303.html; “With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas,” Associated Press, August 24, 2011, http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/new_york&id=8323847

      2. “The Swartz Suicide and the Sick Culture of the DOJ,” Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, January 23, 2013, http://masslawyersweekly.com/2013/01/23/the-swartz-suicide-and-the-sick-culture-of-the-doj/

      3. John Celock and Arthur Delaney, “Drug Testing Bills Proliferate in State Legislatures,” Huffington Post, April 11, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/11/drug-testing-welfare_n_3063962.html

      4. Charlie Savage and Leslie Kaufman, “Phone Records of Journalists of the Associated Press Seized by U.S.,” New York Times, May 13, 2012

      5. Amy Chozick, “Bloomberg Admits to Terminal Snooping,” New York Times, May 13, 2013.

      6. Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart’s Violation of U.S. Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association (Human Rights Watch, 2007)

      7. “Vance Packard, 82, Challenger of Consumerism, Dies,” New York Times, December 13, 1996.

      8. Lewis Nichols, “Talk With Vance Packard,” New York Times, March 15, 1964.

      9. “Vance Packard, 82, Challenger of Consumerism, Dies,” New York Times, December 13, 1996.

      10. Julian Borger, “Dirty Rats Leave Gore a Subliminal Message,” The Guardian, September 12, 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/sep/13/uselections2000.usa

      11. “Vance Packard, 82, Challenger of Consumerism, Dies,” New York Times, December 13, 1996.

      12. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), p. 209

      13. Ibid.

      14. John Brooks, “There’s Somebody Watching You: The Naked Society, by Vance Packard,” New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1964, p. 1.

      15. Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 120

      16. Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepardsville, KY: Victor Publishing, 1960), p. 11.

      17. Lewis Nichols, “Talk With Vance Packard,” New York Times, March 15, 1964.

      18. Lawrence Laurent, “Eavesdroppers Now Sophisticated Pests,” Washington Post, May 23, 1964; Associated Press, “LBJ Sets Up Committee for Lie Detector Study,” Daytona Beach Morning Journal, December 14, 1965.

      19. Wikpiedia, “Polygraph,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph

      20. Ann Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (New York: Free Press, 2005), p. xiv, 157.

      21. Discredited: How Employment Credit Checks Keep Qualified Workers Out of a Job (New York: Demos, 2013).

      22. Mark Crawford, “Workplace Spying: How Far Can Companies Go,” BusinessWatch, nd, accessed May 10, 2013.

      23. Laura M. Sands, “Spying on СКАЧАТЬ