[iDC] The difference between privacy and anonymity
Michael H Goldhaber
michael at goldhaber.org
Wed Sep 30 09:00:42 UTC 2009
A number of people have challenged Sean Cubitt's ingenious and poetic
post that started this thread. Perhaps partially restating some other
comments, I would like to add —however lead-footedly— some points of
my own.
1) Sean's general background assumptions, sometimes shared with others
on this list, include two key ones that seem dubious.
a) Sean: "On the other, it is conducted on
>
> grounds established not by the self, but by neo-liberal capital and
> the
> biopolitical governmentality with which it is now intimately
> associated."
This implies all agency is that of capital. I think this mistaken in
two ways. First, all sorts of actors retain considerable independent
agency, even within the (once) dominant capitalist mode of production.
Denying this, among other things makes any left political effort
absurd. Second, contra Marx, we should not now take for granted that
if we don't have socialism — as we certainly don't — the only other
possibility is capitalist rule. There can be, and I believe is a
different and post-capitalist class system, and it is imperative that
we understand how this different system works.
b) Sean: "In the same way, public good requires abandoning private
property. This is
>
> .....{my ellipsis] .... the lesson of private
> transport and the personal computer: neither of which are ecologically
> sustainable models. "
It is true that fossil-fuel powered internal combustion vehicles and
current personal computer technology are not environmentally neutral,
but there is no law of physics that requires that either private
transport or personal computing be ecologically unsustainable. New
technologies are possible. (Buses are not necessarily better than
bicycles.) The need for socialism cannot be adduced on ecological
grounds, but only on on grounds of equality and justice, once a large
enough public becomes convinced that some humane socialism both is
practicable and would allow the average person a better life. (I
suspect that within our reach is a system of a much enlarged commons,
ecologically sound, yet allowing a great deal of individuality and
personal preferences. For instance, wiki commons do not preclude
completely individual use of and even additions to the resource.)
2) "Private property" in the Marxist tradition generally refers to
privately held productive property, i.e. capital. This is only
indirectly connected with identity, home life or anything else.
Further, the English legal concept that one's home is one's castle
included peasants specifically and dates far further back than 150
years. It was by no means restricted to a small set of bourgeoisie,
although of course capitalists sought to strip the proletariat of
personal identity, so that they would be interchangeable and thus not
irreplaceable. I strongly suspect that for most of the world's
people, however poor, identity remains of vital import, and so does
some degree of privacy in some form. Also, the public good may require
a partial sacrifice of private property in the Marxist sense, but how
much is not clear.
3) I am not certain I grasp what Sean means by "identity...... poses
itself as the obverse of community." How does an abstract concept or a
complex internal sensation pose itself? Or, from what or whose
viewpoint is it so posed? If this means that identity in fact is the
other side of the same coin as community, I would agree, in the sense
that identity is significantly constructed from (overlapping )
communities and vice versa. But I infer from context rather that Sean
believes identity is rather the "reverse"of community, not the
obverse; otherwise why be so negative about identity? If so, I
sharply disagree.
4) Current forms of identity are not primarily composed of state- (or
capital-) imposed categories. For instance, the state hardly
originated the identity of gay or bisexual. Nor did either state or
capital play a significant role in providing the very wide range of
other adjectives that people commonly use partially to describe
themselves, and still less did either shape a great many inner
experiences on which the typical sense of identity and self-hood is
quite largely based.
5) In my view, consistent with my notions of the emerging post-
capitalist (but not socialist) mode of production that I have referred
to for twenty years as the attention economy, privacy is still an
important feature, even though its meaning has partially flipped. If
you think of the older privacy in terms of having windows composed of
one-way mirrors, those mirrors worked to shield those inside from the
gaze of outsiders., while allowing insiders to see out. Now, the one-
way glass is often reversed. Anyone can see in, but those inside do
not have to pay attention to those outside. Privacy in other words now
means primarily the ability to focus one's attention as one chooses.
Capitalist firms and others try to breach this barrier, but with very
partial success at best, as various filters — mental, political or
technical — reassert it. {Let me reiterate stubbornly that my use of
the term "attention economy," which I introduced in the 1980's, has
little to do with advertising, and, by the way, Dallas Smythe, as far
as I am aware, never used the term.]
6) The argument that we can only assert the public good by abandoning
identity reminds me of the conservative view of socialism as creating
a society of ants. This is certainly very bad propaganda for
socialism. To call for sacrifice of identity as part of a political
program strikes me as unlikely way to attract adherents. What happened
to Marx's notion that "the free development of each is a precondition
for the free development of all" ? (Of course Buddhism and other
religious practices call for the renunciation of self, but hopefully
only for those who individually choose that path.) Let me also observe
that the military and prisons try most assiduously to strip away
identity. This is not to create genuine community.
7) It is not true that whistle blowers need anonymity. The best
protection for a genuine whistle blower is publicity and lots of it.
If Daniel Ellsberg had been anonymous at the time of handing over the
Pentagon papers, he could have been easily discovered and killed.
Hiding behind anonymity allows the promulgation of all kinds of lies
as well as of secrets.
8) Why accept 2001 as the time of the closing of the supposedly
previously open web, rather than see that the Internet remains a
vitally important locus of contestation, newly open for many who
could not avail themselves of its earlier more exclusive and therefore
more closed operation? If a great many people now take advantage in
myriad ways of the opportunities afforded by the existence of the
Internet, that does not make their new actions primarily
"opportunistic" in the pej0rative sense Sean appears to me to imply.
Again, possibilities of agency are shortchanged in this formulation.
9) I think the example of the non-existent "Luther Blissett" as a form
of anonymous publishing is of quite limited value. True, it can serve
as a form of resistance to prevailing and often egotistic or
narcissistic academic practice. (An earlier and perhaps more
successful example was "Nicholas Bourbaki," the name adopted in the
1940's 0r 50's by a group of French modern mathematicians. )But could
genuine dialogue —even on this list— take place or be served by
anonymous entries? Individuals still do experience and still do think
in idiosyncratic ways, and to lose the distinctions for the sake of
the public good, while it might damp down competitiveness in academia,
would hardly be an advantage in developing good public ideas — in my
(admittedly private) view.
Best,
Michael
On Sep 23, 2009, at 8:02 AM, Sean Cubitt wrote:
> Arising from question and answer session at a talk yesterday at the
> Pervasive media Studio in Bristol. The central topic was the
> environmental
> impact of digital media, but I threw in the thesis below. A very smart
> questioner raised the question of anonymity. It took me several
> hours to
> work through just how important that question is. I think it has a
> bearing
> on the playground/factory issue. I hope so anyway. The de carolis
> ref is to
> Massimo de Carolis, 1996, Toward a Phenomenology of Opportunism in
> Virno and
> Hardt's collection Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics
> Sean
>
>
>
> Private property stands to the public good as identity stands to
> anonymity.
> We cannot achieve public good without sacrificing both private
> property and
> identity. Privacy is not a given but an ascription, whether
> self-administered or provided by others. This is also the case with
> identity, which poses itself as the obverse of community. Both
> identity and
> privacy are results of historical processes of capital, which
> required the
> individuation first of households and later of persons as units of
> consumption and reproduction. This is the position we must start
> from in a
> socialist analysis of surveillance
>
> Thesis: Privacy was only ever the privilege of a small proportion of
> the
> world's population for a brief period in history. For about 150
> years, the
> European bourgeoisie enjoyed private rooms, private water closets
> and a life
> distinct from the life of the street. That period is now over,
> thanks to the
> development of always-on, ubiquitous media. The only people left
> with a
> direct interest in privacy are wife-beaters and tax-evaders.
>
> Corollary: The 'loss' of privacy is no loss for those who never
> possessed
> it. Privacy was born in the invention of the division between public
> and
> private, and remains dependent on that division. As capital has
> moved from
> production to consumption; as consumption has moved from mass to
> personalised; and as personalisation has moved from choice to the
> active
> participation of prosumers and user-generated content, the distinction
> between public and private has become harder to maintain. But the
> publication of private information in blogs, social networks and other
> convergent media has not been undertaken innocently either.
>
> If on the one hand there is no naturally given privacy which can be
> lost,
> the social construct had been altered. In line with the post-marxist
> tendency in contemporary theory, much analysis has focused on the
> surveillant state. But the state has had relatively little to do
> with the
> formal principles of contemporary surveillance which, as Elmer has
> argued,
> is far more properly associated with commerce. The extraction of
> commercially exploitable 'personalities' from data flows such as
> online
> behaviours also structures forensic data mining, but is almost
> invariably
> pioneered by commerce. Commercial surveillance is at least as
> effective as
> political in constructing concepts of the self attired in the
> mystery of
> privacy and identity. These two ascriptions are a pair. Privacy
> expresses
> the economic condition of private property; identity expresses the
> political
> construction of individuality in regimes of power. Both, being
> historically
> produced, necessarily have histories.
>
> Antithesis: Anonymity is a tactic required of whistle-blowers, who
> act in
> fear of reprisal. Anonymity is the enemy of self-expression. The
> publication
> of the private self which is the ideological engine of social
> networking
> technology's user-generated content, is self-expression. Whether
> undertaken
> in your own name or under a pseudonym, the principle is the same. True
> anonymity is not hiding behind a nickname, but abandoning the
> principle of
> self=expression in favour of speaking something other than the self.
> That
> act can be called 'speaking the truth'. (This is an apt label even
> if an
> anonymous whistle-blower is mistaken: they nonetheless wish to speak
> truthfully of objective situations).
>
> Self is the outcome of the governmental structuring of demography:
> gender,
> ethnicity, income, age and patterns of consumption. This kind of
> self was at
> the centre of the attention economy discussed by Dallas Smythe, when
> groups
> had become the target of advertising and public relations. The
> micro-targeting provided by cookies and other commercial surveillance
> technologies intensified this corporate gaze, placing the self
> rather than
> the group at the centre of the enterprise of commercial
> communication. On
> the one hand, then, self-expression is an opportunistic and tactical
> response to the available resources. On the other, it is conducted on
> grounds established not by the self, but by neo-liberal capital and
> the
> biopolitical governmentality with which it is now intimately
> associated.
> This is the form of pseudonymous behaviour developed negatively with
> victimisation (race hatred, cyber-bullying) and positively by the
> collective
> identity Luther Blissett.
>
> Such opportunistic tactics – where tactics are the political means
> available
> to the weak, as opposed to the strategies of the strong (de Certeau)
> – are
> not necessarily to be dismissed as unethical or valueless. de Carolis
> observes that opportunism can be seen as the continuous adaptation
> of one's
> identity to rapidly changing circumstances. On the one hand, this is
> an
> accommodation to conditions of precarity, while on the other it is
> also a
> skill, the ability to outmanoeuvre the imposed situation. It is then
> both a
> technique of continuous reskilling and re-identification developed
> in the
> interests of post-Fordist production, and at the same time escapes the
> merely tactical sense of opportunism (petty crime, petty acts of
> sabotage or
> time-wasting) to provide the basis for major acts of autonomy, such
> as the
> pre-2001 world wide web.
>
> Opportunistic anonymity arises then from consideration of the imposed
> situation and from a resolution to work exclusively in it or with it
> but
> against it or in excess of it. This is the moment when the imposed
> identity,
> which is the place prepared fro the person in the imposed situation,
> and s
> there structural position within it, has to be abandoned if the
> situation is
> to be changed radically, rather than merely survived. Any post-
> surveillant
> condition requires that the object of surveillance – identities –
> must be
> abandoned. Both political and personal identities must be left
> behind, since
> both are functions of the same situation.
>
> In the same way, public good requires abandoning private property.
> This is
> the lesson of the credit crisis of 2008-9, which was caused by the
> actual
> ownership of mney by a handful of people, and the illusion of private
> property for a vast number of others. And it is the lesson of private
> transport and the personal computer: neither of which are ecologically
> sustainable models. Privacy is of one kind with privation: property is
> definitionally what you may not have if I possess it: my private
> property is
> your de-privation. Our private property is the despoliation of the
> planet.
>
> Anonymity is the condition of the crowd. Psychology and sociology have
> abandoned the fascination they once had with crowds and masses (Freud,
> Reich, Ortega y Gassett) in favour of identity politics and individual
> psychology. Pluralising the self (the schiz) is one aspect of the
> potential
> change; reducing the boundaries between self and crowd is the other,
> the
> route so far untaken. It is time to recover the crowd from both
> hyper-individuation and from the tribalism, from user-generated
> capitalism
> and from the style-based subcultures which use consumption as a
> means of
> resistance.
>
> Synthesis: It is on such a basis that a new sociology of solidarity
> might be
> built as a political platform no longer based on produsers and
> prosumers but
> on post-individuals who recognise their commonality first and their
> personality second. This is not an austerity program, though it
> implies an
> end to endless consumption and waste. It is instead a move from the
> valuation of the individual by what and how they consume and prosume
> to the
> values of sharing, and a remaking of shared values.
>
> Prof Sean Cubitt
> scubitt at unimelb.edu.au
> Director
> Media and Communications Program
> Faculty of Arts
> Room 127 John Medley East
> The University of Melbourne
> Parkville VIC 3010
> Australia
>
> Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667
> Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494
> M: 0448 304 004
> Skype: seancubitt
> http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/
> http://www.digital-light.net.au/
> http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/
> http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/
> http://del.icio.us/seancubitt
>
> Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series
> http://leonardo.info
>
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