I have spent a lot of time recently not writing about certain things. Yes, I read about them. But there is something about the stories that depresses and disturbs me. They all originate in an invasion of someone’s privacy.
Take the news that George W Bush freely talked to a friend in his first presidential election campaign about his previous drug use and right-wing pressure to “kick gays”. It was front page news in The New York Times and made its way around the world.
It confirmed my view that Bush had used recreational drugs, then stopped, and is smart enough not to brag about it as president. It also reinforced the notion that Bush is not homophobic; he just uses homophobia as a political tool when necessary (something worse, in my view).
It was amazing to hear Bush even say the word “gay”. He has never used the word in a formal speech. Yes, I read every word of the story — eager for a glimpse into the real Dubya. I was fascinated. Then I felt like taking a shower.
The problem is that he said all these things in private telephone conversations with a friend. Those chats were secretly recorded and later released to a liberal newspaper. Bush had every right, it seems to me, to believe that such a conversation would be kept confidential.
If politicians cannot have frank conversations with friends and aides then their ability to think aloud will be destroyed and their judgment impaired. We are already living with those consequences.
The first thing that Bush had to give up when he became president was e-mailing. The White House is sassy enough to know that every e-mail you send can be seen and read by anyone. As a friend once reassured me: “Don’t worry, Andrew. This is between you, me and the internet.”
Private correspondence from politicians is now restricted to verbal, face-to-face communication in secure locations with a tiny cadre of loyal apparatchiks. People wonder why this White House is so secretive. Have they considered that there is no alternative? Take another little spat. Michael Kinsley, editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial page, recently got into a heated e-mail exchange with Susan Estrich, a political commentator, writer and consultant to the Democratic party. She was outraged at the paucity of female writers on the LA Times op-ed page, corralled 50 leading LA women to write a protest letter and demanded that Kinsley print it.
He refused. She threatened to make it public if he did not. He said that was blackmail and offered her a column to make her points. Estrich resisted. She e-mailed Kinsley, who has Parkinson’s disease: “(P)eople are beginning to think that your illness may have affected your brain, your judgment and your ability to do this job.”
Now we’ve all written things in e-mails that we wish we could take back. For some reason e-mails seem to liberate our intemperate id. But losing your cool in an e-mail to someone is one thing. It’s quite another to have the whole world read it.
The e-mails were copied to an editor at The Washington Examiner. Then they were posted on the web. Of course, even by writing about it I have increased the number of people who know. You cannot oppose this stuff without promoting it. The logic of the end of privacy is self-reinforcing.
We live in a paradoxical new world. On the one hand technology enables us to retreat into niches and personal spaces with protective precision. We can communicate more easily and intimately than before — texting, e-mails, mobile phones, BlackBerries, mobile phone cameras, blogs etc. But as we become more cut off from general social contact, our personal communications are increasingly transparent. We have rising social atomisation with a collapse of personal privacy. We are alone — and at the same time on stage.
We used to think that this was all about the famous. Paris Hilton had her privacy destroyed when her love-making was put on the internet — but she is a famous attention seeker. Charles and Camilla had their sex-talk broadcast to the planet. But one of them was a royal.
The trouble is that technology makes no such distinction between the famous and the obscure even if you believe that people in public life deserve no privacy at all.
A while back a posh New York city prep school disciplined a bunch of its male pupils because they had set up a web page ranking various schoolgirls on their sexual skills. Girls were rated; comments were added; pictures were open for the whole world to see. What was once playground gossip became global. When the site became famous several of the girls were understandably traumatised.
A few months ago mobile phones were banned from the changing room at my gym. Someone had been taking pictures of people in the showers and putting them on the web. I get spam all the time promising real-time secret camera peep-holes. I’m sure some of it is real. Someone somewhere is having his or her extramarital affair exposed right now.
The political uses of this are not minor. A couple of weeks ago a low-level Republican hack in the White House press room (he got daily passes and lobbed featherweight questions at the presidential spokesman) suddenly became famous. It turned out that he was using a pseudonym and had once had a gay escort service on the side.
He went from obscurity to mega-fame in seconds as bloggers vied with each other to reveal as much as they could about his private life. Bloggers on the left used the same techniques of exposure and shame as J Edgar Hoover, the notorious FBI director, once deployed against homosexuals. Except that Hoover would have killed to get the stuff that is now available to anyone with a grudge and an internet spy-cam.
The silver lining, of course, is Abu Ghraib. Without those digital photographs the revelation of America’s conscious deployment of torture and abuse would never have gained traction. But it’s worth remembering that those Abu Ghraib photos were taken precisely to exploit and further the victims’ humiliation.
Not only were some detainees sexually abused, they knew that their prison guards had photographs of it and could release the photos to friends, family and community. That was part of the leverage to gain intelligence. It was blackmail.
The technology that allowed us to expose the abuse was also part of the abuse itself.
The technology that has liberated us in so many ways is also capable of suffocating that inviolable personal space that once had another name. That name was freedom.
