April 2, 2013--Post-Privacy

I knew we no longer cared about privacy when they eliminated phone booths--booths--that had accordion doors that callers would close for privacy.

The telephone company said that this was to prevent homeless people from sleeping and peeing in them.

In place of the booths, they installed small, aluminum-hooded shelters. If you cared about not being overheard, you ducked into them and whispered, hunched against the light poll to which they were affixed.

Then there were cell phones. By the time most people had one--certainly at least right after 9/11--you could wander the streets and listen to passersby talking at full volume to whoever was on the other end of the line. Rather, since there was no line, at the other end of the wireless connection. No one any longer seemed to care what they were so publicly broadcasting.

This came through literally loud and clear to me one morning years ago while I was heading south on Broadway and couldn't help but listen in to a woman clutching a flip phone who was complaining bitterly about her husband. Nothing of course unusual about that--there is always a lot to share about an insensitive and uncaring husband--but what was unusual was that she was telling her friend that he had resumed coming home drunk and beating her. Not just that he had again forgot her birthday.

So now it feels a little late in the civil liberties game to be so worried about privacy--about new forms of airport screening that would probe personal data available via the Internet in an attempt to identify potential security risks to worrying about all the demographic and personal data that companies such as Facebook and Google routine collect and sell to advertisers and data-miners who are trying to figure out how best to pitch their goods and services in increasingly intimate and targeted ways.

I'm not that much of a civil libertarian (I do worry about who gets on the plane with me and am in favor of a little profiling), but I am old-fashioned enough not to want everyone to know my birthday, where I went to school, and what kind of underwear I buy.

Much younger people for the most part don't seem to care at all who knows their business. They are a let-it-all-hang-out generation, used to being videoed by parents from the actual moment they were born (maybe even conceived), at every birthday party and Gymboree class, when they "graduate" from pre-pre school, and then only a little later in life when they begin to video themselves and put even their silliest moments--perhaps especially their silliest moments--on YouTube.

I'm not sure what this means.

Minimally, after centuries of discretion and privacy being highly sought after and valued, in the West at least, it's all over. Like it or not, the rest of us either have to unplug ourselves and retreat to the woods or seek commiseration in the fact that too-much-information is really no information at all. At least, none that we should care that much about.

I did, though, love huddling in the phone booth while in college and talking for hours with my first girlfriend. What I had to say was for her only.