16.Oct.03

Sub-cultural foibles

Most people have, in the back of their mind, the belief that what they say to their friends, they would be happy to say in public, in the same words. It isn't true, and if you don't believe me, tape-record yourself talking to your friends one day, and then upload it to your website for the world to hear.

This is the trap that makes fly-on-the-wall documentaries and reality TV so entertaining. It's why politicians are so weirdly mannered, and why everyone gets a bit freaked out when the videocamera looms at the wedding. It's what makes a particular kind of gossip - the "I can't believe he said that!" - so virulent. No matter how constant a person you are, no matter how unwavering your beliefs, something you say in the private register will sound horrific, dismissive, egotistical or trite when blazoned on the front page of the Daily Mirror. This is the context that we are quoted out of.

But in the real world, private conversations stay private.

-Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka 10.13.03

Ω{Well that's the crux of something there.
We don't all live with the same level of privacy, or the same level of presumption of privacy.
Angela Davis is a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The chances are her "expectations" of privacy are, even at this late date, somewhat different than Mr. O'Brien's. I'm imagining years ago she popped through the bell jar of government surveillance, into that terra incognita of reality-improv so many of the other-class were transported to back then.
Knowing that some asocial jerk was 'auditing' your daily life for clues to the puzzles of subversion and anti-authoritarian malignancy didn't change the need for real contact, real interaction, real touch.
Some of that only being possible through language; we are semantic beings, after all. And yet the reality of those moments of contact was bled away through the portals of surveillance. It took an effort of will to attempt to be genuine under that unblinking gaze.
It's like your first shit your first time in jail. You have to, though it violates so much of your trained being, your child-self.
You have to get the contact you have to have to stay whole and sane.
But then reality's less real. You see?
They learn what's hip, or at least what you know of what's hip, without ever paying any dues for it. And they "share" your life, which is a kind of death right there.
These are the conflicts of the imprisoned, the enslaved, the captive of all stripes.
Fortunate souls those who managed to steal a few hours or days hidden from the Panopticon, to confirm the presence and its burdens, to forge and execute ways of being that subverted the process. Speech-within-speech, codes and gestures, whispers against the backdrop of level-10 rock and roll.
For a lot of us there was only the madness and rage of breakdown and the neurotic self-dividing of denial and withdrawal.
'It isn't really happening, it can't be.
But then why am I so phony all the time?'
This is not about right and wrong.
I don't care anymore about the morality of these things, I don't see them as moral or immoral anymore, only as biological strategy. The 'morality' is a gloss, a subterfuge, a con-man's patter, a diversion for the credulous. There's enough history readily available to show the broad uses 'moral' authority can be put to. And most of it at heart comes down to the same motives the piranhas of the Internet would throw up if they were pressed. Freedom, or necessity, the uncovering of lies and danger. We'll have cameras and microphones everywhere so we can protect our children from the darkness. And keystroke memory.
The obvious response, how we'll protect them from all this light, goes unasked and unanswered.
Safety really. The justification's always safety.
But it's all and only and always survival. There is no other struggle, no other battle, no other cause.
-
But hey, don't get me started on the 60's.
All I really wanted to say was, I haven't known the privacy Danny O'Brien's worried about losing since I was in my teens.
I thought that might be interesting, that I haven't written a word on a computer, except for a few hours on September 11, 2001, that wasn't 'monitored', that didn't feel public even as I wrote it.
That is not acceptance.
It's real, I know it. In order to live I've had to accomodate, but I haven't surrendered to it.
And the little bit of progress I've made with it is this: that it doesn't matter at all anymore about the moral parameters. You have to take what you want from the world.
There are qualities I think of as human and necessary, but there are people who think of themselves as human who don't share those qualities. It seems to work equally both ways. The couching of every dilemma in moral terms means those conflicts with corrupt 'authority' that inevitably arise leave the rebels with no traditional base, no 'moral' foundation.
Numinous recension. Take your morality from your own being, from your own heart.
Compromise up to a point, stubborn refusal past that.
The question is, given the bloom of surveillance technologies and the steadily increasing prosthetizing of contemporary life, how do we return to privacy, once it's been lost? How can we re-privatize private conversation?}