Correction

Matt,

I think Andrei, Justin and Ted have done a nice job of presenting a more academic response to your paper, and while I generally agree with their premises, I still found them a bit unsatisfactory in addressing the problem I have with your paper. I’ve given a great deal of thought to the question you pose and also why I find the academic response unsatisfactory, and I think that perhaps it’s that these responses to you lack, well, perhaps a certain Wyoming-ness that seems to me essential in these debates. Why is it a problem the grocery store tracks my purchases or my rental company my car? It could be as, Andrei suggests, because the government, too, could access this information and use it coercively, or as Justin does, that in aggregate, this data gives its holder a great deal of power over its over its originators. But there’s something else crucial underlying people’s reactions, which I think, very deeply, is this: it’s just none of their goddamn business. It’s no one else’s business where I go or what I do when I go there, and it is this intrinsic violation that I, at least, am railing against when I talk about privacy invasion.

In his comment, Ted hinted at something that I think needs to be stated more explicitly, which is that we are clearly coming from entirely different normative systems, a fact which is probably obvious, but not unimportant to recognize openly. The competing paradigms make having a discussion about this topic extremely difficult, because the paradigm acts as a filter which alters everything we see. In this case, as long as you remain locked in a capitalist framework, you will not be able to recognize or understand the problem we are talking about, because your overriding value is efficient markets (though, as Ted points out, even that value may not be served by the current system) and not, what I will unsatisfactorily call “personhood” values, which would be served by a different system. These personhood values are what underlie and inform my “none of your goddamn business” response. People resist the notion that “perfect information [is] necessary for a well-functioning market” because you aren’t talking about “information” in a vacuum--- you’re talking about information about people, about their inner recesses and intimate lives, their garbage cans and diaries.

To this you say, so what? Don’t we want to be sold things we like? I’m aware there’s a value difference between us that may make this answer difficult or even impossible for you to hear, but I will say it anyway: I am not a machine that exists merely to be sold things. Again: I am not a machine that exists merely to be sold things. My values, dreams, beliefs, ideas, thoughts, hopes, fears, anguishes, nightmares--- the things that make up my very soul, if you want to call it that--- do not exist for the benefit of becoming commodities in your perfect market. I resist your resistance because I see a person's place in the world you yearn for, and it is a place of valuelessness and waste, of your human worth being reduced to nothing more than the dollar that an advertiser will pay to get a good look at you. It is a place I don’t want to go, and neither should you, though your essay supposes that you do indeed want go there, that having the perfect shampoo for your hair advertised to you is worth the price of giving up on personhood, because aren’t well-functioning markets just so great? But, Matt, there should be, and is, much, much more to life than that, and if we say in the name of capitalism that all is well, I fear we’ve lost something essential to our being men at all: a precious and private soul.

I realize that it’s perhaps a fool’s errand to counter normative statements with normative statements, but I felt that, important and logical as the other comments were, we are, at heart, having a discussion about what we value, and so it seemed necessary to use the language of values with you. I hope you find what you value in the world you seem to be arguing for, because I’m quite sure I won’t…

-- DanaDelger - 19 May 2009