7 Reader Responses

1. slomo Says:
   March 19th, 2006 at 9:52 am

   Tim, you are working an interesting line of questioning. Certainly, I hide things everyday (e.g. my annoyance at something my partner is doing, uninteresting details in the stories I tell, my confusion about some point in a meeting at work, etc.) We hide things and lie all the time, just to maintain social relationships. If I were completely honest and self-revealing every day, I would piss off my partner, bore my friends, and lose the trust of my colleagues. On the one hand, society is a huge illusion, but on the other hand, could not possibly work without these millions of white lies.

   As far as what one might hide at a grocery store: suppose I bought 20 packages of antihistamine. One could suppose that I was running a speed lab at home. So, in some ways grocery store purchases could be revelatory.

   Somewhat off-topic: in my profession I’ve heard talk about using grocery store data as part of disease surveillance. The idea is that if anti-diarrheals are flying off the shelves, there must be some kind of epidemic intestinal disease. The big cryptosporidium contamination that occurred in Milwaukee in 1993 was discovered precisely because of a sudden spike in the demand for anti-diahhreals.

2. channel null Says:
   March 19th, 2006 at 10:41 am

   I cannot understand this “line of questioning” at all. Privacy is a legal and a physical protection. We keep things “private” because someone in a position of authority over us would use them against us. We keep things “secret” for different reasons, which are not necessarily as valid.

   Right to Privacy is actually the dam we (or someone else) built to keep the world out and us out of the world? Are we really individuals or unique in any real fundamental important sense when we all get diarrhea, when we’re all essentially the same inside, when we all share the common experience of living Life and being fully Human? What do we really have to hide?

   Some of your questions seem to be rhetorical devices meant to prove a point less than a means of opening a discussion. If I am mistaken, that is unfortunate.

   No one has a social “right to privacy.” That’s why there’s gossip. At the same time, everyone ought to expect a reasonable degree of freedom from harassment. Look at the video Fell has of Lindsay Lohan at the mall, e.g. The first discussion of a “right to privacy” started during the youth of the newspaper and photograph, when it was common for reporters and photographers to invade the property of others for the sake of getting a scoop. Since they didn’t pose a physical threat, you couldn’t shoot them, so a discussion about privacy–largely as a way of preventing intrusion–began at a level legal.

   The right to privacy remains a legal issue:

   1. Many entities have reason to discriminate. I am fairly certain you must know someone who has been denied health insurance for having a pre-existing condition. You really do not want any company anywhere keeping a record on your health. It’s bad enough that doctors record answers to “do you smoke, drink, or use street drugs?” When a company is looking to cut costs, if they have access to information and precedent that allows them to discriminite in a manner that seems unfair, they will. Consider that in most developed countries health care is guranteed.

   2. I reiterate that the any body willing to use force against its citizens have as little access to information on them as possible. It is a little known fact that the government of the United States of America currently imprisons a ridiculous number of people to fight “the Drug War.” The drug war runs directly against two ideas: Sovereignity of Self and Ownership of Self. If one has either, one ought to be able to

   3. Employers frequently run “background checks” on individuals, not so much to verify refernces and other resume items, but look at credit scores and arrest records.

   If anyone here believes that he or she has nothing to hide, I suggest that you compile a list of all the laws that you have broken in the past four months, accumulate what evidence you can, and head to your local police station. See if you have your job come monday morning after you start keeping marijuana scattered about your desk or in the company truck. If that’s extreme, every monday morning send your supervisor a list of what you did to relax that weekend.

   So long as we have close-minded people in positions of direct authority over us–and this is a social mechanism, one strict person has more sway than five permissive people because the strict one will for a position of little authority complain until something happens and from a position of higher authority act harsly–it will be necessary to keep things hidden.

3. slomo Says:
   March 19th, 2006 at 10:44 am

   Channel, I think Tim is working a philosophical/ontological angle. From a legal perspective, I think he would agree (I certainly do) but I suppose I should let him speak for himself.

4. Tim Boucher Says:
   March 19th, 2006 at 7:01 pm

   Channel Null, I think you’re “confusing your planes” as you accused me of in the comments to a previous post. I am indeed “working a philosophical/ontological angle”. I understand and agree with all of your points, and yet at the same time don’t think they potentially disprove anything I’m trying to get at here.

   I suggested the possibility that the idea of privacy and individuality were red herrings designed to isolate us from each other. You countered that no, there are legal and social reasons for it. Very well, but that doesn’t cancel out what I’m saying. Wouldn’t a legal and social system institutionalize the very isolation I’m talking about?

   You also pointed to people in power as using our secrets against us. But in so doing, you didn’t engage fully in the thought experiment I was initiating. If every one of us - even and especially the people in power - had no way of hiding anything, they would have no leverage over us whatsoever. In fact, they would be exposed as the worst kind of criminals in a society of already delinquents. Or maybe not, maybe their bold acceptance of their own flaws and internal horrors would keep them in a position of power, even still, even though we all knew in gruesome detail every last one of their crimes.

   On another note, does anybody else remember the Gilligan’s Island episode where one or more of the characters becomes telepathic and these same issues of needing to hide certain things to keep a society going are addressed?

   There’s also a bit of interesting material that asks a somewhat similar question in Don Juan’s account of the predators, which I linked to earlier. Don Juan asks:

   “The weird idea,” he said slowly, measuring the effect of his words, “is that every human being on this earth seems to have exactly the same reactions, the same thoughts, the same feelings. They seem to respond in more or less the same way to the same stimuli. Those reactions seem to be sort of fogged up by the language they speak, but if we scrape that off, they are exactly the same reactions that besiege every human being on Earth. I would like you to become curious about this, as a social scientist, of course, and see if you could formally account for such homogeneity.”

   http://forum.noblerealms.org/viewtopic.php?pid=32780#p32780

5. Ant Says:
   March 19th, 2006 at 8:51 pm

   Okay, normally I’d admit that I’m completely honest to everyone all the time. Even at the risk of changing friend dynamics.

   But you’re right, there are plenty of times that I WITHHOLD information in order to create a better first impression. There are plenty of ways to get a bad first impression of me if I told them about some weird occult experiences right-off, or told about my last relationship, or talked about that one time when I got so drunk that my friends had to keep me from falling backwards down the stairs. Essentially, there are plenty of good reasons to keep my college life out of my business life. In fact, even this website I try to keep separated from my business life. If it doesn’t, then fine, there’s always a group of clients out there to reach… But yeah, there might be a client that might think that this website alone was odd enough to not want to do business with me.

   But back to the grocery store thing, I still don’t think that I’m worried about my info shared. Even if I bought 20 boxes of anti-histamines, and some drug task force decided to follow up on suspicion of a speed lab, they could easily come to my house and not find a speed lab. Because there still wouldn’t be one.

   The government can know my purchasing secrets. Fine. I’m not convinced of some huge conspiracy other than good marketing research… Maybe if I were a different type of person, I would think differently.

   I agree though, I do have a lot of problems with the whole Patriot Act “If you have nothing to hide, then why are you worried?” But I think it’s a matter of the general creepiness of that statement.

6. Tim Boucher Says:
   March 19th, 2006 at 8:58 pm

   I agree though, I do have a lot of problems with the whole Patriot Act “If you have nothing to hide, then why are you worried?”

   Me too. Absolutely. I think that’s an entirely creepy statement and I’ve always had problems when people bring it up. I feel like I’m starting to talk about something very different from that though, and I’m still just grasping what the words are to express it accurately.

7. channel null Says:
   March 20th, 2006 at 12:33 am

   You’re right Tim, I am confusing my planes here, and been too damn grouchy. I’m sticking with the branding issue, but here you’ve got me.

   Coincidentially enough, I spent a good five hours today at work browsing through someone’s emails and checking accounts, which actually have a very substansive role in the events leading to their production, although they seem like a mere tangent with regards to a related event… Do not worry, you will be reading about this sooner or later.

   Let me paraphrase:

   “U have plans”
   “what flavour”
   “…pork curtain curry”

   Imagine reading this drivel for five hours a day…

   This guy *did* have things to hide. His domestic life is ruined, and he’s stuck with a bunch of videotapes, on account a credit card statement. But he was no good at hiding anything, and damn near all his co-workers described the events as “likely” to his character. This guy wasn’t exactly judicious. But now there’s a last ditch scheme to keep things like this from hitting the public eye, entirely because of something else.

   Maybe we can’t hide much, as anyone can sieze a thread in the present and follow it back into the past: hindsight. But why wasn’t it accessible at the time? Presumebly we told ourselves the same story at the time, but we didn’t attribute enough importance to make it reverse-causative. Time puts a strange vissicitude on active memory. But as his private actions came to light, no one was surprised: they sutured it all into the necessary fiction of the Narrative they carried with them. I believe that doing so automatically and hypnotically leads to some psychological limping and Antignostic False Perceptive Syndrome.

   Sutured Narrartive. Maybe it’s not so much “we have nothing to hide” but that everything will be tied into some narrative regardless. Of course, the narrative is false. Remember the BTK killer? He started out as “the guy next door” the first two days of the media blitz, but by day three rumors about his misogyny etc had come out. I take that as the media performing a suture-op in its own way, probably pseudo-intentionally.