JACOBIN MAGAZINE
In the popular discourse, authoritarianism typically stands as liberal capitalism’s dramatic antithesis. And nowhere are their purported differences more stark than in their attitudes toward individual privacy. While in the liberal capitalist world every person’s home is said to be their castle, in authoritarian regimes, it is just one more state-monitored cage.
Today, however, privacy is disappearing within the walls of advanced capitalist democracies. And multinational corporations, holding aloft the banner of total transparency, are the ones leading the charge.
In 1999, Scott McNealy, then-CEO of Sun Microsystems, famously declared, “You have zero privacy now anyway. Get over it.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s sixth richest man, decided that privacy was no longer a social norm, “and so we just went for it,” while Alexander Nix, of the data firm Cambridge Analytica — famously employed by both the Brexit and Trump campaigns — brags that his company “profiled the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.”
These days, the rhetoric of private capitalists seems indistinguishable from the rhetoric of state tyrants. Their scripts are all mixed up. Their differences have always been exaggerated, if not imagined, but we could once rely on them to at least speak differently. What’s changed?
The Evaporating Bond
As an economic system founded on the idea of a private sphere — consisting of private individuals who own private property and make private profit in private markets — capitalism is assumed to protect individual privacy. The sanctity of the private realm allegedly ensures maximum freedom for the individual, as producers and consumers are liberated from unwanted interference from the state and nosy neighbors.
Capitalism’s detractors have long decried its tendency to hollow out the commons and push everyone into their private bubbles, but its supporters celebrate this atomization. “Civilization,” wrote Ayn Rand in 1943, “is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” From this perspective, capitalism’s emphasis on the private sphere and the resultant privacy made it the world’s great civilizer.
As early as the 1970s, however, the bond between capitalism and individual privacy was becoming unstuck. In 1977, the right-wing legal jurist Richard Posner put forward his “economic theory of privacy,” eventually publishing it in a paper in, aptly, 1984. There, he argued that individual privacy hindered capitalism by interrupting the free flow of information that markets need to be efficient. Posner concluded that “people should not — on economic grounds in any event — have a right to conceal material facts about themselves.”
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