JACOBIN MAGAZINE
In the popular discourse, authoritarianism typically stands as liberal capitalismās dramatic antithesis. And nowhere are their purported differences more stark than in their attitudes toward individual privacy. While in the liberal capitalist world every personās 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, āYou have zero privacy now anyway. Get over it.ā Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that āif you have something that you donāt want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnāt be doing it in the first place.ā Mark Zuckerberg, the worldās sixth richest man, decided that privacy was no longer a social norm, āand so we just went for it,ā while Alexander Nix, of the data firm Cambridge Analytica ā famously employed by both the Brexit and Trump campaigns ā brags that his company āprofiled the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.ā
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. Whatās changed?
The Evaporating Bond
As an economic system founded on the idea of a private sphere ā consisting of private individuals who own private property and make private profit in private markets ā 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.
Capitalismās detractors have long decried its tendency to hollow out the commons and push everyone into their private bubbles, but its supporters celebrate this atomization. āCivilization,ā wrote Ayn Rand in 1943, āis the progress toward a society of privacy. The savageās whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.ā From this perspective, capitalismās emphasis on the private sphere and the resultant privacy made it the worldās 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 āeconomic theory of privacy,ā 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 āpeople should not ā on economic grounds in any event ā have a right to conceal material facts about themselves.ā
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