Why The Left Should Care About Privacy
The surveillance state always hurts dissidents most of all. We shouldn't neglect the importance of constraining its power.
Illustration by Emily Altman
Lauren Fadiman
filed 29 July 2024 in Tech
Since the height of the Cold War, the United States has championed capitalist society as the only one to value privacy. In communist societies, it is still alleged, people are forced to bare all to the government—even those things that happen in their homes, which Americans are taught to consider sacred. “The house of every one is to him as his Castle and Fortress,” wrote Sir Edward Coke in an oft-cited 1604 English legal decision—and no Soviet khrushchevka could ever a castle make. Nor could any apartment block in the Eastern Bloc. A 1956 dispatch from Shanghai, China, reported that, under Chairman Mao, “even a family squabble or argument between man and wife falls under scrutiny” by committee. Twenty years later, a report about Cuba was still claiming that, in exchange for a “decent life,” citizens under President Fidel Castro were compelled to accept “lifelong ‘ownership’ by the state [and] lack of privacy.” In the years between the two reports, however, the United States would dramatically expand its own surveillance apparatus, institutionalizing along the way the systematic collection and collation of information about American citizens until it resembled the very system that good American patriots were supposed to stave off from the Soviet Union. It was as though, distracted by their efforts to barricade their East-facing windows, Americans had forgotten to lock the front door.
Indeed, it was American capitalists and their cronies in Congress who tore apart civilians’ private “castles” during the Red Scare in their ruthless hunt for communists. In 1966, Carl T. Rowan, the first Black member of the National Security Council and an acclaimed journalist, penned a piece for the Los Angeles Times called “Privacy? What’s That—?” in which he excoriated this political development, chiding “civilized men… [who] submit so meekly to the grossest invasions of privacy” by “criminally repugnant… characters who run around with wiretaps, electronic listening devices and peek-a-boo cameras, eavesdropping on people’s bedrooms, offices and lunchtable conversations.” Those “criminally repugnant characters” were none other than his colleagues. At the time of publication, Rowan had years of government service under his belt: as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under President John F. Kennedy, as a delegate to the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis, then as director of the United States Information Agency (the U.S. propaganda arm) under President Lyndon B. Johnson. “Anyone with any idea how widespread wiretapping and ‘bugging’ is today—and I have an idea,” he writes, “knows that… ‘safeguards’ are, and would be, a joke.”
Things would get worse before they got better. Between 1960 and 1974, the FBI and friends embarked on a campaign against half a million civilian “subversives” that the Church Committee—a group of senators tasked with investigating the security state in turn—would later reframe as a veritable “vigilante operation.” Using tactics first developed in the far reaches of the U.S. empire—where they had been used to quell progressive and nationalist movements from Puerto Rico to the Philippines—the government used infiltrators to wiretap, bug, stalk, and set up American subversives. Their lives were sabotaged by agents who interfered in their marriages, got them fired from their jobs, and even set them up to be killed in manufactured intragroup conflicts. One victim of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in 1964 received an infamous letter from the FBI encouraging him to commit suicide before the agency released recordings of his alleged extramarital affairs. “You are on the record,” the letter threatens. “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is…. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” The Church Committee ultimately declared COINTELPRO a threat to the democratic process—one that utilized techniques of espionage, provocation, and misinformation that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all the targets had been involved in violent activity.”
How, then, to explain the chasm between promise and practice? Between the political lip service afforded to privacy and the growing lack thereof in daily life? In his article, Rowan offers one theory. “The right of privacy isn’t terribly precious if you don’t stand for anything,” he pronounces—“if you run from all controversy, if your private love life is close enough to non-existent that you aren’t bothered by having your private boudior [sic] turned into a electronic maze.” The answer is at once intuitive and unsatisfying: that Americans are among the most surveilled people on the planet because too few have had political reason to fight back—or else too little courage to do so. It is a comforting explanation, too. We can imagine it is the apathy of others, and not our own, that stares back when we gaze into the CCTV camera.
And yet, Rowan’s explanation does not hold up to scrutiny—or, at least, fails to encompass the whole of American life. After all, U.S. popular culture abounds with implicit and explicit criticisms of surveillance: from X (formerly known as Twitter) humor about “the FBI agent watching me through my phone” to the multiple episodes of Black Mirror and other science fiction shows that reinforce the association between “surveillance” and “dystopia,” people love to castigate the state for being such a peeping Tom. Ironically, however, whether we are posting to social media or watching TV on a digital streaming platform, we are also necessarily offering ourselves up for observation. In fact, I am doing so right now by using Google, without which this article (up to and including its implicit criticisms of Google) would be far more difficult to write. How do I or any of us deal with the cognitive dissonance? It would be disingenuous to say I had no choice in the matter. I could use DuckDuckGo, but I don’t like the interface; I could use the encrypted Tor browser, but I am too lazy to learn how. Getting off social media was one thing—but even with Facebook, X, and Instagram down, I am still tethered in one way or another to the AANG of FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google). And so when I stare into the CCTV camera, I don’t like the version of myself that gazes back: someone whose taste for convenience and convention has trumped (at least in this respect, at least for now) her commitment to privacy as a civil right.
That makes me one of many Americans who have been incentivized to make peace with forms of surveillance that do not interfere with the illusion of freedom. After all, the general public is well aware of state and corporate misuse of their personal data. Huge swaths of the public believe that it is not possible to go through the day without having their data collected by a voyeuristic government and voracious corporate interests, but at least 80 percent continue nonetheless to use social media platforms—to say nothing of search and streaming platforms. Everything worth having, it seems, comes with “your personal data” scrawled on the price tag: from access to information to insight into your far-flung friends and family members’ lives. The ince
tivization is so great as to look like compulsion, but the coercion is so subtle as to feel like free choice. To explain this phenomenon, the famous (and famously esoteric) French philosopher Gilles Deleuze advances the idea of the “society of control.” In such societies, the carrot has displaced the stick as a symbol of power. It is no longer static disciplinary institutions (like the school, military, and prison) that act most immediately upon individuals, enforcing rules and administering punishments to shape behavior. Instead, power flows through a network big enough to encompass all the infrastructure of everyday life, and veneers of flexibility and freedom mask feedback mechanisms that encourage (and even facilitate) certain behaviors over others.
On a practical level, the society of control looks increasingly like our own. Predictive policing promises to preempt crime, consumer data collected from people’s Amazon accounts and Google searches obliterates any need for the customer satisfaction survey, constant performance assessments at work and in school eliminate the need for the cumulative annual review, constantly updated credit scores trump character assessments and collateral as means of assessing credit-worthiness, and minute-to-minute biometric data makes every day a doctor’s visit. There are real benefits to these developments: comfort, convenience, even a sense of security that comes with the supposed objectivity of data. But the “freedom” afforded by this system is illusory, because the system controls us with incentives: whether it is accepting cookies because it is the only way to access a website or submitting to a background check because it is the only way to get a job, we are constantly trading personal information for basic participation in mainstream life. Privacy is the cost, increasingly, of accessing large parts of culture and countless economic opportunities—a choice that is no choice at all, but rather a form of quiet coercion that begins at birth.
But we would be remiss to lump together sites of surveillance, to imply coercion where there is none. A Social Security number is one thing; social media is another. How many of us, after all, remain terminally online even as the scandals stack up—even knowing that, for example, the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used data harvested from Facebook to influence voter behavior in the 2016 elections? How many of us have even shipped our DNA off to companies like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, receiving an imagined identity in exchange for $79 and a lifetime in the federal CODIS database? Apathy alone cannot explain choices made by those who know well and even agonize over their potentially dangerous consequences. Surely something else motivates us to surpass the security state’s wildest dreams in our willingness to share.
Maybe it is for the sake of psychic survival, as though sharing implies continued existence: I share, therefore I am. I am seen, therefore I am. Plenty of critics and theorists have noted the performative dimensions of American culture, which drive us to experience our lives as actors on a stage. The sociologist Erving Goffman first identified this theatrical quality to American social behavior in his 1956 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956). In this book, Goffman observes that people manage their identities in social interactions much like actors manage their characters in a performance, with everyday figures—whether spouse or stranger—doubling as audience for the never-ending one-man show. More than 20 years later, the social critic Christopher Lasch would quote Goffman in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. Going a step further than his predecessor, Lasch argues that the phenomenon of people living their lives as self-conscious performances “derives… from [a] waning belief in the reality of the external world,” something he views as a serious moral failing—the “narcissism” of the title. According to him, we are trapped in a hall of mirrors, endlessly seeking “reassurance of our capacity to captivate or impress others, anxiously searching out blemishes that might detract from the appearance we intend to project.”
Part of the problem, Lasch goes on to say, lies in the erosion of identity in the workplace. As workers are systematically de-skilled by the rise of technologies like the assembly line, and thus stripped of both expertise and ownership, “labor power takes the form of personality rather than strength or intelligence. Men and women alike have to project an attractive image and to become simultaneously role players and connoisseurs of their own performance.” We are socialized to self-medicate any sense of alienation with the consumption of commodities that masquerade as experiences, their advertisements careful to cultivate an “aura of romance” with “allusions to exotic places” and a heavy dose of sexual innuendo. No one peddles this quackery better than your average Instagram influencer, who leverages their personality to sell sponsored products to the rest of us equally alienated but less personable schmucks.
And so we return to social media. If the “hall of mirrors” problem Lasch describes were not depressing enough, social media is a hall of two-way mirrors: we are not only observed by ourselves and our peers in the mirrors, but by the state and corporate interests through them. It is for the sake of others—and, really, for the sake of the self we see reflected back in their eyes—that we remain doggedly online despite the scandalous overreach of things like the PATRIOT Act. But our efforts to overcome alienation online only compound it. Today, the government doesn't need to expend much effort to uncover the secrets of our inner lives. We expose them willingly ourselves—all for the sake of that rare moment online when we don’t feel quite so alone.
The cure, according to this and other polemics, is to dismantle the system of capitalism that produces these terrible feelings of isolation and alienation. On that front, however, surveillance is more than a mere affront to the senses, more than mere salt in the wound of loneliness. We need only to look to COINTELPRO to see how—and with what effect—the security state has historically targeted the Left. It is easy enough to justify staying on platforms like X and TikTok by appealing to the untrustworthiness of most major news outlets and claiming that the circulation of uncensored firsthand footage of events (like the ongoing genocide in Gaza) outweighs in its benefits the harms of data extraction. But as the very same platforms have lent themselves to the collaborative doxxing of protesters, making even easier the jobs of the authorities, I cannot help but wonder: To what extent do these platforms make us incapable of resistance, even as they alert us to atrocities worth resisting?
Schadenfreudian Slips
In 1968, just shy of the halfway point between the first telephone call in 1876 and the pending release of the iPhone 16 this fall, an anonymous individual—worried that someone was eavesdropping on her—wrote a plaintive request to Elizabeth L. Post’s advice column, “Doing The Right Thing,” in the Baltimore-based newspaper The Sun. “On several occasions when I have been talking to a friend,” wrote the anonymous reader, “I have heard the click of a receiver being lifted and I think someone must be listening in on my conversation. I don’t know who the party is, but it gives me a very uncomfortable feeling.” There was good reason for her concern. It was not hard, in the epoch of the party line, to illicitly listen in on the call of another. For example, an excerpt of George Sessions Perry’s book Tale of a Foolish Farmer, reprinted in a 1951 issue of The Christian Science Monitor with the title “We Live on a Party Line,” features a narrator who reflects bluntly, “I do not know anybody on the line who does not listen to every call that goes over it.” No doubt even the most paranoid individual enjoyed other people’s parties every now and again.
The telephone was one of many new technologies to foment—and prove well-founded—privacy concerns in the 19th and 20th centuries. Other such technologies, described in depth by the legal and cultural historian Sarah Igo in her book The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in America (2020), included everything from telegraph messages to the humble postcard. The former was subject to military wiretapping almost as soon as the first cables were laid in the years leading up to the Civil War, while the latter made reading other people’s mail as easy as turning a page. Crucially, Igo writes, both “posed [a]… familiar trade-off between privacy and convenience,” with the latter seemingly taking the lead. The telephone soon joined them in eroding the boundaries of space, time, and the “separate spheres” that sought to separate men and women. In that sense, these technologies also posed a trade-off between privacy and modernity: to take advantage of modern technology, one had to sacrifice certain expectations of privacy. And modernity had its many pleasures. There was a thrill, no doubt, to using the telephone to transcend the distance between two homes—even when such a thing would have been impossible (or, at least, uncouth) in person by the standards of the time.
But for all its supposed strictures, the Gilded Age was both prurient and performative. The best evidence for that fact was the explosion of tabloid journalism that sent shockwaves through society time and again in the last decades of the 19th century. Flurries of exposés uncovered individual secrets (from Oscar Wilde’s sex life to the state of the dead president Ulysses S. Grant’s teeth) and, later, social ills (from the backroom dealings of “Boss” Tweed to the brutal “treatments” of the Bellevue Mental Hospital, exposed by pioneering journalist Nellie Bly). These revelations fomented a popular movement in favor of increased transparency among those traditionally afforded privacy—namely, wealthy white men. This, in turn, helped generate the first iterations of “right to privacy” discourse, among both elites who expected it and those who had never before had the privilege. The advent of “instantaneous photography,” which was not only faster but far subtler than the arduous mechanical process that had preceded it, raised the stakes even higher: journalists were not just listening at the keyholes, but—from 1880 onwards—potentially pointing their cameras through them as well. (And if journalists were sneaking around like that, god knows what the average sex fiend could get up to with a Kodak. At least so went the logic of the time.) Spectacles in the press (and technology-related paranoia on the pages in between) were compounded by a growing sense that the state was closing in on its citizens—an army of census takers and civil servants seeking to register, number, and record information about everyone in the United States.
While concerns about privacy flared up with each new innovation, a revolution in the collection and collation of information had already begun, as the government harnessed the ability to “see” people in previously unprecedented ways. The advent of the Social Security Number, for example, raised the alarm among labor unions, who—coming off decades of brutal labor battles—feared that employers might take advantage of the 1936 enrollment process to dredge up an individual worker’s past employment history and probable union affiliation. But soon enough, anonymity would become a burden rather than a source of power. “It was possible… to suffer not only from too little but also from too much privacy,” writes Igo, noting how “invisibility to service providers or census takers… [might] limit one’s social opportunities and legal rights,” even as that level of visibility made one simultaneously more vulnerable to the state. This tension would remain intact and irresolvable through the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st. To a greater or lesser degree, all major American civil rights and social justice movements have been concerned with either gaining visibility, tethering new rights to that visibility, or else changing the way in which a given group is seen.
As once-new technologies became commonplace and the information revolution transitioned into the Information Age, the stakes of an emerging cultural uncertainty about the limits of privacy only rose. In a 1969 edition of the Hartford Courant, an unnamed concerned citizen speculated about a future in which “credit bureau reports, police reports, school questionnaires, health reports… and other records [are] available nationwide at the press of a computer button.” Taken to an extreme, “the entire life record of anyone would be instantly available,” and the lives of future generations would be lives “lived in public.” Credit checks were a particular sore point: a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission against one credit reporting agency (which allowed its subscribers to pull anyone’s credit information in less than two minutes) found that these “reports” consisted of a damning combination of ill-gotten information and blatant falsehoods. It was not uncommon, apparently, to have no idea that “credit reports” even existed until you were denied a loan.
But for much of the 20th century, ordinary people—like our sender of that anonymous complaint to The Sun—were actually far more concerned with the likes of “prying acquaintances, sociological field workers, and psychoanalysts.” Their observations took place outside the purview of the state, but the microscope they held to the behavior of others did as much to shape social norms as the coming Second Red Scare. Thus, says Igo, “the threat [of invasion] came not from one particular direction but from every corner of American society.” And some of these “invasions” were easier to counter than others: nothing could be done with nosy neighbors, but the Supreme Court was able to reinforce at least certain privacies—foremost being couples’ use of contraceptives—via Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.
By the final decades of the 20th century, people had begun to take matters into their own hands. They did so not by beating back the culture of surveillance, but by participating in it in new ways, for their own reasons: installing surveillance fixtures at home, checking caller ID before picking up the phone, moving to gated communities with their own CCTV setups. “Practices seemingly hostile to individual privacy—surveillance, voyeurism, and the extracting of confessions—would to a surprising extent in the 1970s and 1980s migrate from authorities to the citizenry itself,” notes Igo. And as new media—investigative documentaries on the one hand, reality TV shows on the other—emerged, “surveillance [became] a [real-time] spectator sport.” One need only think of an episode of Maury (1991-2022 , The Jerry Springer Show (1991-2018), or Judge Judy (1996-2021) to get the gist of this. The quintessential gladiatorial match of the age was a divorced couple duking it out on live television.
But why go on such a show in the first place? Perhaps because in “confessing,” one wields the power (however illusory) to control the narrative. This was the “confessional” turn of the late 20th century: through tell-all memoirs and televised exposés, then personal blogs and podcasts, Americans began to tell the world things their grandparents would only have told their priests—as though “the undoing of secrets [had] become the very substance of politics and self-making alike,” says Igo. These confessions were at once acts of autonomy and capitulations to the culture of the times, both reclamations of the right to privacy and public renunciations of that very same privacy. And it was in this uncertain landscape that social media would take shape, taking advantage of the ambiguous and ambivalent place of privacy in the hierarchy of American values to build platforms that quickly sold it out to the highest bidder. Whether information was being extracted with or without people’s consent, the lineup of buyers was the same as always.
First in line was the U.S. government. In 2013, the National Security Agency (NSA) contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed some of the inner workings of a massive surveillance infrastructure tasked with monitoring telephone and Internet usage across the United States. Brought into being in the wake of 9/11 with the PATRIOT Act, this infrastructure was expansive and indiscriminate in its collection: every American with phone or computer access as well as countless foreign nationals were caught in the net of observation. From 2007 onwards, Snowden revealed, the NSA had used PATRIOT to justify PRISM, a covert surveillance program that legally obligated major tech and telecom companies to give the NSA direct access to their servers. There, agents could avail themselves of huge amounts of personal information: email contents, chat logs, photographs and files stored in cloud services, search histories, social media contact lists, voice and video call recordings, location data, and more.
But it was not just the NSA that took advantage of the powers granted them by PATRIOT—and it was not “terrorists,” so much as Tom, Dick, and Harry that PATRIOT actually targeted with any modicum of success. Between 2003 and 2006 alone, the FBI issued subpoenas to obtain personal information about nearly 200,000 individuals, resulting in a single terrorism-related arrest that would have occurred even without the provisions of the PATRIOT Act. Many of the other “crimes” they caught during that time were immigration offenses. In a similar vein, federal law enforcement agencies took advantage of expanded permissiveness for covert “sneak and peek” searches of private homes—mostly to aid in the investigation of drug-related offenses, which were the subject of 76 percent of “sneak and peeks” in 2010. In 2011, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used their PATRIOT-granted powers to launch a lengthy investigation of the Occupy Wall Street protesters that resulted in numerous preemptive arrests and the gradual chilling of participation in the movement. And, of course, all of these agencies collaborated in targeting American Muslims—including by pumping money into the Muslim community itself to turn people into informants, a tactic straight from the playbook of the racist policing of the U.S. empire. There is thus a chilling continuity in both the tactics and targets of American surveillance.
The other throughline to this history is profit. State agents of surveillance necessarily collaborate with private tech companies, who also sell—and profit from—huge swaths of raw user data in what philosopher Shoshana Zuboff calls the “behavioral futures market,” which are bought by entities seeking “to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes.” Our location data, search engine queries, email contents, likes, shares, posts, instant messages, purchases, voice commands, app usage, health data, video consumption, and more are fed into the maws of the FAANGs and friends. They sell that information to advertisers, and we, in turn, are sold ever-more-tailored product suggestions. And there is no end in sight: “Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous intensification of the means of production,” writes Zuboff, “so surveillance capitalists and their market players are now locked into the continuous intensification of the means of behavioral modification.” Now, scrolling through TikTok, you are fed advertisements that masquerade as content; with a flick of your finger and a couple of taps, any one of those products can be yours. And you, too, can be paid pennies on the dollar to make a video unboxing and reviewing the product—achieving that new American Dream, the one where you become a TikTok influencer.
These companies prey on both loneliness and a desire for individual expression that, as Lasch and other midcentury theorists theorized, we can only express by means of purchasing power—since, after all, our ability to actually exercise meaningful control over our lives is stymied by the economic necessities of capitalism. We are the victims of a “collision,” claims Zuboff, between the contradictory outcomes of a historical process that has made individual expression a key part of our identity while simultaneously producing a consumer landscape in which “our sense of self-worth and needs for self-determination are routinely thwarted.” To get off the Internet, in such a world, is to cease to exist as an individual—much like ceasing to buy food or pay rent also means, albeit in a different way, “ceasing to exist as an individual.” In fact, to “go offline” would be a good euphemism for death; maybe in some circles, it already is.
The People's Privacy Policy
Is the Left one such circle? Framed another way, the question of social media and the Left would be familiar (and no doubt incendiary) to those longtime ideological opponents, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. In many ways, it boils down to this: How can the working class most effectively organize to achieve a successful revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system? Under ideal circumstances, social media would presumably lend itself to the “spontaneous revolution” envisioned by Luxemburg: an organic uprising of the working class motivated by shared experiences of oppression and exploitation. And yet, even as social media has made obvious the universality of those experiences, the capital-R revolution remains elusive. Movements have certainly made their way from social media to the streets: in the U.S., both the Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine movements are good examples. But modern organizers are limited in ways that their historical predecessors, who could operate with greater anonymity, were not. On the streets today, one risks not just physical violence, not just police surveillance, but the possibility, too, that a single identifying picture makes its way online where it can be tethered to other identifying information. After that, anything is possible. Pro-Palestine protesters have faced real economic consequences, like job loss and blacklisting—in some cases carried out by CEOs themselves, who have assumed the legacy of the House Un-American Activities Committee on their own shoulders.
What do the FBI and friends fear more: the possibility of spontaneous revolution, or an organized movement? At least during the Second Red Scare, it was the latter that haunted red-hunters—for whom the problem was not just that communists were organizing in the U.S., but that they did so under the radar. Indeed, in a 1947 edition of Newsweek, infamous FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself offered the following summation of communist organizing tactics in the earliest years of the Cold War: “Their most effective work is carried on under a cloak of secrecy,” he revealed—including to anyone interested in effective communist organizing as you, dear reader, might be. Never mind the “above ground” communists who publicly declared their allegiance to the Party, he continued; it was only in the communist “underground” that the organizing became serious and that “the dangers of Communism become real.” It was the organizing done in private that posed the gravest threat to the status quo.
Perhaps Hoover was onto something with his unintentional implication in that 1947 screed—though he would hate to know how inspiring I have found it. Perhaps the panacea we need is to take the Left back underground. And perhaps we can even find a degree of evidence to support that theory in the U.S. government’s outsized response to the direct actions carried out by climate activists with the Stop Cop City movement, who operate largely in secret. By the time 42 people are being charged with domestic terrorism for nonviolent property damage, you have to wonder what about the tactics being brought to bear in Atlanta has the authorities quite so on edge.
But as sexy as sleeper cells sound in theory, it has never been harder to go off-the-grid or start one’s life over again than it is in our globalized, gentrified, and gadgetized world. As unimaginable as it no doubt was then, it is virtually impossible today to imagine something like the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, the covert activist group that stole classified documents from a Pennsylvania FBI office in the early 1970s—thereby revealing COINTELPRO and triggering the formation of the Church Committee that called foul on the program. In fact, all forms of organizing out-of-sight and out-of-mind grow more difficult each day, as bosses build tools to track their employees’ eye movement and expressions (even at home) and the police funnel millions annually into new surveillance technologies. Even some of the quintessential, tried-and-true organizing tactics—like the “salting” of workplaces with workers who intend from the start to unionize them—are challenged by the easy accessibility of personal information online.
What is to be done? Luckily, the Internet abounds with ideas for its own evolution and obsolescence. A socialist alternative is easy to imagine: publicly owned, democratically governed, community-controlled. In his 2022 book, Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, technology writer Ben Tarnoff offers the following prescription for an ailing Internet: user data in cooperatively-owned and democratically-governed trusts, the right to opt out of certain (or all) forms of data collection, social media reimagined at a smaller scale, collaborations between communities and coders that “blur the line between users and creators,” and so on. The unofficial mouthpiece of all things digital, ChatGPT itself, can see such a world as clearly as Tarnoff himself. “In such a system, I would likely be developed and maintained as an open-source project, with my code and data governed democratically by a community of users, developers, and ethical oversight bodies to ensure transparency, accountability, and alignment with public interests,” it said when I asked.
And in the meantime? I hesitate to say, simply, Delete your accounts, because that would individualize a collective problem—falling short of the mark much as one man’s recycling does not a Green Revolution make. But at the same time, we would be remiss to dismiss the idea of an outright boycott of the FAANGs as mere Luddism. For Zuboff, the fight against surveillance capitalism must necessarily start with a strong declaration of intent—and a boycott speaks even louder than words. By targeting tech profits, a well-organized peoples’ embargo could force policy changes where past legislative attempts to regulate technology companies and protect privacy have failed. At the same time, it could insist to tech companies that they answer to the people—not a handful of paranoid technocrats in Washington, D.C., and certainly not snack and clothing companies interested in participating in the data harvest. With mainstream platforms out of the picture, even if only briefly, a boycott could also accelerate the coming of the world described by Tarnoff in his work—whether because people flock to existing privacy-friendly platforms, like DuckDuckGo over Google and Signal over iMessage, or because they take advantage of a window of demand to debut new, democratically-governed platforms.
Of course, it might well be the case that, while never too big to fail, the FAANGs are far too big to be felled by the blow of even a well-organized boycott on a massive scale. A concerted action would nonetheless communicate to legislators that a more offensive approach is necessary: regulation at the scale and scope of that which, in 1911, broke the seemingly unbeatable Standard Oil monopoly into thirty-four bite-size chunks. For that to be possible, however, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890—eroded by decades of judicial reinterpretation—would need teeth once more. With companies broken down into their constituent parts, the process of legislating toward public ownership and the democratic governance of people’s platforms could begin.
In the meantime, we remain on the defensive. We are forced to “hide in our own lives,” Zuboff emphasizes, by means of everything from VPNs to newfangled “signal-blocking phone cases… LED privacy visors to impede facial-recognition cameras … a scent diffuser that releases a metallic fragrance when an unprotected website or network is detected on any of your devices,” and more. “Security culture” is increasingly common parlance on the Left: even college organizers have taken their business to Signal for fear of surveillance by university administrators and other authorities. But as ingenious as such evasions might be, they are symbolic of a sick society. “It is not OK to have to hide in your own life; it is not normal,” insists Zuboff in a simple ending to a dense masterpiece. “It is not OK to spend… conversations comparing software that will camouflage you and protect you from continuous unwanted invasion… It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance, and desire to be catalogued, manipulated, and then used … for the sake of someone else’s profit,” says Zuboff. “[We] should not take [these things] for granted because they are not OK.”
From that follows the most important thing that a boycott might do: inject an element of possibility into the development of technology. While a combination of cultural and economic history allows us to see, in retrospect, how we have gotten to this point, no future is inevitable. Silicon Valley supervillains peddle an attitude of technological determinism (most recently about artificial intelligence) not because the future is actually determined, but because they want to ensure their place in the capitalist hierarchy of tomorrow by speaking their preferred future into existence. Our priorities are different—and if we were to go offline, perhaps we would decide to work toward an entirely different future. It is hard to imagine, but perhaps that even looks like a world with less Internet instead of more.
The path between us and such a world is lined with many obstacles, some baked into the problem of monopolization and others taking the form of our family members, friends, and neighbors who believe that surveillance is necessary for safety. Those who defend government overreach with brash declarations of “having nothing to hide” are the bogeymen of privacy advocates, civil libertarians, and people everywhere who do have something to hide. It is not about hiding, though; it’s about control—control over our personal information, its politicization, and the potential worlds (good and bad) that information can be used to create.
If Audre Lorde’s famous admonition that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is correct, then the movement for a world without Big Tech monopolies cannot begin on the very platforms it seeks to subvert. No Facebook invite to the Facebook boycott can possibly be taken seriously; fighting for the digital will require organizing in the analog. When in doubt about how best to do so, about how privacy should figure into our own political activity, we might refer to the following acronym: WWHHM, short for What would Hoover hate the most? Let the answer to that question guide us. Privacy remains an important asset to the Left—one that we must fight to keep from falling prey to planned obsolescence. The revolution will not be televised; perhaps the time has to come to accept that it will not be livestreamed on Twitch or TikTok either—and to imagine resistance anew.
