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by kyrenaios, on 30 December 2020
Filed under: gemini, philosophy
Gemini is a very interesting idea. Something like gopher, which I've maintained as my only online homepage till recently, but it promises to be modern – and supports, among other things, Unicode text (καλῶς γ’ ἄν ἔχοι!), something indispensable for any philologue writers out there. Now, of course, all of its technical advantages have been well-trodden grounds for a few decades now; yet I have a distinct suspicion that the sentiment which I have long shared – that the Web is rapidly ossifying around a hard kernel of advertising and surveillance from which it is no longer possible to imagine an alternate course – this sentiment has become verisimilar enough that entire communities have decided that it is worthwhile to use a whole other protocol: make a clean start, carve out a space, however minuscule, apart from the gigantic commercialized realms we've long had to resign ourselves to.
I find this idea quite agreeable, if not exactly world-shattering by any means. Recently I found, in Bruce Schneier's excellent 2018 book on online insecurity¹, a characterization of the orbis terrarum Interretialis that I liked a lot; the Web, he wrote, is increasingly adopting a power structure straight out of medieval Europe, wherein giants like Google, Apple, Facebook & al. play the role of feudal lords: swear your fealty (in the form of service lock-in) and dedicate all your private thoughts to your liege, who will in turn reward you with convenient services and protection from malfeasants.
All this is very true. By contrast, I might add to his description, the world of FOSS quite resembles the Swiss & other republics in this picture: they'll never be powerful enough to take on the great monarchies and empires, true, but one can hope to be left to one's own devices to some degree. Security comes from whatever the community can put together, plus the fact that they are simply too far out of the way and not valuable enough for the most powerful organized bandits to bother with. It might feel like a backwater at times, and some (OK, a lot) of your neighbors might be religious extremists; but μὰ τὸν κύνα, some days one just wakes up to the view, takes a deep breath of the fresh air and thinks to oneself: this too is worth it!
If all this makes us (nous autres, bons Européens, Nietzsche would've said) sound a little too – idiotic for anyone's liking, I truly apologize. And let us not push the above metaphor too far and start a discussion over the distinction between urban republics (like those in Italy) and a rural republic like Switzerland. The point is, though I would value my privacy as much as anyone else, there is something uncanny about this concept of privacy which most people would praise as a good κατ’ αὐτό in a liberal society. Uncanny enough that we are all well familiar with the cliché of "I have nothing to hide, but I value my privacy very much!" For, to take a slightly cynical point of view, isn't liberal society, which bills itself as an open society (Popper ait), essentially also the society of atomic individualism par excellence, if only to create this feeling of intense interiority, previously restricted to the domain of religion, that is now repurposed to fund the unlimited expansion of consumerist capitalism?
In a word, privacy might be yet another example of the Eve's apple of capitalist life: we are taught that it's good, we are made to desire it; all the same it is forbidden from us, all the technological advances and corporate power are poured into thwarting any remaining semblance of normal life that does not involve being subject to nonstop surveillance. Between the two, a space of discontent.
One might react by asking "just what is privacy good for anyway?" And this appears to be the position of a recent article by Firmin DeBrabander², who teaches political philosophy. It is not my intention to write a response of any kind to him, nor to engage in critique (immanent or else). It strikes me as probable that DeBrabander knows full well, and intends the piece to be inflammatory – thus taking aim squarely at Glenn Greenwald, as celebrated a privacy advocate as anyone knows, as opposed to taking the cowardly way out of attacking, say, criminals who take advantage of their privacy to do harm.
For this, I think, DeBrabander deserves credit, but not for this alone. We might even be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and ignore his Arendtian, juvenile musings on the Greek word ἴδιον. This is a common symptom of Heideggerians, even reluctant ones – speaking of Arendt, not DeBrabander – we can forgive Heidegger himself for his terrible etymologizing (seriously, read Plato's Cratylus for a comparison) because the force of his insights makes us willing to wade through even prose as terrible as his. By contrast, Lord knows how many of our good Heideggerians devote all their lives to illustrating the adage that one may be Greeked in letter, but not at all in spirit.
As for DeBrabander, I do think that he makes some good points. Then again, if it is true that "nur ein Gott kann uns retten" (pace Heidegger), it is clear that neither Greenwald, nor Snowden, nor anyone else we know of is the god we are desperately waiting for. No one is going to push society forward by staying private online. But then – what choice have we? Vote? Demonstrate? Organize? Critique? Dutifully work our way up the academic hierarchy until (ὃ δὲ μὴ γένοιτο!) we become an associate professor in political philosophy? Ross Douthat isn't a name I expected to agree with often, not from my earliest memories of reading his screeches contra papas heterodoxos. Yet I cannot help but feel that his latest writings³ strike a certain chord, that it is today the spectre of capitalism, rather, that is haunting not just Europe but the entire world. A spectre of defeated, morally bankrupt, grotesquely irresponsible, intellectually vacuous liberal capitalism which nevertheless refuses to die, whose enemies, thought to be numerous and powerful (Islamism, Russia, China, Viktor Orbán, Brexiteers, Trump, Bolsonaro, the list goes on and on), turn out to be paper tigers who can barely sustain their own ideological consistency and let alone challenge the hegemon.
I suspect I am not the only one – and this not only because of the apeiropandemic times we live in – who is growing more sympathetic by the day to the ("authentic" or not, it matters not a whit) Plato of the seventh letter, a Plato who's had his youthful idealism forced out of him by exposure first to the political upheavals in Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and then in his dealings with the tyrants of Syracuse. But the god he was waiting for, τὸ Σωκρατικὸν δαιμόνιον, it never came to him. Did it come with the rise of the Christians? No one can answer that except Plato, and he died many centuries too early for us to know.
If all this sounds suspiciously like some sort of mystical obscurantism, and if anyone were to want to leverage some or other brand of materialism to dismiss all of this, then it is just as well – it would simply validate the definition of "un écrit" as "pas à lire" – at least not by dunces and blockheads. But to fully argue that line of thought out would take up perhaps several books' worth of effort, and I may be excused for now for being content merely to till in this particular garden of Adonis.
What I remain committed to is the idea that the truly political is always coupled to a certain form of death – this much Sophocles' Antigone has taught and will always teach us – and so perhaps, inevitably, if we dig into etymology (and wave our hands enough times), we'll find out that it is life that makes idiots of us all. Whence the key to that notorious passage in the Phaedo, where Socrates teaches that all of us living are really just waiting around to die; yet that, since we are nothing but the gods' possessions, we may not kill ourselves – or speed ourselves along to death in any way – but must spend what little time we have on philosophizing best as we can. This might be as best a "Socratic" teaching on privacy as we may draw out: let us all be idiots, let us all be private individuals who know nothing, because it turns out inevitably that those who participate in the public life of the polis, the sophists with their eloquent lectures and soaring public orations who can turn the tide of public opinion and manipulate their way to honour and positions of power – they are the dumbest of us all.
1: Bruce Schneier, Click Here to Kill Everybody, 2018, ch. 4.
2: Firmin DeBrabander, "What If Privacy Matters Less Than We Think?"
3: Ross Douthat, "The crisis of the liberal zombie order"
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