More Privacy

"Privacy" comes from the Latin privare, "to deprive" -- and it is crucial to grasp the relation of privacy to privation even now: the necessity I mentioned in the last post/tweet that we disentangle privacy politics from privatization politics is very much a matter of determining just what manner of deprivation yields the dignity and freedom to which privacy advocacy is presumably devoted. Of course, I wrote a whole dissertation on the topic of privacy -- much of which no longer impresses me very much I'll admit, and some of which actively embarrasses me. Frankly, this twitter stunt-treatise on the topic strikes me as more commendable really. Anyway, the point I keep insisting on that never seems to catch on with anybody (hell, maybe I'm wrong to think I'm right?), is that privacy is not a matter of securing control over how one appears -- which, after all, isn't compatible with political freedom on my Arendtian construal of it and also, too, isn't even possible really -- but a matter of rendering insecure any interested interpretation of how I appear that threatens to be misread as exhaustive or final. Only in objecting is the object made subject.