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The Death Of Privacy
How our digital technologies return us to the pre-industrial age
Up until the late 1700s, privacy was almost an unknown concept. As hunter-gatherers, we had no privacy because we lived in small intimate tribes. Then, after the agricultural revolution, we gathered into modestly-sized conurbations in which privacy was likewise essentially impossible. As nearly everyone lived within small villages and towns, neighbors were generally privy to all of one’s life events. As there was little in the way of mass entertainment, gossip provided what today we get from trash TV reality shows: salacious details about other people’s intimacies and weaknesses, scandals, and other mindless distractions.
Even the very wealthy, who could afford to isolate themselves in large houses, were lacking in privacy because they relied upon numerous servants to take care of their many quotidian affairs. And although the wealthy were often astonishingly obtuse with regard to the fact servants were human beings too, this obtuseness did not protect them. Servants shared gossip as assiduously as any village crone.
It was only with the emergence of large towns and then cities as the Industrial Revolution picked up steam that the first adumbrations of personal privacy began to take shape. With laws against libel and slander becoming more common and…
