MXII. Description As Threat

Where Hughes’ own case for privacy departs from such conventions in my view is in its axiomatic stringency, and in the extremity of its proposed applications. Consider the example through which Hughes first seeks to illustrate his sense of just what privacy consists of, and by what it might be threatened. “If two parties have some sort of dealings,” writes Hughes, conjuring up sociality at a very general, even exhaustive, level, “then each has a memory of their interaction.” Further, obviously enough, “[e]ach party can speak about their own memory of this [interaction].” Without pausing even to begin a new sentence, Hughes then asks what seems to me a rather curious question (it immediately follows the last statement with a semicolon): “[H]ow could anyone prevent it?”

I wonder myself, to the contrary, if it would occur to many people at all to desire to prevent other individuals from testifying to their own memories of events in which we have likewise taken part in any kind of general way in the first place -– even if, say, one might easily imagine isolated instances where one might desire such a thing for fear of embarrassment or the like.

Hughes, however, seems to regard this perceived basic threat of being described by others on terms that are not fully under one’s control as a commonplace one, widespread enough in fact to provide a firm foundation from which to erect his more general case. “If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties,” he continues on. “The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech,” and he then adds, “it will not go away merely because we might want it to,” clearly implying that indeed many (or even all: “we”) might so want it to.

“Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible,” Hughes proposes, as if this were the most obvious suggestion in the world.

But isn’t it often, even usually, the case that it is perfectly harmless or even desirable that personal information be spoken of? What could be more commonplace? Even granting that there are conspicuous occasions when an unwanted disclosure of personal information is unappealing, it seems hyperbolic to generalize from these cases to the stronger claim that to be susceptible to description is to be intolerably vulnerable as such. In Hughes’ account it is almost as if the susceptibility to description, which would seem to say the least an ineradicable dimension of public life in its most elementary characterization, is always an intolerable violation, come what may, whatever form it takes, with whatever consequences.

Hughes points out that one “cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence.” This is because “[i]t is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak.” Here, once again, the violation of privacy in such a formulation seems less a matter of exposure to unwanted scrutiny than it is a matter particularly of bearing the burden of unwanted description.

And while it seems perfectly reasonable to want to be protected from inaccurate, misleading, fraudulent, or literally threatening descriptions that organizations might circulate to facilitate our manipulation or control it scarcely seems right to imply that every time it is to the advantage of an organization or individual to speak of us this will likewise disadvantage us to be so spoken of.

To take an example that tends to loom large in market libertarian accounts of properly functioning social orders, it is precisely because we do not control entirely the terms in which we are publicly described that “reputations” exert a normative force impelling better conduct from public actors, many of whom could no doubt produce public rationalizations to retroactively justify any conduct of their own, however unappealing. Again, it is difficult to generalize from a concern with particular abuses of description to a denigration of the public susceptibility to description as such.

Foundational to Hughes’ own case is a forceful distinction of privacy from secrecy. “Privacy is not secrecy,” he simply declares in his Manifesto’s second sentence. Although few would be tempted to collapse the meaning of the two in any case, Hughes manages to distinguish them in terms that render both concepts importantly idiosyncratic. “A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know,” he goes on to write, “but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know.”

This might seem to suggest that the difference between secrecy and privacy for Hughes is simply a register of the degree to which one is exposed to uninvited scrutiny and so susceptible to unwanted description. But the discussion of privacy that follows in the piece belies any suggestion that privacy is just a matter of a more moderate or tentative withdrawal from the public sphere than the more absolute withdrawal that secrecy seems to be for him.

“If the content of my speech is available to the world,” writes Hughes later in essay, then “I have no privacy.” Note that Hughes does not suggest that one’s privacy is diminished by the accessibility of one’s speech, but utterly obliterated by this accessibility. Elsewhere, he writes that “[w]hen my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of [a] transaction, I have no privacy.” Once again, the phrasing here suggests not an impairment or diminution of privacy, but its obliteration.

Now, it is certainly true that growing numbers of people have left discernible traces of their purchasing habits, say, by using credit cards in their own names over telephone lines or via the Web, and likewise of their reading habits by consenting to register by name before accessing online versions of mainstream news-sources and popular magazines and the like. And it is true that by means of such traces the agents of corporations, governments, and other organizations can now discern patterns from which to compile personal profiles of extraordinary depth and predictive power. But even if many people will admit to a certain uneasiness about such unprecedented levels of scrutiny, and worry that new kinds of abuses are now possible that demand serious address in law and in policy, it is not right to suppose that this emerging state of affairs inevitably constitutes an outright obliteration of personal privacy rather than simply signifying a transformation of what privacy is coming to mean in everyday life.

It is not, after all, just corporations and governments and comparably authoritative organizations that pry into our personal affairs in the present day, but more and more often ordinary people who do so in their everyday commerce with one another. It is becoming commonplace for people to do an online search of a person’s name before meeting them for the first time or once a new acquaintance has been made. It isn’t clear that people experience the unprecedented exposure of personal information via the suddenly ubiquitous recourse to Google and other online search engines necessarily as a violation of their privacy at all, so much as a shift in the set of expectations on the basis of which they distinguish what properly counts as the public and the private as such, a shift in their sense of the authority and relevance of publicly available information and the ways in which it connects up to personal identity, and a shift in the sorts of demands they are likely to make of their privacy in the first place.

If nothing else, Hughes’ formulations on privacy, publicity, and secrecy seem to overlook a familiar dilemma of the published, namely, that as often as not publication is compatible with nearly perfect obscurity. To be vulnerable to scrutiny is not necessarily to be scrutinized, that information is available provides no assurance that it will be availed of –- all to the endless frustration of the many people who so crave attention that they provide content online for free.

Again, Hughes defines a “private matter” as something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, when the truth is few if any of us are ever in any kind of position to command the attention of the whole world under any circumstances. Similarly, to say of a “secret matter” that it is “something one doesn’t want anybody to know” seems a curiously implausible amplification of the usual sense of the term. Typically we think of secrecy more as a restriction than as an absolute truncation of the flow of information. Secrets may be clandestine, intimate, or even open, but almost never do they imply perfect silences, which is why so many popular sayings imply that only the dead can keep secrets entirely to themselves.

It seems fairly clear that Hughes’ curious pairing of the “secret” and the “private” in his piece derives, in fact, directly from the special technical use of the terms that describe the functions of the secret and the public keys in the asymmetric encryption systems on which cypherpunks dote so much in so many of their discussions, schemes, and utopian projections.

Recall that public key encryption systems rely for their effectiveness on the unique mathematical pairing of a secret key that must be revealed to no-one and a public key that literally anybody can access. Hughes seems to have taken up these technical usages, and then redeployed versions of them as political categories. “The act of encryption… removes information from the public realm,” writes Hughes later in the piece, which is to say that encryption renders information inaccessible. “[W]e desire privacy,” Hughes confides, conjuring up a “we” that might not in fact be mobilized at all by the idiosyncratic value that “privacy” has come to name for him here, as witness (the whole sentence from which the last quotation was culled): “Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction ha[s] knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction….”

For Hughes, “[t]o encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy,” but elsewhere he supplements this point with the suggestion that “encryption” itself “is fundamentally a private act.” Privacy on this view is not so much the traditional space of the oikos into which one withdraws for relief and recuperation from the exactions of public life, nor is it a state of dignity, integrity, or security which can be either violated or enjoyed as such, but it emerges in Hughes’s “Manifesto” specifically as a way of acting.

Remember that in Hughes’ definition “privacy” is essentially a power of selective revelation, of self-description, against which he repeatedly arrays the countervailing threat of susceptibility to description by others. For Hughes the actual details that might be exposed in a particular violation of privacy seem a secondary consideration compared to the co-incident circumscription of the agency of the one who would control the terms on which any personal details whatever are revealed and apprehended in public as perfectly as possible.

“When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of [a] transaction,” that is to say, when the terms of a transaction connect particular content to his name in ways that he does not perfectly control himself, then Hughes has insisted, “I have no privacy” at all. This conclusion initially seemed puzzlingly hyperbolic in the absence of a better accounting of the specific information involved in the revelation.

But it is clear now that the specifics of the personal information involved in the example are secondary to the impact of any uncontrolled descriptive or otherwise revelatory alterity at all that plays out against the grain of Hughes’ own self-descriptive agency. To be described on terms beyond one’s control would seem tantamount to an interminable exposure: “I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.”

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