Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Lost To Be Found

Contra privacy rights discourses, privacy-qua-privation is not only NOT threatened by algorithmic profiling but vastly expanded and imposed. The greatest danger of the surveilled/profiled algorithmically legible subject is that it threatens our public, not our private selves. What Arendt sought to describe and defend as "public happiness" is not available on the terms proffered the false publicity of the surveilled/profiled subject. But in my classrooms and in union meetings, in public demonstrations and assemblies, both the pining and the pleasure Arendt is talking about are still palpable. The phenomenological inhabitation of democracy and its openings onto experimental political practices -- what Arendt called "The Lost Treasure of the Revolutionary Tradition" -- is always lost, the better to be found, and re-founding, in each new generation.

For more, check out my Twitterized Privacy Treatise and under posts available under the "Surveillance" topic tag at The Superlative Summary.

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