Pancryptics Abstract

We are witness and accomplice in this moment to a breathtaking technological transformation of human capacities, assumptions, and limits. New media, biomedicine, and other disruptive technological developments confront millions of human beings with unprecedented quandaries and promises. Urgent legal, theoretical, and popular contests over the meaning and force of individual agency caught up in these developmental transformations repeatedly make crucial recourse to the subject of privacy. Consider, for example, the importance of privacy in court decisions and popular discussions concerning reproductive technologies and electronic surveillance.

I argue that the sense and significance of privacy is produced and reproduced through technologically mediated practices in ongoing transformation. The same is true no less of “publicity,” although I will show that in both the hyperbolic and yet commonplace technophobic and technophilic responses to disruptive technological change there is typically a foregrounding of the private that enacts a pernicious evacuation of the public altogether.

Digital networked publication and collaboration practices and the social software and media technologies that facilitate them are palpably reconstituting the lived demarcation of public from private life in this historical moment, and so reconstitute much of the lived experience of the political as such. Certainly, conventional champions of privacy who would treat it as an unproblematic "capacity" imperiled or empowered by particular technological developments discover soon enough that the values they imagine to arise spontaneously from and abide undisturbed within "nature" are in fact stable neither in their attributes, conditions, nor their implications. These developments expose the problems and even incoherence of privacy in general parlance, but also reveal that privacy is open to promising contestations. They italicize the need for renewed deliberation to influence developmental outcomes to better reflect a democratic conception of privacy and support public goods like due process, fair use, transparency, ongoing innovation, and free association.

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