Original URL: http://pleasedonotfeedthemonkeyonmyback.blogspot.com/2014/06/my-son-was-born-after-age-of-privacy.html
A few weeks ago I put up a question on my Facebook, asking friends what they remembered from childhood that children now will never know.
That weekend I read a book on the subject that chilled me to the bone.
It was the second draft of my uncle's history of our family. It's also a rigorous examination of the key central mechanic of America class motility-- the key to America's success as the land of opportunity.
Privacy.
You see, every individual in my family who ever made a name for him/herself, took up a step socially, or set up her/his kids for a better future.was able to do so by moving to a new place and telling a new story about themselves.
Privacy. It is how Americans have succeeded in defining ourselves by our potential, rather than our pasts.
And it is gone.
My uncle spent 35 years puzzling out the pieces of Grandfather's side of the family. Stripping off all the veils from Grandmother's side took only five years with current information technology.
So what? you ask.
So this past month a close friend of mine was tracked down by a childhood molester. This happened despite a cross country move, name change, and years of rigorous active paranoia trying to control what personal data appeared in search engine results.
I was painfully reminded of reading about an elementary school teacher's desperate plea to Google to remove her name from the internet-- in early childhood she'd been at the center of a bizarre tragedy and her name had appeared in local news. Decades later, casual internet tinkering by her students and their parents was resurrecting the story and ruining her career. Think about that-- everything she'd accomplished in her whole life, rendered worthless by a horror that happened before she could remember.
Growing up, business books on my father's shelf had a ton of advice on how to speak about your paycheck and perks, your job duties, your previous employers-- the bread and butter of an interview, the quintessence of self-promotion. Nowadays much of that advice is deemed counterproductive-- after all, even if your real work differed from the official description (a situation about as common as dirt) saying as much these days puts you at risk of the universal interview kiss of death-- looking like you're lying.
Speaking of universal, I have several friends involved in the technological march toward universal medical records-- a utopia vision of a future collective data base where all your health data follows you from birth to grave. I live in terror of this idea: I am quite literally alive because of points in my life when I moved to a new system and specifically denied permission for my records to follow me-- forcing my new doctors to assess me with fresh eyes. Actually, studies are *very* consistent at showing that more data does NOT make for better decisions;-- the human brain is built to do more with less. (Go read _Blink_, everybody.)
And speaking of more with less, I'm forever seeing these inspirational social media memes about moving on from the people in your life who don't make you a better you-- which is ironic because social media has made moving on from people gosh darned difficult. "Friendship" has become an opt-out, rather than an opt-in, relationship...with a distinct exchange of quality for quantity as we expend our energies sharing a morning snapshot with a hundred people in a tenth of the time it would take to have a real conversation with one.
There's some huge blessings possible here-- especially for an uber-introvert like me who has a lot of love to give and not many spoons for giving it-- but there is still some part of me for whom "real friends" are the people you can read by scent and body language and by the quality of their silence. I suspect my little boy will grow up in a world where the only word for such people is "relatives." At the same time, my uncle points out that children today will grow up in a global version of small town small mindedness, where things they said and did decades ago are only a click away.
We can no longer burn our old love letters.
Looking back, I realize that as a growing child myself during the dawn of the Information Age, all the futuristic network-world fantasies I ever read had omething in common. Every single spec. fic writer I ever read, every single one, envisioned the 'Net as a place of anonymity, the ultimate field of self invention, an arena entirely separate from real world identity and action. I think the alternative was, simply, unimaginable.
We have destroyed the natural boundary between history and memory.
My son will grow up in a world where his ability to define himself, reveal himself, and ultimately create himself will be constrained beyond the imagination of his pioneer ancestors. He will live out his life in a cage of data, and all he can do in life will only add bars.
