Add social policies and trends to the mixture - police profiling, mandatory drug-testing, workplace keylogging, the nanny (welfare) state, traffic surveillance, biometric screening, electronic bracelets - and the long-heralded demise of privacy is no longer mere scaremongering.
As privacy fades - so do intimacy, personal safety, and self-esteem (mental health) and with them social cohesion. The ills of anomic modernity - alienation, violence, and crime, to mention but three - are, therefore, directly attributable to diminishing privacy. This is the irony: that privacy is increasingly breached in the name of added security (counter-terrorism or crime busting). We seem to be undermining our societies in order to make them safer.
First published here:
http://samvak.tripod.com/culture.html
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