Privacy And The Electric Monk

Many believe several contradictory things about privacy. If we could figure out why this is, we could solve a lot of problems with governments disrespecting fundamental civil liberties, and worse, getting away with it.

The writer Douglas Adams is most known for his Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, with five books in it. However, he wrote a couple of other series as well, and in one of them, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, there is a very special character known as the Electric Monk.

The idea of an Electric Monk was simple. Just like a VCR would record TV shows for you so you wouldn’t have to be there to see them at exactly the time they broadcast, an Electric Monk could watch all that garbage for you and more, believing every single word of it, so you could go about your daily life instead. It could believe in all the world’s major religions simultaneously and could hold eight completely contradictory ideas in its head at the same time without having any symptoms of malfunction.

Here’s where today’s general statements on privacy from the public comes into play. You can easily hear all these phrases from one and the same person in the continuous timeframe of five minutes while discussing privacy:

• “What Stasi did was horrible, opening people’s letters and reading them.”
• “I don’t mind the NSA/GCHQ/FRA reading my stuff, I have done nothing bad, I have nothing to hide.”
• “It’s horrible how they’re making examples of people who did absolutely nothing bad.”
• “I’m not interesting, they won’t care about my phonecalls anyway.”
• “People have a right to privacy. It’s in the Constitution.”
• “Just because the government is reading all people’s correspondence doesn’t make us East Germany. (Just look here at the map, it’s obvious we’re not. We’re here and they were over there.)”

While this is admittedly stereotypical, it’s also the points you’d tend to hear. You will notice that they are completely, one hundred per cent, contradictory and irreconcilable. There is a major cognitive disconnect that allows people to argue completely contradictory points in the context of privacy without even realizing that they do.

So what do we do about this?

We talk about it. We keep talking about it. The best way of making people think about a subject is simply to talk about it, bringing the subject to front row center from time to time. When contradictions are pointed out, some people will dismiss them just offhand. But many will actually start questioning why they think contradictory things.

Right now, the public perception on privacy is as self-contradictory as powdered water. We need to work together to change that.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.