You Have One Identity, Drones

I have just read Lauren Weinstein's excellent blog on Mark Zuckerberg's latest frolics: basically an attempt to integrate Facebook, and your one uber-identity, into everything you do or comment on, on the web. His justification for this is as follows:

"You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

Pretty sinister, hey? That, or the devastatingly naive comments of someone who, as Laura points out, is too young to have acquired any "life baggage" as yet and cannot possibly understand the implications of what they are saying. Or thirdly, the cynical comments of someone who needs to find any justification for their business model, and ways for it to keep on expanding (although by now we can assume that the need for continued expansion is not about the money, but about the game itself).

Sure, I hear you saying - if you're against this problem, don't be on Facebook. Or just have a fake Facebook identity to comment on the websites you want to. Great. But then maybe you can't comment on your favourite blogs: y'know, join the big debate. And I think we can already imagine how people not on Facebook, or who have a private alter ego on Facebook, will increasingly start to be viewed, not just socially, but in the competitive jobs market.

The whole thing has got me thinking about the concept of privacy. Zuckerberg's 'belief' that anonymity must intrinsically be a bad, even dangerous thing - and the increasing willingness of other people to share that view - is leading towards the kind of world I don't want to live in. Here's why:

"The greatest passions, however, require privacy, and the good society
would not deserve to be so-called if it lacked ample opportunities for
seclusion and solitude. In work and in love, creativity requires time
alone, to think and plan. Great, passionate works of art are not
usually brought into existence by committee. The deepest friendships
and loves also need time away from prying eyes to blossom; time to
share intimacies not shared with others; time to build a special
microcosm of private meaning within the wider, public world. A society
devoid of privacy would be a society with no room for great passion,
and hence not a place I would want to live. Warrantless wiretaps and
extensive networks of closed-circuit television cameras have
contributed to the United States and England being ranked alongside
other “endemic surveillance societies” like Russia and China,
according to Privacy International. But those who say, in defense of
such invasive government actions, that people who have done nothing
wrong have nothing to hide, reveal a profound misunderstanding of the
importance of privacy. Privacy matters not because of the bad that it
hides, but because of the good and the great that it nurtures."

I've been saying that last sentence to myself over and over. This quote is from a blog by Bradley Ducet called Freedom and Virtue in the Good Society. Give it a read, as I link to this blog from Twitter and quite possibly, Facebook...