IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013 - 7
Is privacy an inalienable human right or the last
refuge of the scoundrel? The serial killer, the child
abuser, or the gun crazy sociopath can all claim the
defense of American judge Thomas M. Cooley who
defined privacy as the "right to be let alone" - the freedom to mind my own business. For Eldred Capurro
and Nagel privacy is a much more positive notion:
We become who we are only through interplay
with one another in a shared historico-temporal
world. We share world-situations with one another that change, evolve, dissolve, reconstitute
themselves thus being constituted as we. The
advent of digital technologies and the ongoing
merging of the physical world with the cyberworld lead to the predicament of the possibility
of the Big Bugging Operation enabled by powerful digital technologies that diligently record
everything so that even on a solitary walk in the
woods the trees have ears and eyes.
Digital Whoness provides a solid framework for
thinking philosophically about the phenomenon of
computation itself. Eldred's critique of Floridi's posthuman data-driven infosphere is timely. Just as we
cannot reduce the mind to the brain or the psyche to
neurobiology, neither can we reduce knowledge and
information to bits and bytes nor reason to an algorithm. Capurro comments (p. 177):
Being informed means nothing other than noticing the difference between 0000110001000000
and 0001100001000000. To say that being is
computation (computari est esse) means that
everything that is is translatable into a digital
form. Being in-formed and im-pressed by binary code is the ultimate metaphysical destiny
of Western humankind.
In criticizing Alan Westin's commonly held definition,
Privacy is the claim of individuals, groups or
institutions to determine when how and to what
extent information about them is communicated
to others (p.159)
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE
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WINTEr 2013
the authors argue that we need a much more proactive and creative notion of privacy, one in which the
individual self engages in an interplay involving concealment and public exposure. This interplay has its
philosophical roots in the Presocratics, particularly
Parmenides - where the subtle dialect of self and
other began - and Eldred is particularly strong here
in refuting Floridi's "synchronic individualization."
But what is missing from this otherwise excellent
work is a coming-to-terms with privacy as the sine
qua non of personal qualitative experience - be it
that of an aesthetic erotic moral or a spiritual order -
beyond Aristotelian privation and Heideggerian
Being. While applauding the move away from privacy-protected autonomy" towards intercultural
ethics (Capurro), socio-political interplay (Eldred)
and a situational legal approach to the private/public divide (Nagel) I am yet to be convinced that the
concepts of Heidegger and Marx alone are adequate
intellectual weapons for the battle against technocratic pragmatism and the Big Brothers of cyberspace - the digital demigods and their armies who
control our virtual domains. Are they like the messenger Hermes electronically mediating our access
to the public good or like the cyclops Polyphemus
guarding the cave of our privacy in the interests of
the "gainful game"? Alternatively what, in the world
of information, is the value of "gainless games" (like
reading, visiting public libraries, cyberactivism) and
can we continue to play them in future?
The conversation started by Digital Whoness needs
to be continued and developed beyond the privacy/
publicness debate. I was left with some unanswered
questions like "Why is anonymity important?" "Is
our contemporary obsession with whoness as fame,
personality, and "who said what" a by product of the
electronic media? "Where is the needed philosophical
counter attack on the doyens of cyberspace - Shannon Wiener and Turing, Kurzwell and his singularity,
Wheeler's "It from Bit" and the technophilia of the
Transhumanists?" "Is Wikileaks an ally or an enemy
of freedom?" Nevertheless Eldred Capurro and Nagel
are posing timely questions about the control of our
freedoms in an increasingly digitized world and they
deserve our full attention.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013
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