Then she left,
Undoing strands
Twined by hand,
Our warp and woof.
Now how to learn
That never again
Shall we spin,
Shall I yearn
To twist and ply
And interleave
Sheets I believe
Are strings to tie?
Privacy is a Sideshow
Data and ownership of it has increasingly become not just the measure but the object and engine of economic and political power. Corporations and states which do not control it on their own are merely producing it for others.
From one perspective, data resembles property, property being, as Proudhon put it, theft, theft from the Commons. From another “neo-Marxist” perspective, data is analogous to “work value”.
Our activities are the source of every bit of data out there, but the data value obtained from our activities is alienated from us in the same way the surplus value of labor is extracted from workers in the old industrial order of things.
Concern for privacy, typically turning around a question of “bourgeois” individual rights, is only a sideshow compared to the transformation in social relations occurring before our eyes.