{"id":17693,"date":"2013-12-06T05:15:48","date_gmt":"2013-12-06T09:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17693"},"modified":"2013-12-06T09:57:13","modified_gmt":"2013-12-06T13:57:13","slug":"on-balance-or-why-privacy-is-a-red-herring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/12\/06\/on-balance-or-why-privacy-is-a-red-herring\/","title":{"rendered":"On Balance, or Why Privacy Is A Red Herring"},"content":{"rendered":"

A longer, more academic version of this post appears at Its Her Factory<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This post follows up on my earlier post<\/a> about a culture of moderation. Here I want to consider one aspect of this contemporary focus on moderation: the idea of \u201cbalance.\u201d We talk about work\/life balance, the \u201cbalance\u201d between individual freedom and national security, and, as Jenny notes<\/a>, the \u201cbalance\u201d between tech use and abstention.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This language of balance was particularly prominent in recent discussions of NSA spying. In fact, \u201cbalance\u201d is the term the Obama administration uses to justify and rationalize government surveillance. In an August 2013 news conference, President Obama said<\/a> \u201cwe have to strike the right balance between protecting our security and preserving our freedoms.\u201d When he was interviewed by NBC\u2019s Andrea Mitchell, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper elaborates on the administration\u2019s concept of \u201cbalance\u201d (this starts in the video <\/a>around 6:30).<\/p>\n

Clapper says: \u201cThe challenge for us is navigating between those two poles. It\u2019s not a balance, it\u2019s not either\/or, there has to be that balance so that we protect the country and also protect civil liberties.\u201d Though he appears to contradict himself in this statement (it\u2019s not a balance, it is a balance), I read this as a contrast between two different concepts of balance. On the one hand, \u201cbalance\u201d could mean the average of two extremes, an either\/or; on the other hand, \u201cbalance\u201d could mean a dynamically-adjusting continuum (the kind of balancing done, for example, by an audio equalizer or an electrical resistor). What Clapper is arguing, I think, is that the \u201cbalance\u201d the government must strike is of the latter type, not the former type. Mitchell\u2019s follow-up reinforces this reading. She says, paraphrasing President Obama, \u201cYou can\u2019t have a 100% security and then you have 100% privacy and then 0% inconvenience.\u201d Security and freedom\/privacy are not absolutes or binary opposites; rather, they\u2019re like asymptotes or limits on a continuum, limits that you can approach but never reach.<\/p>\n

According to this model of balance, the most just approach is the one that finds the sweet spot, or, in Clapper\u2019s language, \u201cthe exact tipping point\u201d in which both freedom and security are maximized without one pushing the other beyond the point of diminishing returns (the Boston Marathon bombings are the example Clapper cites of diminishing returns).<\/p>\n

This language is echoed in Ludacris\u2019s song and video \u201cRest of My Life.\u201d I\u2019ve written about this here<\/a>, but the tl;dr is: the image of a cresting wave captures the ideal of maximizing risk and reward, a life pushed to its limits, or, what I call elsewhere<\/a>, \u201cliving on the edge of burnout.\u201d The lyrics constantly evoke this ideal:<\/p>\n

\n

…What the hell is a life worth living if it\u2019s not on the edge<\/p>\n

…Tryin to keep my balance, I\u2019m twisted, so just in case I fall\/written on my<\/p>\n

tombstone should be \u2018women, weed, and alcohol<\/p>\n

…I go for broke…I\u2019m willing to bet…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So if balance is the ideal, how is it achieved? Clapper argues that the best way to preserve the balance between individual freedom and state security is \u201cto be as precise as we can be\u201d in selecting \u201cwhat we actually need to \u2018read\u2019.\u201d In this view, a just society is one that most accurately filters the signal (useful information, or information whose use reaps a profit) from the noise (information that\u2019s not profitable, info with too high an opportunity cost). This echoes Nate Silver\u2019s argument in his book about big data, The Signal And The Noise. \u201cInformation is no longer a scarce commodity; we have more of it than we know what to do with. But relatively little of it is useful…We have to be terribly selective about the information we choose to remember\u201d (34\/26 of Kindle version). Filtering signal from noise (\u201cthe truth\u201d from \u201cwhat distracts us from the truth,\u201d Silver 35) is, according to Silver, the epistemological, social, and ethical problem facing us today.<\/p>\n

Ok, so, filtering. But what are the filters? But Clapper and Silver suggest utility as a filter. But that just pushes the question back: useful for whom, and in what way? In the end, it all depends on the end balance you want to achieve. Think back to the audio equalizer example: some equalizers let you choose among different acoustic profiles–rock arena, concert hall, etc. In social and political terms, these profiles might be something like the relative distribution of wealth, whiteness, vulnerability, health, etc. In other words, you can strike a balance that distributes risk and rewards at specific levels for specific populations. For example, it is now common for US government policy to distribute risk to individuals and rewards to corporations (e.g., bailouts for banks but not borrowers). Stop-and-frisk and stand your ground laws are other examples: risk is distributed to people of color, reward (security, survival) to white citizens and to the state\/police. We choose the filters that produce the distribution of risk and reward (i.e., the social profile) that is most beneficial to society\u2019s powerful and privileged groups. So, this concept of \u201cbalance\u201d isn\u2019t really about protecting individual rights, liberties, or privacy; rather, it\u2019s about maintaining the overall mix or balance of relationships that allow society to function at maximum efficiency and productivity. (This is why, as Jenny notes in her above-linked post, that at the individual level this ideal of balance is really only an ethical imperative for privileged elites–a well-balanced society maximizes the capacities of its most privileged members. For this overall balance to work, oppressed groups need to live relatively \u201cunbalanced\u201d lives, lives that can never really get ahead.) This means that \u201cprivacy\u201d as an individual liberty is more or less a red herring–it distracts us from the real focus and intent of contemporary ideology and practice.
\nRobin is on twitter as @doctaj.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A longer, more academic version of this post appears at Its Her Factory. This post follows up on my earlier post about a culture of moderation. Here I want to consider one aspect of this contemporary focus on moderation: the idea of \u201cbalance.\u201d We talk about work\/life balance, the \u201cbalance\u201d between individual freedom and national […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[26509,19986,424,2143],"class_list":["post-17693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-balance","tag-nsa","tag-privacy","tag-surveillance"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17693"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17710,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17693\/revisions\/17710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}