Privacy will be the next luxury

Get camera-ready as we enter the surveillance state/surveillance capitalism/self-surveillance era

Happy new year!

I bought a new car over the holiday break and, while sitting in the finance office, the account dude handed me a piece of paper and said something like, “we don’t have cameras in our cars, but in the state of California,¹ we’re required to have you sign this document about being recorded in your vehicle.”

Me:

And that’s when I learned that Teslas (a car I did not buy) have cameras inside that record you and can data share when you enable them.

“When you enable them” being the key phrase here.

Do corporations like Tesla really care if you enable or consent?

Probably not (see news stories below).

But I suspect many people opt in. Tesla cleverly bundles these options with other safety features or enticing options like Autopilot so that you want to enable them. This is some shady shit, but corporations and governments do it all the time, sneaking their agenda into upgrades or bills. I get it, but I don’t like it.

In just the past few weeks, there were numerous examples of privacy vs. surveillance gone wrong.

• After the Tesla explosion outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, Elon recently said that Tesla can remotely unlock and monitor vehicles. Don’t you feel safer already?

• Apple will pay $95 million for a Siri breach where she listened to and captured people’s conversations.

• The Secret Service essentially admitted it didn’t pay attention to whether users consented to being tracked with a third-party mobile phone monitoring system.

We’ve been being recorded for quite some time. There are cameras everywhere, from tolls and traffic lights, to parking garages, inside shops.

Of course, there are benefits to surveillance. How else would we ever consent? Just look at the success of the Ring doorbell, TikTok live, selfies, Google maps, Zoom eye tracking, dash cams, body cams, location sharing, etc. We opt in and happily walk around consenting to being tracked and watched, and—the payoff is that we can watch others.

Data has long been the most important collected and traded asset. We opt in to share our data with every account we create on any given website in order to get that website’s benefits.

Although we cycle through times when we think opting out of an app’s tracking will somehow protect us, ultimately between our heavy digital footprints, algorithms, and ubiquitous cameras, we can’t fully opt out.

The assumption (or the benefit that we’re being sold) is that it makes us safer.

Does it?

As we approach a 1984-like society, which is being served to us (and by us²) on the most palatable platter ever (iPhones, legal weed & soon psychedelics, endless entertainment), I think that we’re going to see a behavior shift in the opposite direction, making privacy a luxury.

We’re already seeing this unfold. There are cultural shifts in which folks are leaving social media³ to seek more offline experiences, to reshape their attention spans,⁴ or to reset their taste algorithms.⁵

A growing number of comedians and musicians ban phones at their shows, more clubs are employing “no phones” policies.

This is a good thing, it’s healthier for us. We should take time away from screens, and yes, this also means streaming platforms.

However, I don’t think that this will change the greater culture, which seems to still be heavily pushing digital. Companies like Meta aren’t just going to start making dumbphones. For culture to change, there needs to be a larger faction of people truly moving offline, not just talking about leaving social media while still on Substack, and Notes, which is literally a social media platform with an algorithm 🤷‍♀️. I’m not even sure that when AI agents and influencers flood the Internet and apps, we’ll still be able to log off… it’s possible we will get more addicted… but that’s another article.

Companies will continue to push products that record, stream, or spy on us, and whether we opt in or not, the red light is always on.

“In the future, everyone will want to be a complete unknown for 15 minutes.”
—

Elliot Aronow

in

minor genius

These devices will likely be too important to ignore. Imagine being a knowledge worker who travels frequently but doesn’t have a smartphone. Feels impossible, right?⁶

Tech companies are making surveillance products so enticing—so necessary— that we get excited to buy and use them. Or, we are forced into it in order to do our jobs and to function in society. Who is to blame? The consumer for buying and using the product or Meta for making the product or society for making its use indispensable? If there isn’t a singular entity to blame, there is no accountability.

Take, for example, the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, which can record video and take photos of unsuspecting people without their knowledge or consent. Businesses will push society in this direction until we all have a pair of smart glasses. What you used to do on your phone will eventually be performed using gestures and eye tracking.

More alarming, however, is the potential to become a pawn in the surveillance game. Just look at how easy the glasses are to hack (and imagine when we all have AI to help us hack anything and everything):

All digital software can eventually be hacked. It’s just a matter of time.

What could go possibly wrong?

By now, you have consented to so many terms of service that it’s impossible to undo. OpenAI has already crawled the entire Internet—even your tweets from 2008 and a few pages of that old LiveJournal you had when you were 23 that was saved by Internet Archive.

Any publication or journalist worth reading is now behind a paywall (my archives will be soon, too so read ‘em while ya can!).

If the future is 24/7 surveillance, then those of us who can afford to do so will pay for privacy.

We will pay for private experiences.

For anonymity.

We will pay to not have AI crawl our words, not have trolls comment on our articles,⁷ not have a conversation or an interaction accidentally recorded or listened to.

Maybe there will be tiers. Or, maybe it will be only for the ultra-rich. But, a surveillance-free zone will be the ultimate luxury.

A place where you can truly dance like no one’s watching.

Thanks for reading! Unsquare is a regular feature written by Jaime Derringer about creativity, business, leadership, and technology.

1. Of COURSE it’s California 😂

2. I tell this to everyone I meet: please read Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han

3. Google this or search Substack.

4. Here’s a good read on this by

kate lindsay

You might just have to be bored

5. See Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld

6. I recently had a conversation with my husband while watching Homestead Rescue about whether people living off the grid can be completely self-reliant and self-sustaining in today’s society. In particular, we were watching an episode where the homesteader’s job was selling herbs and…not surprisingly she had an Instagram.

7. Substack is watching, too.