The exhibitionist economy - RIP privacy

[Mr.Know-It-All]

The Exhibitionist Economy

Upcoming generations will not thank us for gifting them a world devoid of the concept of personal privacy.

quillette.com

Not sure why people complain about privacy in the digital age when they voluntarily disclose everything about themselves for worldwide consumption.

A person’s entire educational and employment history is publicly available on LinkedIn; Facebook offers access to their friends and family; Twitter showcases their political beliefs; Instagram reveals their tastes and interests. We no longer have to walk out of our front door to know our neighbours, we just need to know their names.

Social media normalized what Jonathan Haidt calls a “prestige economy”—a performative culture in which people compete for social status. Under these market conditions, privacy—withholding our drunken antics, beach bodies, breakups, shower thoughts, and uninformed political takes—was the road to social irrelevance and nonexistence in a world measured by outrage and shrinking attention spans. “If you’re not online,” a City Press headline advised in 2018, “you don’t exist.”

Today, we all live on Instagram. From cradle to grave, a vast and growing segment of humanity has willingly forfeited personal privacy in pursuit of likes and shares. The notion of a “private sphere” now seems quaint and archaic