I was thirteen when I killed my first deer, the shot flying forth from my hands, an incantation to crumple cities and knees. My father and I follow the bullet’s path, running long across a Wyoming plain. We stand above it, knives in hand, our breath half-frozen before it leaves our lungs, and when I am ready, we kneel down, a prayer. He shows me how the knife goes in—working from the soft belly up to the ribs, his big bear hands cracking open the cavity, as easy as my mother’s spoon at Sunday supper. We take out the intestines first, quickly to avoid tainting the meat, and work our way upwards. I put my hands so deep inside I lose sight. I pull out the heart and cradle it--- such a small, small thing, but something else also. Then I know why my father has taken me here. He leans in close and says: You have to know how to do this. You have to be ready for what comes.

We locate the Fourth Amendment’s protections around places because we have an intuitive understanding of what it means to be looking for something. What does the policeman dream of, alone in the dark? The fatal gun. The fingerprint. The policeman, we reason, wants things, and things exist in places. It is those places we feel moved to protect. Of course, this understanding is an anachronism. The policeman dreams larger now. It is not your gun he wants—it is you. But it is hard for us to understand this and even harder to for us to translate the Constitutional protections anchored so strongly to place to our identities. In part this is because those very places themselves create and contextualize our understanding of what the Fourth Amendment means.

Imagine London of the 18th century--- the gutters full of dead dogs and waste, pestilence pouring out of houses, thieves and madmen thick in the streets. A world scarcely to be dreamed by those who lived before the gravitational pull of cities began to draw all towards their center. Urbanization, the rush to cities at the end of the industrial revolution, has fundamentally reshaped our ideas about privacy in the 21st century.

We can locate these changes in two main areas: first, the move away from the country, where the space itself teaches about what it means to be private and then enables that privacy, to the city, where privacy is made impossible, has radically altered what we think of as privacy. This paradigm shift has happened partly because being unable to be private brings with it forgetting that you ever wanted to. Ask a question about government searches in rural Wyoming, and rest assured you will never hear: “Why do I care? I have nothing to hide.” The landscape where I grew up in bears more resemblance to a pre-Industrial society than a post-Industrial one, and I suspect that this has more than something to do with my homeland’s attitude towards privacy and government intrusions upon it. A man like my father understands what privacy means. Living in a hard and empty place breeds people like him: self-sufficient and wild. We live and let live in Wyoming, and let living means keeping yourself firmly out of other people’s business. We have this attitude because we can, because we don’t live wall to wall people, because you can drive for hundreds of miles and see nothing but starlight. No one need ever know anything about you, where you go, or what you do. But in New York, a man’s ideas about the nature of his secrets is different. He is watched all the time, a million eyes moving, moving. He listens to his neighbors fuck, he watches couples disintegrate in public parks, he overhears the names of drugs others take while in line at the pharmacy, and the same is done back to him and more. When this man hears that the government might intercept phone calls by reaching hands into wires, it means nothing to him. When he realizes that they want more than to enter his home but his soul, it hardly matters—he ceded it to the multitudes long ago.

Second, urbanization saw the rise of a change that saw its roots in feudal societies—specialization. Living in cities allows men to create distinct tasks for one another. There are butchers, bakers and candlestick makers; the city allows us to cede control over the very necessities of our daily lives to other people. This concession carries with it a powerful implication for privacy. The Lockean idea that we put ourselves into our labor remains a seductive one; it rings true even to modern ears--- we want to protect the things we make. But we now live in a world of cities where we never make anything. Our meat comes wrapped in plastic, dead already. What does it matter if the store knows how many cans of soup I buy? Those cans are not me--- they are something else, something made and bought and devoid of me. But yet they still howl out my name to the world, and if I knew, in my gut, that they did so the way the deer’s heart sung in my hands then I would be more careful. I would take my own life back. But urbanization has created a world of people who cannot care for themselves and so do not mind who knows the details of their not-caring. Self-sufficiency allows you to be private. A man who keeps his own company keeps also his secrets.

We don’t know what to do with the Fourth Amendment. We can’t understand the policeman’s new dream. We are blind to his searching because we have been taught already by the place we live what privacy is, and what we have been taught is this: your secrets are already known. Come into the open- you have nothing to hide.

Is it really that "urbanization has created a world of people who cannot care for themselves and so do not mind who knows the details of their not-caring," or did the move away from self-sufficiency create incentives for others to want to know more about us? Who wants to waste the energy required to learn about the self-sufficient hermit when understanding him doesn't let you take advantage of his need to purchase things? The hermit lives apart from society, so society feels no burning need to control him.

-- AndreiVoinigescu - 16 Feb 2009

As to the first point, there may be something to be said about the expectation of anonymity. The city teaches you to live without secrets, but it also teaches you that nobody cares - you witness the lives of people you don't know and don't care about, and you assume they don't know or care about you. The internet is fundamentally different: everything is recorded and saved, and you are a potential source of profit regardless of how uninteresting and ordinary you are. There is no way to keep your head down, no way to attain the anonymity that I feel makes up part of the bargain we make with the city.

-- TheodoreSmith - 17 Feb 2009

I agree with Ted that your first point neglects to consider that the rational city dweller does not feel that she has already ceded her identity to the multitudes. I think that the difference between the city dweller and the country dweller is that the country dweller believes that the data about him will be aggregated -- he knows he will be recognized when he goes to the store, the bar or to get a haircut. The city dweller does not -- she never expects the masses to recreate the actions of her day.

I think the instinct is right: regulating spaces to regulate privacy makes sense in the country setting, but must be rethought in the city. In the country we can not expect privacy in public spaces, and "the rush to cities at the end of the industrial revolution has fundamentally reshaped our ideas about privacy in the 21st century": we believe in the city that we are effectively private even when our private life leaks through the thin apartment walls. But I think you stray when you claim that the realignment is that we "ceded it to the multitudes long ago." In our new conception, we still expect privacy because we expect no one to care.

-- JustinColannino - 17 Feb 2009

Between Ted and Justin’s comments, I think we’re experiencing a confusion of terminology. There is a difference between “privacy” and “anonymity.” Just because they can, and often do, overlap, does not make them coterminus with one another. I think that the city/country dichotomy presents this paradox: When I am in New York, everything I do is anonymous, but nothing is private. In Wyoming (or the perhaps idealized Wyoming that I present in the paper), nothing is anonymous (everyone knows your name), but more things are private. This dichotomy, I think, perhaps partly explains the difference between our theoretical city and country dwellers. Ted, you noted that anonymity is part of the bargain we make with the city, but I think this is less a bargain and more a bait and switch. This goes to Justin’s point—because we are anonymous in the city, we don’t realize how much privacy we have “ceded to the multitudes.” That is to say, we don’t recognize how much the aggregation of data (Justin’s point) and the internet (Ted’s point) has made even our theoretically anonymous conduct non-private and, of course, commercially valuable. By contrast, spaces which disallow anonymity force us to be more thoughtful at least, if not more militant, about policing our privacy, because we cannot escape the fact that our conduct comes back to us and our identities in a fundamental way.

You both pointed out how our expectations of others “not caring” may have also reshaped our expectations, and I don’t disagree. But again, I think this may go back to the difference between what is anonymous and what is private. I still maintain that we have ceded privacy to the multitudes as an inevitable effect of urbanization, but I will concede that our ideas about anonymity have perhaps blinded us to some extent to that loss. Part of my point in this essay was that certain spaces force you to feel very acutely what constitutes your identity (killing the deer verses buying soup cans at the mega mart) and therefore alters your conception of what it means to protect that identity. Anonymity, the kind a city provides, cuts you off from that link--- you don’t feel your actions are you and so the fact that they aren’t private means much less than if your space forced you to constantly recognize what ultimately constitutes your identity.

-- DanaDelger - 17 Feb 2009