[WS:] Trust me, the citizens of the US of A are no slaves, regardless of the amount of spying. Nobody spies on the dwellers of the slums of Nairobi, because nobody gives a flying fuck about them, and that does not transform them into "free people" either.
Furthermore, aristocracy was far removed from privacy (in the bourgeois sense of the word) - every aspect of their lives was very much public (at least according to Foucault). What mattered was not the information others had about them but power they had over other people.
Finally the great majority of people in the US and I suspect elsewhere, go to great lengths to make the information about themselves public. The popularity of shows of the "Judge Judy" kind proves it.
This preoccupation with government spying is a typical American government hatred. I can be totally exhibitionist on TV and social media, but I will be very upset if the government collects any of that information on me me.
How infantile.
On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 2:38 PM, JOANNA A. <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> I remember when I was translating Augustine in Peter Brown's class at
> Berkeley, his telling us that being "secretus," having privacy, was
> considered a key characteristic of nobility in the classical era. The
> poorer and more powerless you were, the less right you had to privacy.
> Slaves, of course, had no privacy whatsoever.
>
> I wonder, in that context, how much the universal spying going on,
> transforms everyone into a "slave" having no right to privacy.
>
> I also wonder, given the prerogative of wealth, whether the rich can
> actually protect themselves from NSA stuff. I don't know enough about how
> the spying is done to understand whether current levels of encryption are
> enough. Snowden seemed to suggest that they are not.
>
> It would be interesting to talk about modern slavery in these terms.
>
> Joanna
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-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."