1 - Surveillance and Self-Realization

Summary

Adequate informational privacy is essential if people are to successfully seek self-realization as they interact in a variety of social roles. Those interactions create and maintain the necessary informational privacy as people conform to shared expectations about the selective flow of information. Conformity to shared expectations about information flow requires complex group coordination, which is facilitated by informational norms. Surveillance creates a massive capacity to know. The existence of that capacity undermines self-realization by undermining the norm-based coordination on which adequate informational privacy depends. Norm-based coordination depends on common knowledge of conformity to norms. Common knowledge is the recursive belief state in which people know, know they know, know they know they know, and so on ad infinitum. Surveillance undermines common knowledge by attacking the first, nonrecursive step in that sequence – simply knowing.