4 - Privacy as the History of Normalisation

Summary

The illegitimacy of present accounts of privacy is revealed by the manner in which normalisation has long taken place through a series of social transitions. Other historical perspectives of societal evolution have been adopted, but the mythological analysis here is distinctive. Following Christian confessionalism and pastoralism, we see the methods of governmentalizing discipline that led to the civilising of the sovereign State through the rise of the bourgeoisie; then the liberalism and neoliberalism that ultimately promoted the dominance of the Market over the State, by which the consumer has been constructed; and now the Technological ‘algorisation’ of social and individual perspective and practice. Many of the elements that have accumulated in this long process are thereby being brought to bear in technologies of the self as self-creation. Each of these regimes was founded on the distancing and camouflage of existential reality, inducing subjection to the ideas and practices promoted within these mythological magnitudes and primarily for the benefit of their respective dominant interests.