Igo - The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America

In a sardonic poem of 1940, composed just after his migration to the United States from Great Britain, W. H. Auden memorialized an Unknown Citizen. Written in the form of an epitaph for an unknown and yet all-too-knowable citizen, the poem offers a capsule biography of an unnamed individual from the point of view of the social agencies charged with tracking and ordering his affairs. The citizen it commemorates is identified by a string of code similar to a U.S. Social Security numberJS/07/M/378and his life amounts to a compendium of details gathered by employers, hospitals, schools, psychologists, market researchers, insurers, journalists, and state bureaus. The poems final lines point simultaneously to the hubris and the limits of societys knowledge of this man. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

If seldom as eloquently as Auden, contemporary Americans raised similar questions about those who sought to know them, whether for the purpose of governance or profit, security or convenience, or social welfare or scholarly research. Indeed, the proper threshold for knowing a citizen in a democratic, capitalist nation would become in the twentieth century one of Americans most enduring debates. How much should a society be able to glean about the lives of its own members, and how much of oneself should one willingly reveal? What aspects of a person were worth knowingand to whomand which parts were truly ones own? Where and when could an individuals privacy be guaranteed? As the century advanced, the questions became more insistent. Were private spaces and thoughts, undiscovered by others, even possible under the conditions of modern life? What would an ever more knowing society mean for the people caught in its netand for the individual liberties that Americans supposedly prized? To wit: Could known citizens be happy? Were they, in fact, free?

This book borrows the poets questions to pry open the contentious career of privacy in the modern United States. Individual privacy first surfaced as a sustained political issue only in the late nineteenth century, but it would swiftly become a fixtureeven fixationof U.S. public culture. As corporate industry, social institutions, and the federal government swelled, so too did disputes over what sort of prying and how much probing into citizens lives were acceptable. These debates emerged alongside an increasingly impersonal, urban society: its techniques for maintaining social order but also its mass media, its scientific technologies as well as its styles of selling. Privacy talk waxed and waned, following no predictable path. But it closely tracked public attention to the perilsand the promiseof being a known citizen.

Modern privacy sensibilities were honed at the crux of a contradiction. Even as Americans grasped at wider freedoms in the twentieth century, they, like Audens protagonist, were becoming ever more intelligible to an expanding array of parties: state bureaucracies and law enforcement; the popular press and marketers; financial institutions and private corporations; scientific researchers and psychological experts; and, eventually, data aggregators and proprietary algorithms. A knowing society impinged on individual liberties in unsettling ways. Being known could bring punishment from the state or destroy a reputation crafted for peers; it could raise ones insurance rates or cost someone a job. It could even compromise ones free will and sense of authentic personhood. Because they possessed this capacity to know, modern social institutions raised Audens questions quite directly. Emerging technologies and media, novel modes of expert and corporate surveillance, and new practices of official documentation all propelled the problem of individual privacy to the foreground of U.S. public culture. There it would remain, becoming more and more central to citizens assessments of their state and social order.

Americans turned to privacy talk because it helped them navigate the pull and push of a knowing society, one that sought to apprehend, govern, and minister to its members by capturing them in fuller and finer detail. Such a society carried rewards as well as risks. The proliferation of techniques for rendering citizens knowable, from credit reports and CCTV cameras to psychological testing, promised opportunity and security, even self-understanding. But being known too wellthrough the monitoring of ones sexual or consumption habits, for instancecould threaten personal autonomy, undermining the notion of a free-standing individual so foundational to U.S. politics and culture. In like fashion, to remain unrecognizable was in certain contexts a sign of privilege, but in others a form of disempowerment. Being traceable in a national criminal or DNA database was a different matter than being identifiable to a benefits-granting program like Social Security. It was possible, that is, to suffer not only from too little but also from too much privacy. Invisibility to service providers or census takers could sharply limit ones social opportunities and legal rights. Whereas ones individual dignity might require being shielded from public view in some contexts, in others it could demand just the opposite: the validation of being named and seen. A longing for public recognition could oscillate with a desire for obscurity, even within the same person. And so, whether one could be known accurately and authenticallyand on ones own terms, rather than the larger societyswas yet another question animating privacys presence in American public life.