SecretLife
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Gabriel García Márquez once said that each of us has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.And this private life, this secret life, seem to me necessary to us as human beings. The erasure of these aspects of our soul – our otherness – has long been the goal of totalitarian regimes.
In the past they sought to achieve it through the elimination of civil society on the one hand – the destruction of any social organisations not pressed into the service of the state – and on the other through a system of surveillance and punishment.
Social media’s methods are different.
“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or coworkers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” Zuckerberg has said. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
Like the character in Philip Roth’s Prague Orgy who writes his own reports on himself for the secret police, Zuckerberg’s method is to so completely enmesh and entrap us in the social media of public revelation that no private life is possible and, in return, expect us to be grateful to the corporations which have liberated us from our private lives and given us his gift of integrity.
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