Sight Unseen

Whether singly or in herds, deer commonly stand outside the window next to my desk and computer. They are much the same hue as the background, so I rarely notice them unless they move a lot. They aren’t actually invisible but they don’t draw attention so most of the time they might as well be. They plainly prefer it that way, for if they notice me notice them they leave. I doubt the deer think about it much, but there is wisdom in this nonetheless.

The view out my window

This past Thursday night at around 10:30 PM power went out on my street and so did my Wi-Fi internet connection. (A road accident a few miles away had taken down utility poles.) The power didn’t return for 18 hours. My land line was down too, and my cell had little charge remaining, so I turned it off to preserve it for actual need. For a day I was invisible. But not really. My phone was still trackable even when turned off. My car has GPS. E-Z Pass registers every toll highway, bridge, or tunnel I might choose to take. Security cameras on homes and businesses tracked my moves on Friday as I drove to visit a friend in a healthcare facility; there, cameras recorded me in the parking lot, a security guard at the front desk asked for a photo ID, and interior cameras watched me in the elevator, down the hall, and then back again. On the drive back home I passed a parked police car equipped to scan license plates of cars as they pass. I was quite visible.

Even without deliberately filling our homes with internet-connected listening devices such as Alexa, we must make a deliberate effort to achieve privacy nowadays and we are likely to fail. In most cases our anonymity is preserved only because no one is interested enough to bother to pick us out of the crowd, but we are pick-out-able to anyone who does choose to make the effort. This state of affairs contrasts with my youth when privacy was the default state. In those benighted days we could speak and joke and act unguardedly without concern some frenemy with a cell phone might record it and turn it against us. We rarely encountered security cameras outside of banks and casinos. It never would have occurred to us willingly to put listening devices into our homes. In the early 1970s when I took shuttle flights from Newark to Washington DC I did so anonymously (no ID check) and bought the ticket on the plane in cash. Folks generally were invisible unless they chose not to be. Nowadays most of us broadcast our locations and activities on Facebook and Instagram, but even if we don’t do this we remain traceable.

We don’t have to give up a measure of privacy by posting things on social media, of course, but most of us do even though we know tech companies are watching and will try to sell us things based on what we search or post. That is our choice, but we no longer can count on privacy even when we don’t choose to surrender it – even in places where until recently we had a reasonable expectation of it. The always prescient Aldous Huxley worried about this long ago: “I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark like celery.” Absence of privacy is unhealthy for a person and (at best) is unpleasant in a society. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being about the 1968 Prague Spring, Milan Kundera writes of how an important figure was undermined by the release of secretly recorded private conversations: “Instantly Prochazka was discredited: because in private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he'd never admit in public, and so forth.” This release of private conversation is presented as a dastardly act by a totalitarian regime, yet this sort of takedown is commonplace in the U.S. (and elsewhere) today, albeit far more often by private citizens with various motivations than by government agencies.

Akiko Busch repeats the Huxley quote in her 2019 book How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency. The title is a misnomer. This is not a guide to staying under the radar in contemporary society. The book is more about “why” than “how,” and for this she makes her case. In essence, we just need time when we are not “on,” just as we need time off from every other type of work – and maintaining a public persona is most assuredly work. Just as in art, sometimes the negative space is what matters. “Transparency” is a modern buzzword, and there is a place for it, but not everywhere. Louis Brandeis in an influential 1890 Harvard Law Review article stated a "right to be let alone," which means a right not to be transparent. Amendment Four of the Bill of Rights establishes a particular protection against arbitrary intrusions on privacy:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Today, as in the 18^th century when this was written, authorities cannot be trusted to muck around willy-nilly through your stuff whenever it suits them looking for a reason to arrest you or embarrass you. They would be sure to abuse such power, particularly against political enemies. The restriction is against government power specifically, but it is a good ethical rule (nowadays often honored in the breach) for private citizens to follow, too. Some of our life is public, some for our close circle of friends, and some for us alone. It is a kindness (and common decency) to respect that.

Ordinary privacy is one thing, but people also long have fantasized about what actual physical invisibility would be like. There are ancient myths of heroes with invisibility cloaks. The idea has been a staple of science fiction since H.G. Wells wrote The Invisible Man in 1897. (The 1933 film adaptation of Wells is fun, by the way; on the other hand, I suggest passing on the movie adaptation of H.F. Saint’s 1987 The Invisible Man though the novel is quite good; my own short story about invisibility, titled Ghillie Suit, alas, has no film adaptation.) Griffin, Wells’ invisible man, becomes a criminal. Wells was probably onto something with this. H.L. Mencken remarked, “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.” We need our private places, but the secure knowledge no one is looking in public either would invite…well…unsocial behavior. So try to find some private space to be unguarded if you can, but maybe it is best to pass on Griffin’s potion should you (or I) happen upon a vial of it. I think I’d handle it more ethically than Griffin, but I’m not sure how much more.

Trailer for The Invisible Man (1933)