That I am awake at all tells me something. I should be unconscious while they probe my mind and mess around with my private interior. Not that they acknowledge privacy as a concept any more. The European Union had it as a baseline right, once upon a time, but the American perception was that free speech was infinitely more important in every case. All this technology flowed in its earliest days from America. With it came the political and social assumptions of a small number of engineers and entrepreneurs, predominantly male and white. This unexamined muddle of privileged anarchism and academic idealism. Security of the person was one thing – and safeguarded by the right to bear arms and the prohibition on unreasonable search – but ownership of one’s own data-wake was dangerous and antisocial. ‘Free’ came to mean not ‘unchained’ but ‘unpaid’ – a conflation that no doubt delighted authoritarians across the globe. (Location 4393)
