Friday 18 January 2019

Privacy

"Cubs, calves, and chicks, too small for education, bumbled about like the pet animals they were. Units that must be too aged or ill for daily toil waited quietly near the middle of the house. It was all one enormous room. Privacy was surely an idea which Didonians were literally incapable of entertaining. But what ideas did they have that were forever beyond human reach?"
-Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 367-520 AT CHAPTER NINE, p. 459.

Sometimes we can formulate a question but never answer it. Other collective intelligences, like Anderson's Baburites or merging sophotects, must also live entirely without privacy.

Sometimes also, human beings, who do know what privacy is, are acutely aware of the lack of it:

"If you were the heir to a throne at least three people and a brace of bodyguards knew when you were so much as going off to empty your bladder and probably discussed it among themselves afterwards.
"You didn't have any privacy at all if you didn't have close-mouthed, loyal and skillful friends ready to run interference for you."
-SM Stirling, The Sky-Blue Wolves (New York, 2018), CHAPTER EIGHTEEN, p. 306.

See also Palatial Privacy, Lack Of. 

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Here's a riff on the lack of privacy most leaders have to endure which you may not have known about. When US Presidents travel abroad I've read even their bodily wastes are disposed of by their guards! So foreigners would not be able to analyze the feces and thus find out more about the President's health.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Good grief!

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I know! I was surprised too! Talk about lack of privacy!

Sean