It’s an odd feeling to not be mad about something that you know that you ought to be mad about.

I’m weird about my privacy.  If you have access to my Facebook page and you go look at it, it’s going to be a very few posts up at the top and then nothing but posts about what I’ve been reading after that.  I generally delete anything else after a couple of days.  I’m scrupulous about not using my real name anywhere on my blog, right down to the point where I’m probably going to change the username soon to pull my initials out of it.  This is, admittedly, mostly because I’m a teacher and am not terribly interested in my students discovering my writing online.  But I’m also genuinely not interested in strangers being all up in my shit; a friend of mine (who, it should be pointed out, I’ve known for ten years, met online, and have only seen in person *once* in that time) once referred to me as “the most online-active paranoiac she’s ever known,” and it’s not an unfair description at all.

I should give a damn about PRISM.  The idea that the government is literally spying on us and tapping into our electronic everything should make me mad.  The Fourth Amendment should mean something.

I don’t.  It doesn’t.  It doesn’t, and it hasn’t for decades.

I’m interested in privacy issues, particularly as they relate to futurism, and I talk about them a fair bit.  My last real post on Xanga was on the surveillance state, in fact.  But that doesn’t mean that I really believe privacy is still a thing anymore. The bit that George Orwell never got– and who could have blamed him?– was that we were going to cheerfully hand over any semblance of privacy to corporate and governmental entities so that we could post cat pictures and look at porn.  Big Brother didn’t have to watch; we handed him a camera and posed.  I’ve known– put “known” into quotation marks if you like– that the government was spying on electronic communications for as long as I’ve been logging into anything, so… twenty years now, give or take?  The fact that it’s confirmed now doesn’t mean anything to me.  We’re surprised about this?  Verizon has location data on me basically 24/7/365 and they’re not sharing that with anyone who asks?  C’mon, now.  Of course they are.

It’s not that I think they should be able to do these things; they clearly should not.  It’s that I see absolutely no way for the genie to go back in the bottle, and the forces that are destroying the concept of privacy in this country are not, in and of themselves, necessarily specifically malevolent.  We get stuff, for lack of a better word, in return for our privacy; the spying isn’t gratuitous.  Combine that with Americans’ generally supine attitude toward the government in every area except our guns and a healthy dose of “If you aren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear” and you’ve got our current situation in a nutshell.  It’s only gonna get worse once facial recognition technology gets more accurate and publicly available.  I can either get used to it now or go nuts; I’d kinda prefer to not go nuts.

(Sidenote: no force on Earth can make me buy an Xbox One despite owning and really enjoying both previous iterations of the Xbox, and the main reason is Microsoft’s apparent belief that it’s okay to insist on putting a device in your living room that watches and listens to you all day, every day and cannot be turned off.  Apparently that’s where I draw the line.  Government, okay, fine, whatever.  Toys?  No.)

The thing that’s sticking in my craw is the partisan affiliation part.  “IF THIS HAD HAPPENED DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION YOU’D BE SCREAMING BLOODY MURDER!!1!!1ONE!!,” part of my brain is screaming. And when they called it Carnivore and not PRISM, well, I did.  But a curious thing happened; five years or so of basically being completely furious about everything all the fucking time kind of drained my ability to get pissed off about politics.  (Some of you, who didn’t know me during the Bush administration, are shaking your heads.  No.  This is absolutely and undeniably and clearly true.  The fact that I still possess the ability to get pissed off about stuff is nothing compared to what I was capable of in 2004.)  Plus, hey, conservatives, this is what happens when you give your guy unlimited power to do bad shit.  (Cough*drones*cough)  Our guy gets in power and then he can still do the bad shit you let your guy do.  I don’t want either of our guys to be able to do this thing, but now that they can, no one will ever stop.  That’s why it was a dumb idea, see.

So, yeah, I’m probably being inconsistent here.  I think I can make a reasonable case that it’s me being older and, if not wiser, at least less volatile, and not strictly a partisan politics thing, but if you want to blame it on that go ahead; I’m a grown-ass man and I suspect I can handle it.

One more thing: speaking of privacy concerns, I went ahead and let WordPress tell Facebook about yesterday’s post, a policy that I might continue and I might stop doing depending on how it ends up affecting my ability to talk about whatever the hell I want on here.  The result, possibly coincidental but probably not, was fifty hits on a blog that isn’t a week old yet.  Fifty hits was a good day at the peak of the original Xanga MKF.  Granted, only one person left any comments, but that’s a hell of a traffic leap from the three or four visitors a day I was getting before now.  It’ll be interesting to see if it keeps up today.