The Open Curtain

We did not lose privacy in a single dramatic moment. It faded quietly while we were updating apps, scrolling headlines, and syncing our calendars to the cloud. Our phones, cameras, and algorithms did not just capture our lives; they rewrote what it means to be seen. Maybe privacy did not die. Maybe it never truly existed.

The Open Curtain

Every few months someone says it with a sigh: “Privacy is dead.”

And we all nod, not in outrage but in quiet agreement, like we are discussing the weather.

It was not a violent death. There was no debate, no courtroom drama, no newspaper obituary. Privacy slipped away quietly while we were too busy entering new passwords and clicking “accept all.”

The American idea of privacy was born in another world. The Fourth Amendment was written when “unreasonable searches” meant a soldier rifling through your desk. The founders could never have imagined a time when your desk, wallet, diary, and social circle would merge into a single glowing rectangle that you carry everywhere, whispering your secrets to the cloud.

We like to think technology happened to us, but that is a comforting story. We built this system ourselves. Every search, every click, every “just for you” suggestion adds another brushstroke to the portrait of who we are. We have become our own informants, willingly feeding the machine that studies us.

We complain that “they” are listening, yet our addiction to convenience keeps the door wide open. We whisper about eavesdropping devices while asking those same devices to play our favorite songs and remind us to buy oat milk. We film our lives, tag our locations, and send our DNA to private companies in exchange for a colorful ancestry pie chart.

Maybe privacy was always an illusion. For most of human history, we lived in close communities where everyone knew everything anyway. The modern sense of privacy, the belief that we could exist as independent, unknowable individuals, might have been a brief experiment between the small town and the surveillance age.

So the real question is not how to get privacy back, but whether we even want it. We have traded it for connection, convenience, and comfort. In return, we have built a society that knows itself in astonishing detail. Whether that is progress or folly depends on what we do with the knowledge.

Privacy did not die alone. We were holding its hand, watching the screen, and refreshing our feeds the entire time.

Later,

Darrian Douglas