I’m often guilty of it myself. Letting defeat creep in when I see all of us getting stomped on by tech-enabled jackboots in an unregulated corporate panopticon. Even heeding the spectrum of privilege on which we each sit closer or further from the brunt of the surveillance state, it’s still hard not to be exhausted into apathy by the seemingly inescapable data-gaze of internet billionaires. The jötunn of Silicon Mountain hurl down cold, hard lobbying cash and seem to bury every pro-privacy bill we can muster — it’s hard, then, not to feel hopeless about digital rights, privacy and freedom of speech.
But our hopelessness — and the surrender it inevitably yields — is what those metaphorical frost giants want most from us. It’s been called “Privacy Nihilism.” Those who profit at the expense of our privacy, by abusing public infrastructure and dodging corporate taxes, want us fooled into thinking we’ve already lost. It’s easier to sell us new data-Hoovering tchotchkes if we’re already so dejected that the steady social-media drip of dopamine micro-hits is the only thing letting us forget about the feds staring back from the other side of every screen.
