The New York Times recently published a sweeping exposé of the bounty hunters in our pockets.1 By design (for tech companies) and default (to us), our smartphone apps track our every movement. Long after we’ve stepped out of the Uber, our desires persist as commodified data ready to sell to advertisers, retailers, and even hedge funds. If you aren’t paying, you are the product—as an emerging cliché goes. But perhaps at some point a dependence becomes so deep that it is no longer pathological but constitutive: through the compulsive use of technology we become more of ourselves, discovering, inventing, and accessing the desires that define us. Such a belief has united technological utopians from Jeff Bezos to Isaac Asimov, who dreamed of a future in which technology would tend lovingly to the unstated desires of consumers. In a 1973 essay, Asimov predicted that data-driven knowledge would usher in a new era of individualism, an era of curated product recommendations “so likely to be of interest to [the consumer] and to be slanted to his particular needs that even if he does not buy, he will feel that someone has gone to the trouble of knowing what he might want.” (p. 238) And, at any rate, you’ve likely already forgotten about that Times article anyway, assimilating its revelations as just another cost of participation in a convenience-driven consumer economy. Or perhaps that twinge of concern was quickly extinguished by the dopamine rush of a “like” on social media. There is an amnesiac quality to debates over privacy. For the past 150 years, Americans have routinely identified crises of privacy only to be mollified or cowed into the belief that previously known degrees of control and solitude are unrecoverable. And yet, privacy’s contested place within American politics has been entrenched by a tension fundamental to capitalist democracies: the insistent surveillance of corporate life and liberalism’s veneration of the individual subject. Sarah Igo’s The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America is a sweeping and insightful probe of the paradox at the heart of privacy. Americans have at once desired exposure of the self—and demanded acceptance of diverse sexual and familial arrangements—even as

中文翻译：

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隐私的公共生活

《纽约时报》最近对我们口袋里的赏金猎人进行了全面曝光。1 根据设计（针对科技公司）和默认情况下（针对我们），我们的智能手机应用程序会跟踪我们的一举一动。在我们退出优步很久之后，我们的愿望仍然存在，因为商品化的数据准备出售给广告商、零售商甚至对冲基金。如果你不付钱，你就是产品——正如一个新兴的陈词滥调。但也许在某个时候，依赖变得如此深刻，以至于它不再是病态的，而是构成性的：通过对技术的强迫性使用，我们变得更加自我，发现、发明和获取定义我们的欲望。这种信念将杰夫·贝佐斯 (Jeff Bezos) 和艾萨克·阿西莫夫 (Isaac Asimov) 等技术乌托邦主义者联合起来，后者梦想着未来技术会亲切地满足消费者未说明的愿望。在 1973 年的一篇论文中，阿西莫夫预测，数据驱动的知识将迎来一个个人主义的新时代，一个精心策划的产品推荐时代，“[消费者]很可能会感兴趣并倾向于他的特定需求，即使他不购买，他会觉得有人已经不知道他可能想要什么了。” （第 238 页）而且，无论如何，您可能已经忘记了《纽约时报》的那篇文章，将其揭示的内容理解为参与便利驱动的消费经济的另一种成本。或者，也许这种担忧很快被社交媒体上“赞”的多巴胺热潮消除了。关于隐私的辩论有一种健忘症的性质。在过去的 150 年里，美国人经常发现隐私危机，结果却被安抚或畏缩，相信以前已知的控制和孤独程度是无法恢复的。然而，隐私在美国政治中的竞争地位已被资本主义民主国家的基本紧张局势所巩固：对企业生活的持续监视和自由主义对个人主体的崇敬。莎拉·伊戈的《已知公民：现代美国的隐私史》是对隐私核心悖论的全面而有见地的探讨。美国人立刻渴望暴露自我——并要求接受不同的性和家庭安排——即使 对企业生活的持续监视和自由主义对个体主体的崇敬。莎拉·伊戈的《已知公民：现代美国的隐私史》是对隐私核心悖论的全面而有见地的探讨。美国人立刻渴望暴露自我——并要求接受不同的性和家庭安排——即使 对企业生活的持续监视和自由主义对个体主体的崇敬。莎拉·伊戈的《已知公民：现代美国的隐私史》是对隐私核心悖论的全面而有见地的探讨。美国人立刻渴望暴露自我——并要求接受不同的性和家庭安排——即使