A Cultural History of Privacy, with Tiffany Jenkins
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. What does it mean to have a private life? In an age of constant sharing, surveillance and blurred boundaries, can privacy even survive?

On the podcast today, cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins draws on the themes of her latest book, Strangers and Intimates, to trace the meaning of privacy throughout history. From the strict separations of ancient Athens through the moral codes of the Victorian home, to the feminist rallying cry that the personal is political, and right into the uncharted territory of our digital age, Jenkins speaks to Demos fellow Carl Miller about how privacy shaped the modern world,

and why it remains crucial for our personal and collective freedom. Let's join Carl now with more.

All right, well, welcome to Intelligence Squared, everyone. I'm Carl Miller, and our guest today is Tiffany Jenkins. She's a writer, cultural historian, broadcaster, author of the acclaimed Keeping Their Marbles, How Treasures of the Past End Up in Museums and Why They Should Stay There. She's a former honorary fellow in the history of art at the University of Edinburgh and a former visiting fellow in the Department of Law at the LSE.

She wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 series A History of Secrecy and Contracts of Silence about the rise of non-disclosure agreements and today we'll be discussing her latest book Strangers and Intimates The Rise and Fall of Private Life which traces the meaning of privacy from the ancient times all the way up to our digital present exploring how privacy shaped the modern world and why it remains crucial for our personal and collective freedom today.

Tiffany, very warm welcome to you to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for having me. Great. So this is a book about privacy that, shock, does not begin with the entrance of big tech. Yes.

So there were two things I wanted to do in this book. One, to take it back in time, because a lot of the books on privacy today do start with the internet, social media, Facebook. Zuckerberg's dorm in Harvard. Exactly. He's blamed for everything. And he deserves a lot of blame, but not for the erosion of privacy. But also a lot of

other books that look at the history of privacy begin in the 19th century. So this is when privacy is a kind of social value. There are a lot of privacy scares around wiretapping, newspapers, Kodak cameras, which, you know, you could take a

picture of somebody on the street, which was genuinely freaky for people in those days. But my question was, well, if we had privacy in the 19th century, to the extent that it was a social value, and people were worried it was being taken away, where did it come from? It's not a natural phenomena, we don't naturally have privacy. So I wanted to go back a little bit in time to see where its origin story was.

Well, being a co-dacker as a pejorative was one of my favourite facts of the book. But Tiffany, let's go back in time then and let's kind of begin where the book begins. And, you know, apart from a kind of dalliance, I think, in the classical world, the story really begins, doesn't it, in the kind of aftermath of the Reformation? That's right. So you have Martin Luther kick-starting the Protestant Reformation, accidentally, really. You have the impact of that on Europe and, in particular, England, with Henry VIII rolling it out into England.

and you have these tremendous conflicts over faith, the best way to follow God, to be saved, to not go to hell and all the rest of it. And this is a time in which the church really owned every part of your life. It's a very communal society and it's kind of interwoven with religion. You have to go to church, you have to worship in a certain way and that's obviously a very internal thing as well as how you organise your life.

But the religious wars that ensued, because this was a phenomena that set off decades, if not centuries, of bloodshed and conflict, came to an end or a kind of relative end with toleration. And what that effectively meant was that people could worship to a degree in the private realm with freedom. So by recognising that people might want to worship God in particular ways to

To avoid the bloodshed, they kind of confined religion to the private realm relative to what came before. And that begins a sort of sense that there are some things in life that are separate from the state, from God and from the other, you know, from communities, really. And you see that emerging in kind of two trials, don't you? So you've got Martin Luther and then certainly not a Lutheran, but also Sir Thomas More, Saint Thomas More.

small. And they're both kind of arguing, aren't they, that this kind of reach of the state and of the crown can't reach all the way into the kind of private conscience that each person would create with God. That's right. I don't think they mean to do this in any way whatsoever. But what you have with Luther is wanting to follow Scripture. And in that sense, he's trusting his own judgment and his own reading of Scripture to

And kind of trying to displace the Catholic Church's authority in that. So the church would tell you the meaning of God. They would be the intermediary between heaven and earth. And he sort of pushes them aside. And in talking about his own personal conscience in doing that, he is kind of saying...

I am better than the Pope at deciding the best way to follow God. And there is a certain degree with that and with the, you know, there's the kind of, he takes advantage of the printing press. You've got the beginning of translations into English and German out of Latin. So there is a sort of triggering really of an internal process.

and an interior life that you really do get with Protestantism. See, Thomas More is very different. He sees what Luther's doing as extremely destabling, destroying the authority of the church and all chaos around.

will be rained down. I think he's the first person to use the words anarchy in English. And that's what he means is that Luther is creating anarchy because it's displacing the Catholic Church, the church, the universal church. He follows his conscience and not taking an oath that Henry VIII has mandated that every citizen, every subject in Britain has to take, which basically means

There are two types of oaths. There's one that recognises his marriage to Anne Boleyn, which Catholics are very unhappy about, and the other that says he is basically the supreme ruler. So again, he's knocking the Pope off its perch, and he himself now, in power, is in charge of both the soul of the believer and the subject, so how they have to live their lives. Thomas More can't countenance that, and he won't take...

the oath. He hopes he can get away with it by being silent, thinking, you know, no man can be prosecuted for his silence, but Henry will not have that and tries to force him to make the oath. And you have this very interesting process that's happening at the same time, where many, many strong Catholics, as they are now, as they became then, took the oath,

to Henry, even though in their hearts they didn't see him as the supreme ruler. So you get this sort of division between what they're saying publicly and privately.

It's a very dangerous thing for them. Dissimilation is frowned upon. You know, Henry did not want them. Henry wanted everything of them. He wanted their minds as well as their voice. So you get this sort of division that's happening already. But Thomas More really kind of personifies it because he is then executed for not effectively taking this oath. Yes, not a winning legal strategy there for Sir Thomas.

But he and in so doing, he then creates a sort of massive discussion about his conscience. What did he mean when he said my conscience will not let me take this oath? He ends up kind of creating this kind of path that Luther has already sort of set out upon about what conscience is.

and is it scripture is it the individual is it following the catholic church which in thomas moore's case thinks it is but it effectively unleashes this idea of a spark of conscience that then kind of just causes chaos because it effectively authorizes the individual over whatever authority it might be whether it's the you know the protestants or the catholics the individual does come out of this and just to situate everyone we're talking about the 1500s here aren't we yes the

The kind of 1516 onwards, you know, all of the things happening. And so as we stretch into the 1600s, the 17th century, Tiffany, we've got both a public and a private sphere in great flux, don't we? On the one hand, you've got obviously the English Civil War, rampant raging debates about what public life actually is, what it should mean, but then also kind of non-conformism, you know, and debates around religious tolerance at the same time.

That's right. So once you've had this sort of splitting of public and private, which is what you have with the assertion of individual conscience, and you have people who are both kind of Protestant sect, but also Catholics, they're worshipping secretly.

Then they're saying the oaths in, you know, they're going to church, they're saying the oaths, they're signing the forms that Henry's men are sent around to get the signatures for. But privately, they are, they're worshipping. And so you've got Catholics who are going to church and stuffing kind of cotton wool in their ears so they don't hear the priest. And then they're going home and worshipping the way that they want to do. So you've got this

networks also being formed of different believers. And they're beginning to think, actually, maybe there's a better way

Maybe there is a better way of organising society. So belief isn't mandated entirely one way down from the top to the bottom. We want to follow God the way we want to. They begin to rationalise that. So it's a very curious thing because they obviously all think, whatever they are, whoever they are, whatever Protestant sect they are, or whether they're Catholic, they all think they know the true way. They know the true way to God. They are not relativists.

They're not like anything goes. You can worship how you want. You know, they think their way is the true way. But they're beginning to have to rationalize their departure from the mandated way of worshipping and organizing. And they're beginning to have to recognize that actually, if they've made this choice, maybe other people can also make this choice.

And so they begin to kind of talk about freedom and liberty of conscience. So we can kind of follow our own consciences in the way we worship. And you begin to talk about, they begin to talk about toleration and freedom of conscience in really interesting kind of ways that then once it's kind of established, it expands. So you get these sort of slivers of ideas and then gradually things expand, right?

include others. So we have in the 18th century, you've got

You've got commercialism, you've got the Enlightenment, you've got merchants, you've got a kind of growing middle class. And it seems in your account, Tiffany, this is when debates around privacy really start ballooning out. And they're not just about religious conscience anymore, but, you know, well, tell us about James Boswell, because there's a man that needed privacy of a very different kind. It's fascinating because in the period we've just been talking about in the 17th century, you know, sex outside of marriage is verboden. You've got these things called the bum courts,

where both the church and the community police each other. So you even have a case in 1640 where a woman called Susan Doughty is executed for the sin of adultery. The guy she's having an affair with isn't. So there is always a sort of slightly uneven rolling out of how that is done. But come the 18th century, ideas about conscience, which were kind of everywhere in the 17th century, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pamphlets are being kind of penned

They extend from religious toleration, so conscience and following faith in a particular way, to sex tolerance.

And people are suddenly sort of talking about how, actually, well, if I can decide this in the most important matter of life, I believe, maybe I can do it in terms of what I do with my own body and who I have sex with. It's just a kind of almost like an overnight thing. Pregnancies before marriage suddenly rise. You know, I think a quarter of women are suddenly turning up to the altar pregnant, which would have not been possible beforehand, you know.

You've got James Boswell, a fantastic figure who has insatiable appetites. And he not only has kind of appetites that he satisfies with prostitutes, with Rousseau's mistress, with ordinary women. He writes about them. He boasts about his virility on every single page of his diaries. And this is also quite interesting because previously the sort of beginnings of

diary culture a lot if you like were with the Puritans who write about how much they pray I prayed in the morning I prayed at 11 o'clock I played at 12 I went to public prayers I prayed privately and now you suddenly got somebody like Boswell writing about how many women he has sex with

Now, he boasts about it. He reflects on whether it's a good thing or not. He's sort of turning to not just conscience, but enlightenment thinking, which is kind of coursing through society, which begins to sort of rationalize human behavior in their kind of intimate life.

So sex becomes, relative to what it was before, a private matter. That is, it's for the individual's concern to decide who they have sex with, how they have sex and all the rest of it. Now, obviously, compared to today, it's nothing like the kind of much more relaxed attitude we have towards what people do in their private lives. But you have the beginning that this is actually a private matter. Sex is, however, very public matter.

So, you know, you've got prostitutes on the street, you've got brothels, you've even got molly houses, which are where men can meet men. Homosexuality is illegal, but you have this sort of relative tolerance, a relative toleration and people talking about conscience in matters of sex.

And is it then, is it here in the 18th century that we see the emergence of, you know, the kind of classical conception of the separation of public and private spheres? So is it now that we have, you know, you've got public life, which is like propertied, you know, you can enter if you're a propertied man, and that's to do with policy and politics and commerce. And then you've got this kind of private sphere, which is sacrosanct and important, but

and the kind of where women are expected to largely be dedicating their lives to.

Yeah, it's a very, it's a funny old process. So if you look at something like ancient Athens, you have a very strict delineation between public and private. Public life is where men, only citizens, so not all men, citizens participate and they, you know, they go to war, they recount great heroic acts in the Agora. There's wonderful public speeches. And then you have the private realm, which is really a realm of deprivation.

And you have women and slaves who serve the patriarch. And the women have very little power within the private realm. And they have very little kind of access to the public realm. So 18th century, you do begin to see this strict separation. Not strict. You begin to see a separation between the public realm and the private realm. You've got the news media, which suddenly after sort of the ending of censorship...

There's this kind of watershed of publications, newspapers in London and then across the country. And you have periodicals like Joseph Addison, The Spectator, who wanders about town describing the wonderful propulsion of commerce and how, you know, suddenly there's, you know, they're rich in, you've got the, you know, you've got tea being transported to every end of the country and

And with that money, you also have the sort of cushioning of the private realm. You have curtains, cushions, don't quite yet have corridors. I was going to ask you, the radical invention of the corridor. You do get the invention of the corridor. And so, but it's not kind of rolled out until in terms of normal people's homes until the Victorian period. So

You also have this veneration beginning of the private realm. So previously it would have been a place of commerce. You know, you make your own soap, you wash your own linen, you sell your own produce. Everybody's working. And that begins to slip away as work is something that people begin to go out and do. And that kind of frees the private realm to be upstarted.

a space of intimacy and privacy. It's still quite fluid that people, you know, people are going to balls, they're going to the libraries that are opening up, the museums, something like the British Museum, the Vauxhall Gardens. It's a very public culture in that people are going out a lot. But they're also, and they're also entertaining in their home. But the private realm begins to acquire...

a certain value that it didn't have in the ancient world. So the ancient world, you know, you don't get novels extolling the emotions and something like, um,

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which is all about very quotidian daily domestic activities, even though he's on an island. You know, he's cooking in his little pot and the word home is repeated again and again in the book. So you get this beginning kind of not quite sanctification, but you get this beginnings of a kind of social and written recognition of the values of the private realm. That's not just domesticity, which is kind of

in the Defoe, but it's also the emotions, you know, the internal world. The novel, I think, is a really important development, whereas previously you had work on theatre, you know, people go to the theatre, but the novel is something you can read. And so although a lot of people are reading in public in all the coffee houses, where everybody's arguing over the best play or

whatever's been done in the political realm, they're also reading quietly, silently, which is a kind of, you know, the development of the mind that's happening there.

Well, and I suppose it's kind of hot on the heels of the emergence of these ideas as kind of fluid or kind of changing as they are, that we also see the critics of those ideas emerge, don't we? So you've got, you know, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, you know, who is beginning to level an accusation that the public sphere, far from being a kind of actualisation of oneself, is a kind of venue of stifling conformity. And then someone else, then very differently, you have...

women like the Duchess of Devonshire who were kind of bravely striding into the public sphere, whether, you know, the morades of the time kind of permit her or not. That's right. I mean, public and private is trying to write this book, pinning down public and private. It's like an octopus.

Octopus is always moving. But whatever position it's in, it always has a tremendous impact upon all aspects of our lives. So it's a valiant endeavour anyhow. So, yes, you have this very interesting period, though, in the 18th century. You do begin to get a real recognition of the categories of public and private, as in the public is seen to be something which...

moderately ordinary people, merchants, workers can begin to enter and their judgments are important. So you have the sort of valuing of this public space in that way. And then you have the valuing of the private in the certain inserts as a sanctuary away from public life. But almost immediately,

that experience does trigger critics and there are right, you know, reasonable criticism to be made of it. Rousseau is one of them. So he sees, you know, he's in Paris, he's hanging out with all the Enlightenment philosophers and the aristocrats. He's in Paris, he's Rousseau. Exactly. And he just sees, you know, these wigs and these, you know, these beauty spots and this kind of

society. You know, we haven't had the French Revolution yet. So there's all these aristos kind of draped around the chairs, pontificating at length. And he just finds it soulless. And he doesn't, you know, he sort of, he begins to think that everything is false. So many of the ideas about sort of being phony and authenticity, you can see, although he never uses that word, but you can see is in kind of Rousseau's head at the moment. And he sort of retreats

to this place outside of Paris, paid for by a nice patron, and he writes his books and all the rest of it and just says, you know, everything that glitters basically out there in the public realm is false. In terms of women, and he would like to keep women in the private realm to a degree,

I think the development of the private realm in this period is a very positive thing, but it's also because it values certain things about private life, but they were much more confined to it in the way that men weren't. Men were the ones going to the coffee houses, banging on about whatever play they'd seen, and the women were much more in the home. And as the private realm was really valued, the home becomes...

something that the women are increasingly responsible for. And it's seen as natural, these Enlightenment ideals, which do great things in terms of creating the sense that there are areas that are private, also naturalises some things that are unnatural, one being the sense of women's inequality. So Duchess of Devonshire is this wonderful figure who is fascinated by politics.

one of the 200 families that run the country. So she has a lot of influence behind the scenes and to a great extent publicly. She's written about in the newspapers, she's a very well-known Whig, she follows Fox. And she does, however, step too far out of the kind of whispering at dinner parties area that women have their influence, are able to make an influence and into the public realm. And

by canvassing too actively and too obviously in the elections of 1784. And she's monstered by the press

which is a horrible, the press had lauded her for some time, respected her public speeches. But once she'd gone too far over the kind of into the realm of the man, as in the public man talking about politics, she was monstered and was very much seen as just as a step too far. She was meant to be in the home. She was meant to be caring for the children. That was seen as having a very important role.

Because that's the next generation, that's a generation of young men who are going to be running the country. So it's a very important role. You're not just knitting, but nonetheless, that's your domain. So also the separation between public and private can be very restrictive sometimes.

Men can do the public stuff. Women have to do the private stuff. Well, this takes us slightly out of the chronology for a second, Tiffany, but I think it's important. And I thought that one of the most interesting threads in the book is this one which takes us from the Duchess of Devonshire all the way through the 19th century, all the way into the 20th century and actually beyond, is this debate within feminism, the suffrage movement going into first wave feminism, second wave feminism, radical feminism around women

the essentially the legitimacy of of the private sphere and and and its relationship with the public sphere and how contested they are and essentially I suppose whether private spaces cons well it seemed to me that that one of the most elemental aspects of the debate was whether private spaces constitute a cage for women or some sort of space they can retreat from but but tell us a bit about this this debate because it's never really resolved is it

It's not an easy one to resolve. And each generation of women reacts to the conditions they're in. So 19th century women and sort of building on from people like the Duchess of Devonshire, the home was to a large degree a cage in that they couldn't leave it. So it wasn't so much as an attack on the home, but it was an attack on the barriers that meant that they couldn't go into public life.

and that their day-to-day life was heavily regulated by social expectation and the law to a degree. So you've got people like Mary Wollstonecraft,

vindication of rights of women, but also Mary Astell, two very different women in terms of their lives. Astell's an Anglican, believes in the divine right of kings, but she starts talking about the problems of limiting women's education because women were educated, as Wollstonecraft also said, to be pretty, to be accomplished, to be mothers. They weren't educated for their intellect. And there's this great debate as to whether they are naturally stupid or

To which most of the feminists at the time said, well, not a chance. They just they don't get the education the boys get. Educate them and they will have autonomy over themselves. They still think that women would probably want a home and think that's a very important role in their life. But they also want access to public life. I think in the 20th century and beyond, that's probably not enough.

for many women. And then there are conditions within the home because you have the situation where it's something that there are very few laws about what happens in the home. So the law against rape in the homes not passed in Britain until 1991. There's a sense that which if we intrude upon the private realm,

it will turn domestic trifles into a public spectacle. And it's the husband's role to decide how the family operate, not society's. So there are many laws in terms of domestic violence and abuse that do need to happen. There's also this kind of perennial discussion, which is what is more important for the way society is run? How we educate people in the home, how we socialise them,

You know, the sense that if you give me a boy and I'll show you a man. And therefore, if that's the case, if what happens later in society is due to how we socialise young kids, then obviously we need to go into the home. The flip side of that is, well, what about education? What about social structures? What about what's happening in the economy? You know, these things in kind of in society. And so there's been that kind of constant debate about,

I think, however, in the 20th century, you did have a kind of disenchantment with changing the social structures of

Something that Betty Friedan, one of the first feminists who wrote The Feminist Mystique in 1963, would have liked. So we need to change social structures so there are more judges, more women MPs, that there's better childcare or 24-hour childcare or whatever it is, so we can get women into public life. I think that's very important. But then I think there's a disenchantment with that that sets in in the 60s and you begin to get the sense, well, actually, it's the personal that is political.

And that begins to the sense of, you know, the personal and political being two different spheres. You have the sense that actually, no, we need to dissolve that border between the two and start targeting private life. And you get feminists like Kate Millett really going for that. Or Carol Hannish, she wrote this wonderful essay, The Personalist Political. So you then get the feminist movement begin to say, yeah, we need to go into the home. We need to regulate how you bring your children up. We need to regulate relationships between families.

your lovers and your husband and wife or whatever. We need to regulate voice, what you say. So you're going to get this beginning of the kind of intrusion into the private realm for ostensibly good reasons, but it does knock the border down between public and private.

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Well, we're about to step into the 20th century and back in the chronology now. And yeah, I mean, spoiler everyone, I think we might see that the separation of public and private and indeed private life sees many antagonists growing up across the 20th century. But just before we get there, Tiffany, where do you mark as the golden age of private life? Because it might be Mill on Liberty and the kind of rumbling outrage. Well, um...

eruptive outrage over Mazzini and the letters being opened is that the kind of high point I wouldn't

I wouldn't say it's a golden age, but so what you have in the 19th century is a highly idealised private realm. And you have all these kind of, as you say, eruptions, privacy panics. First privacy panic, 1844 in Britain, where you have this Italian exile living in Britain called Mazzini. He's a nationalist. And you have the state, British state, after being asked by the Austrians to open his letters. And he finds out because...

he can see that he sends himself empty letters with poppy seeds and strands of hair in it. And when he opens them, they aren't there. And he just thinks, yes, somebody's invading my letters. Somebody's opening my letters. But it's a national scandal.

You know, pages and pages of The Times are covered with coverage about how we do not invade the privacy of anybody. I mean, you know, and they wouldn't have agreed with this politics. It's just something you do not do because the private realm is sacred.

You have these fantastic controversy over a journalist who steals the etchings of Queen Victoria, private etchings of Queen Victoria and Albert, and they go to court and get them back. They have drawn some of their kids, but, you know, some of them are dogs and things like that. But this is a huge privacy scandal and society is up in arms.

I think that is the height of a separation between public and private. But I think at that time, the public world was beginning to look a little bit seen as a negative. And the private realm had risen in kind of in value too much. So I think it's sort of they're too separate. The public realm is seen as sort of this dark place, dark.

I think you begin to see this sort of disenchantment with what can be done with public life. So my favourite is more the 18th century, where you have everybody having a really good time, you get the valuation of the public realm, you get the coffee houses, the print, the debates, the societies, the libraries, but also you get the sort of beginnings of that nice private realm where people have freedom in their private life for the first time. Now, obviously, you don't want to get back to the 18th century,

It needs to kind of be updated so women have access, total access to the public realm and both realms are seen as valuable. So I think 19th century, the private realms overvalued. You want something where you basically have a border between the two and we recognise the values of both realms.

Okay, well, I'm sure you're not alone, Tiffany, in fondly recollecting at least some elements of the Enlightenment age. But we're in the 20th century now. And let's kind of do a diagnosis of what's happening with public and private life.

that's a kind of backdrop against which obviously we'll now see the entrance of not just big tech but but perhaps a range of different tools that allow privity to be kind of intervened in different ways so so where do you want to start that story I mean I think you tell it brilliantly I think one of the most difficult stories to tell is is this kind of the way in which kind of private life and interiority is in a way spilled out in public in this new brand of politics that kind of

stretches across the new right, the new left and new feminist critiques. Yeah, so once you've had the sort of the radical feminists going into the private realm and saying we need to target this because society will be better, you also have a kind of a traditional separation between religion and politics being broken down by the right. And I'm talking about sort of the end of the 1970s here. So

So you have, you know, Episcopalians, you have Jimmy Carter, you know, the first president to be on the cover of Playboy magazine. You have quite a kind of... The first or the only? I think he's got both of those. I don't think anybody else. So, you know, you look at the 70s in terms of kind of sexual culture, it's much more open. You also have...

beginnings of stonewall and gay rights and you have liberation you have liberalism so people are much more relaxed about being open about their private lives but at the same time it's becoming kind of politicized so it's a new type of scrutiny it's freedom in the one hand but it's also a new type of scrutiny and you do begin you do begin to get people like Phyllis Shafley who

who is an American conservative who begins to target things that were previously not partisan issues. Abortion, for example. So it's both Democrats and Republicans in the early 70s were open about legalising abortion. Ronald Reagan passes a bill in favour. But you begin to get with the politicisation of the private realm and private choices that

that partly the feminists did open up, you see that the right begin to no longer leave it as a private issue and politicise it too. So they get in and start talking about the private realm in a way that they hadn't before, but they push it into the public. So previously they would have been quiet and now they start talking about it. And it...

Whereas for the left, I think what you have is you get the left sort of turns in on itself and starts picking each other off. So Kate Millett is kind of told off by other feminists for not being open about her sexuality. She's bisexual, but she's married to a man. And it's just all a bit, you know, it's like many people's private lives, a bit complicated. But the sort of the

lesbians would like her to be much more open about it. You can understand why, because obviously we live in a very different climate where we're much more relaxed about being gay, straight or whatever. But she didn't really want to talk about it. But they turn on her. So they turn on each other for their decisions about their own private lives, whereas the right are galvanised. And in fact, they kind of they are part of really what gets Reagan into power.

There's this coalescence of people that were previously quiet about things, starting to campaign around abortion, feminism, which they see as anti-family, homosexuality and a host of other issues that you see with the rise of the moral majority. So they're galvanised. And it does mean that the right are kind of... And you can still see it to this day with the recent kind of...

turning over of the right to abortion as a constitutional right in America, I think it's partly because they see it as

kind of it's it's now an issue that they can talk about it's kind of been it was opened up in the 1970s and they can go for it and you've also got the private being thrown open to the world at the same time culturally don't you the rise of well from reality I think proto-reality television in the is it in 70s yeah I always thought it was Big Brother yeah

No, exactly. And of course, the other interesting thing about Big Brother is TV. It wasn't the internet. It certainly did train people, Big Brother. It's very, very important. But no, you have Candy Camera in the 1950s in America, people recording each other and sending them into the television programs, TV.

people doing silly things on camera. But the two key programmes, 1973, 1974, are The Family in Britain, which is a Paul Watson fly-on-the-wall documentary. You know, they lived with this family. And like every family, you know, there's all sorts of complications which are broadcast to the nation. You know, Mary Whitehouse,

that a conservative art teacher calls for the programme to be banned. She rails against it. So again, left and right beginning to really kind of focus in on

the private realm as a place to kind of lecture or try to set free or whatever. And then in the States with the, the, um, an American family who's funnily enough, this American family that they filmed in a fly on the wall style, um, are called the Louds, which I think is a really nice, but, uh, their son Lance is the first openly gay man on television. Um,

And, you know, they are huge in both cases. It's their lives of the subject of national discussion. And inevitably, they're kind of people have a go at them. You know, in the States, they're seen as, you know, well-fed zombies, these kind of relatively wealthy people. I think Lance Loud described it as television ate my family.

you know, because they were constantly under scrutiny. It changed their lives and not necessarily for the better. So you've got politics that's becoming private, private that's being thrown out into the public. Set the scene for us, kind of culturally and politically then, Tiffany, as big tech steps onto the scene. Is it that people simply don't really know what privacy is anymore? They're then less interested in it as Facebook and the other platforms suddenly emerge. Yeah.

OK, I think two things are happening. One, you have the breakdown of public and private. So that border that we have beginning in with with toleration in the 17th century between what you do in your in your public and political life and your private life, that begins to kind of erode. You've got scientists like Kinsey going into the private realm and talking to people about their sex lives.

And people are very relaxed about this because it's not the government. There is always a suspicion of the state or the government going into people's private lives. But when it's other bodies like scientists, people are much more relaxed. You've got the feminists kind of also going into the private realm. And then you've got the right taking the private realm and putting it in the public realm. So that's all going on. I think the way to put this, it sounds quite abstract, is to say public and private have become blurred.

And the old form of privacy that you saw in the Victorians, which was the private realm being separated from society, is seen as suspicious. So a good example of how that happens is that in the early 70s, there's in Britain a report on privacy where they start talking about with all the new tech, which is basically wiretapping, maybe we need to be cautious about how these things are rolled out and how do we protect privacy. But the end of the report says,

does then conclude that actually excessive privacy is a problem. So that kind of culture of openness is beginning to see that privacy in the Victorian way of understanding it is a problem. And you get much more narrow sense of privacy.

in terms of the way people are talking about it. So its definition changes. People are much more... So people, I don't think, begin to see this separation between public and private. If you're not doing anything shameful, why keep it quiet? And being out and proud is a political act. So people are much more relaxed about being...

in public and being themselves. And that is when you do see something like Big Brother. You know, this is pre-internet, but it's completely normal and interesting to talk about your private life on TV. At the same time, I think you have a kind of shrinking of the public realm. So best way to sort of talk about it, I suppose, is a sense in which all the big questions are off the agenda with, you know, that great

sense then of the end of history or there is no alternative that just maximizes so this is it and so people do the private realm just has become the only game in town and then big tech comes in and you know it is interesting that the one of the first things that people start thinking about doing is webcasting somebody like Jennifer Wrigley in the 1990s she sets it up this is an American college student she sets up a webcam no idea what's

what it's for, really. And, of course, she becomes this, becomes a certainly national, if not international star, appearing on David Letterman.

And she makes a really important, I think, interesting point, which is she sort of says there's no difference between two things, being online and offline, right? This is reality to very 1990s. What happens online is reality. And she also says, well, if you're not doing anything wrong...

Why be worried about it? Which is obviously what the big tech people say, isn't it? If you've got nothing to hide, don't worry about it. And that's already sort of people's lived experience in the 1990s. And then big tech comes in. And I think social norms and behavior have already kind of

deleted the public-private divide. And so big tech just sort of accelerates it. And I suppose the implications being that we see essentially no major political reaction to the rise of big tech, certainly not in the States and certainly not when it comes to the kind of private sector collection of enormous amounts of data. Always a curious distinction, I think, in the States where they've always been quite

quite nervous about kind of like, you know, the surveillance state, you know, historically, but were completely sanguine about the rise of big tech platforms, even when they began to offer services to the state. But then also, behaviourally, people just, you know, the privacy paradox you mentioned, people just beginning to use them and volunteering more and more of their data over. I mean, I think the state, particularly,

particularly post 9-11. What you have, I think, and I think you have this more generally with tech, is that tech is seen as a solution to whatever problem it might be. Just more tech and actually more surveillance. So post 9-11, you do have that programme, total information awareness, where we just need to collect all the data, all your data, and we'll find the terrorist in this kind of mountain of data. And there's a moderate political reaction to that sort of thing, but it's sort of half-hearted. And I think people...

kind of shrug it off because it feels like the argument's already lost. You know, when the New York Times did this year-long investigation called the Privacy Project, which was to look at the collection of data and the surveillance and the sort of the kind of relationship between the state and companies, which basically means the state can gather data it couldn't otherwise gather.

At the same time, they were installing surveillance cameras in the offices of the New York Times. So you have this sort of acceptance, really, and resignation. I also think the whole privacy discussion can be too technical.

It doesn't really talk about who's got the power, what do they have the power to do and what does it mean? It ends up being about cookies or it ends up being about blame and blaming the individual when, you know, this is the landscape in which if we want to search, if we want to communicate with people, there is a there's often an element of data collection. I also think talking just simply about data collection is,

Oh, it can be a bit technical, can't it? And so our privacy discussion is very reduced.

And you just end up having kind of, you know, tech people who know a lot, but don't necessarily know how to say why it's important and lawyers. And they're never very exciting, even though they're really important. It reminds me of the early debates 10 years ago, so around the communications metadata and the kind of Snoopers charter as that was currently being debated in the UK. But

But Tiffany, so that brings us up to the kind of present day, I suppose. I suppose the book is also an argument, isn't it, for why we're getting the worst of both worlds now. So in a way, like, information that...

ought to be public remains hidden at the same time as information that ought to be private seems to be more and more exposed to public scrutiny. Is that the kind of complaint, I suppose? Yeah, I think that's right, because in an age when public and private is blurred and when our discussion about privacy is narrow, we're

We assume, I think incorrectly, that it just means everything's available and everything's out there. But it's not. I did this programme on non-disclosure acts, the things that people have to sign not to say anything. And they're everywhere. They're absolutely everywhere. And you realise, particularly in the public realm where information needs to be open to have a democratic and accountable society, it's just being kind of

siphoned off and removed. And you saw that, I think, over the COVID inquiry. You know, it's so important that we work out what decisions were made, when, why and how, so we can not repeat the same mistakes, so we can learn from it. This was, you know, an international pandemic and our politicians are constantly trying to remove that information or not put it in the public realm. You see that particularly over WhatsApp,

which are, I mean, WhatsApp is a peculiar language.

medium in terms of the way we use it. But it was and it's entirely understandable that it'd be used during a pandemic. But government, I think ministers certainly use it thinking and they certainly justified it internally, secretly this way, because they thought they could delete it and it would be gone. But this is a really important record of how they made their decisions. So they, you know, Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock tried to keep it from the public domain. And

And we have to be really careful about that because it does mean we are not functioning properly as a democracy if information is just secretly removed. I remember that everyone was magically losing their phones, weren't they? Or deleting WhatsApp by accident or reformatting their phones by accident. Yeah, it was a wholly unconvincing series of explanations for why they couldn't proffer the WhatsApp messages to the inquiry. Exactly. And then the usual ignorance about what messages are retrievable. And also because people leak information.

People leak all the time. And I think one of the SNP ministers had this sort of joke between them, which is that, you know, deletion is a bedtime ritual, basically. As I put my pyjamas on, I delete these messages. And of course, now we've got them. Well, we're almost out of time. But one more question for you, Tiffany. And this is this is stepping back and looking at the you know, we've covered centuries of

we've gone all the way from the Reformation all the way up to the COVID inquiry is there a kind of grand motif that you step back and you see when it comes to pulling together the kind of history of public and private spaces I mean there's several times in the book you kind of touch on the idea of a pendulum

and they're kind of swinging back and forth, and of course never fully going back to the past, but a kind of reaction to one kind of idea of privacy and publicity creating another, and that maybe the kind of public and private... Well, maybe private life or the separation between the two, maybe it grows and diminishes. However tentatively we need to use those kinds of metaphors, is that kind of a right way of looking at this? Like, might we see the pendulum, which is, I think, quite...

according to your narrative, quite decidedly swung against the idea of private life right now. Do you see any sign of that possibly swinging back in the years ahead? I think we do need privacy. I think we do need private life. We need it for the development of the self, for individuality, to just be off, you know, to kind of be an idiot in private, to develop intimacy for trust. And I think that makes a better citizen because you know what it's like. I mean, even just simply...

If you've had a busy week, you go home, you have a drink with your friends, you be with your loved ones, you go back into the world feeling a better, you know, you're more equipped at dealing with it on the sort of fundamental day-to-day level. It's important. So I think that human need exists.

And I think what's interesting about sort of the beginnings of privacy in the 17th century is that, you know, Thomas More and Martin Luther weren't attempting to create it in any way whatsoever. This is unintended consequences. But I think they needed to be able to trust themselves about how to run their own lives. I mean, that might be a bit anachronistic, but effectively, that's one way you'd say. And I think people do trust.

feel that today um if you look at you know even just on a tech level you see lots of young people just putting their phones away and and if you want to get hold of them if you're if you're a parent you cannot get hold of them and you cannot find out about their lives so they're doing something right because they want some sort of they want a delirium they want to border

And we live in a fairly borderless world. It's quite difficult with people working from home, with 24-hour communication. It has to go beyond the individual. You can't just leave it up to individuals. But I think that separation, that desire, I think there is a desire for that sort of separation. To do that, though, I think we have to have a sense that

there are differences between being in public and being private. And it's not false or inauthentic to have a different public face to the one that you show your friends and your family. It's not hypocrisy or anything like that. It's just there are different facets to our individuality that it's beneficial to keep those things separate. And I also think, you know, a lot of the sort of surveillance today and the kind of performative culture, I think probably comes out of distrust

and a sense that tech will save us and keep us safe. You know, safety is the kind of trump card in a lot of these discussions about surveillance. And so that sort of means we need to trust ourselves and each other to keep us safe rather than tech or kind of any type of surveillance. That requires a sort of confident sleep. And ultimately, it means also having a sense that public life is a space which is a place to...

transact affairs in common, to think about how to make a better world and to sort of, if you like, re-enchant the public realm and to be out in public a little bit more, to do more things together, to be less personal in our political life, just more open to people having different points of view, for example. So you have to kind of champion the possibilities of public life as well as

creating a space to protect private life where you can just leave it, leave public life altogether. Well, on that enchanting thought of enchanting the public realm, we have to alas end. But Tiffany, thank you so much. This has been a real fascinating discussion. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.