Our Inner Lives Become Impoverished

Walter Kirn, from "Is My Phone Eavesdropping On Me?" Note to Self, Nov. 4, 2015:

"Having an interior life means thinking things that you don't want to say aloud. Otherwise you'd just be babbling on all the time.

Once people take as a given that all of their secrets would be ferreted out, or that having secrets is something to feel guilty about in itself, they start to become kind of robotic.

My fear is that as we stop defending this interior space, we'll start to do things and think things and censor our very inner life in a way that doesn't cause us any anxiety.

The real cost of surveillance is that our inner lives become impoverished — that the set of moves that make us thinkers and emotional beings becomes reduced.

In that way, we start to become the machines that we're afraid are invading our lives. We can't beat 'em, so we join 'em."

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See also: A Scanner Darkly & The Lives of Others