Sin in the Global Village

By ROBERT WRIGHT

In a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly, a book reviewer found the Starr report to be not just a pulp page turner but a haunting allegory. The report symbolizes "the national invasion of our privacy." The moral of its story: what happened to President Clinton "could happen to any of us--our own sex lives on newsstands everywhere."

On newsstands? Don't flatter yourself. On the other hand, in an age when anyone with a modem can publish a Web page accessible to all of planet Earth, who needs newsstands? You may not be a celebrity, and public interest in your sins may be meager. But as cyberspace grows, its ultra-narrowcasting will serve even meager appetites. So next time you scorn a lover or a friend, make sure she doesn't have Web-authoring software. Just imagine--your own personal Linda Tripp, mad as ever and now equipped with a URL.

The growing ease of spreading dirt is only half the "death of privacy" nightmare that the Lewinsky scandal has stirred up. The other half is the growing difficulty of hiding dirt. Why, when I was a boy, a semen stain was just a semen stain. Now it's a signature. When I was a boy, an intern's girl talk evaporated into the ether. Now it crystallizes in cyberspace as e-mail.

Terrifying. But who ever said privacy is a God-given right--or, for that matter, a wholly good thing?

Ever visit the natural human habitat, a hunter-gatherer society? Very little privacy. And very little child abuse. And little extramarital sex--at least, compared with the possibilities offered by modern anonymity. In parts of Liverpool, England, blood tests showed that 1 in 4 kids had a biological father other than the father of record. Among the !Kung San hunter-gatherers of Africa, the figure was just 1 in 50--and that was without modern contraceptive technology.

The !Kung aren't more puritanical than the English--just more visible. This has always been the great check on the human id: fear of being found out. As Hillary Clinton might say, it takes a village. Or, in the case of her husband, a global village.

There's no denying that the erosion of privacy complicates life. Consider the precautions called for if you rent a hotel room for an extramarital dalliance: don't arrange the rendezvous by e-mail, don't pay your bill by credit card, and beware of security cameras in the lobby. (Also: if in New York City, don't steal any kisses at the corner of Fifth and 45th, which is globally viewable at www.mte.com/webcam/. But is all this really too much to ask when you're violating one of the Ten Commandments?

Of course, high-tech surveillance is not exactly the same as village visibility. As the journalist Kevin Kelly has noted, the old-fashioned, small-town lack of privacy was symmetrical. You knew the people who were watching you, and you could watch them back. These days, you are not on a first-name basis with the computers that track your credit-card purchases or your Web browser's wanderings--or with the people who, for all you know, can access those computers. It's this sense of a distant, cloaked observer that's really eerie.

Then again, some people long ago learned to live with the burdensome sense of a distant, cloaked observer. They call the observer God. It would be easy to ridicule this comparison. After all, God is nice, whereas prying hackers aren't. But actually, depending on the denomination, God can be wrathful and dish out punishment unpredictably. It really keeps you on your toes.

Indeed, in decades and centuries past, as newfangled privacy made personal and professional transgressions more feasible, a compensating deterrent was the sense that somewhere out there, your footsteps were recorded and any misstep could come back to haunt you. Now, through the magic of technology, agnostics can share this angst.

Maybe it will come in handy. The new technology creates fresh temptations, sometimes by erecting walls of privacy as fast as it tears them down. In the old days, if you wanted to play roulette, you walked into a casino. If you wanted pornography, you bought it in public. The Web lets you indulge these hobbies secretly, even to addictive lengths. But then it throws in fear of retribution from on high--the chance that your data will fall into the wrong hands. (If that makes you queasy, buy your pornography at a convenience store, as our forefathers did.)

Am I serious? Am I really nominating private-sector surveillance as a surrogate for village visibility and the heavy gaze of a punitive god? Well, no. For one thing, God punishes only real sins and aims to redeem; malicious hackers and personal enemies will settle for embarrassment. And God brings cosmic reassurance as well as fear; the technologies of surveillance are all hell, no heaven. But I am serious about raising the question: As we spend more time plugged in and less time in public view, and as many people take fire and brimstone less and less literally, where will the surrogates for time-honored restraints come from?