Reading The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War has made me think more about the unique nature of urban civilization of the long 20th-century. The expansion of public health, in particular provision of clean water, meant that for the first time in the history of the world you had a situation where people in cities actually had a higher life expectancy than those in rural areas. Prior to this cities were demographic sinks. We have data from the 19th century which makes it clear that morbidity was higher for city dwellers. This is probably the major reason, in my opinion, the cosmopolitan worlds of antiquity had such a marginal demographic impact: the culturally vibrant city-dwellers who dominated Classical civilization politically and socially didn’t leave many descendants.
Even though cities were dominant politically and central to many earlier societies, only in the last century so have predominantly urban societies emerged. Before that most humans lived in villages or in hunter-gatherer bands. Everyone was in everyone else’s business. Anonymity was simply not a thing for most humans in most periods of our species’ history.
This changed with the rise of cities. In the early 2000s the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that people could maintain ~150 genuine social relationships in their mind. This is Dunbar’s number. Over the past two decades, there have been lots of arguments about Dunbar’s number. One can stipulate that the value may not be 150. Additionally, it seems likely that some people have a higher Dunbar’s numbers than others. But the general point that human social competencies have a ceiling value seems to be right.
And, that ceiling is smaller than the number of people who live in close proximity to each other in cities. The potential facelessness of your neighbors in a city, and its diversity and cosmopolitanism is one reason that it was in cities that written laws displayed in public places emerged as a custom. Societies not bound together by social interaction and kinship needed abstractions which could scale. Laws, kings, and religions are just some of the cultural inventions that were essential to maintain order in a city where strangers interacted daily.
But were these cities really incubators for anonymity? I would argue that the premodern city offered far less anonymity, and therefore privacy than the modern city. Premodern cities were dense, due to limitations in transportation. They were defined by neighborhoods. Additionally, economic activities in cities were often defined by relationships between people, whether it be between a patron and an artisan, or members of a cooperative guild. In some ways, premodern cities were a collection of villages.
What defined the 20th-century was the rise of massive corporations that rationalized economic consumption and production. The supermarket is cheaper than your local green-grocer, but there is also less of a personal relationship between you and the supermarket staff. Similarly, they may not know who you are. Rather than having economic relationships directly to other people, you have an economic relationship with an institution, which acts as an intermediary.
By the second half of the 20th century, individuals in cities could be totally self-sufficient and isolated from other human beings if they so chose when it came to personal relationships. The rationalization of modern life made deep human interaction a choice, and to some extent, privacy was the default state.
The rationalization of economic relations continues. But over the last 20 years, and especially the last ten or so, the default state of privacy has disappeared. If you know someone’s name you can usually find their age, where they have lived their adult life, who they lived with, and who their relatives are. Websites like Zillow can tell you their home-value or when/if they bought their home and for how much. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media make it so you can find out many things about a person.
Recently a friend of mine who became newly single after ten years in a relationship decided to try out online dating (for the first time). One thing he found is that you have to assume that your matches may have Googled you beforehand (presumably this depends on whether the site gives you full name or not). If you are too shy to talk to your neighbors, just look up who lives at the various addresses around you. Once you have their names you can find out everything else.
Obviously, modern information technology doesn’t make it so that we live in a premodern village. But, it does mean that the faceless anonymity enabled by rationalized modern economics and socio-political systems is stripped away. In its place, you become a set of values for various parameters (age, income, political orientation, geographical mobility). You don’t know people in a tacit and natural manner, you know them through their data.
Whereas the political and social views of most employees of a corporation were out of view in the 20th-century, today many companies are snooping around in Facebook feeds and doing simple background checks. You may not have a personal relationship with a large company, but it has a relationship with the data that it defines you by.
The 20th-century was the century of privacy because the machinery of information distribution appropriate to hunter-gatherers and villages did not scale to cities. And 20th-century technology never caught up to the scale of the cities and economies of that period in terms of distributing information. As the 21st-century proceeds, it seems that information technology is finally now in place.
It’s too middle of the night for involved comments, but the notion of the cities of old being collections of villages recalls to mind that the Tang dynasty capital had walled wards with gates and curfews, separated by broad avenues and patrols. Though you could get up at the crack of dawn to find breakfast when the food stalls and bakeries warmed up, as attested in surviving short stories
I’ve got to make more of social media; I’ve been e-famous and am young yet
It’s too middle of the night for involved comments, but the notion of the cities of old being collections of villages recalls to mind that the Tang dynasty capital had walled wards with gates and curfews, separated by broad avenues and patrols. Though you could get up before the crack of dawn to find breakfast as the food stalls and bakeries warmed up (Sogdian, even), as attested in surviving short stories
I’ve got to make more of social media; I’ve been e-famous, and am young yet
Obviously this poses a threat to freedom and Liberal societies as such, because the investment in controlling people with the old means was huge, but will get cheaper and cheaper. So a totalitarian system will be possible, even against the will of the people, with automatisation. It would be an interesting historical comparison to check how many people were needed to keep a population under control against their will and by force. From antiquity to modern times, the number constantly dropped with better weaponry and administrative tools. But I wonder, how many “soldiers” in the widest sense of the word (administrators, police etc.) you will need with automatic control systems and weapons.
Will 100 people be able to control 1.000.000? Or even less for more? This makes the threat of an uprising of the populace for the ruling class less and less of a problem they have to consider and this alone will change politics.
The fear of an uprising was one of the major reasons for social improvments for the mass of people from 1930s to the 1980s.
The fear of an uprising was one of the major reasons for social improvments for the mass of people from 1930s to the 1980s.
Brad Delong has recently highlighted a couple of comments by one Graydon along similar lines: the focus has been on military technology, and the rise and fall of mass armies. See here and here.
One of the corollaries of the fall of privacy is the rise of very intense political movements directed at allowing people to be “out” with regard to identities that have historically been scorned like sexual orientation and atheism and mental illness that have previously been largely kept “in the closet” during the early urban era because they can be invisible.
As hiding who you are “in the closet” becomes an increasingly non-viable option in a world where privacy is vanishing, forcing the world to accept who you are because you will inevitable be outed anyway, is your only option, so you and anyone who cares about you, needs to commit 100% into making sure that you a tolerated.
Living in a world where who you are is reviled and punished, but you are at high risk of being outed, is an existential threat. You will end up like atheist bloggers in Bangladesh or Saudi Arabia – dead – either through vigilante action or through a state supervised execution. You will end up like gays and Jews in the Holocaust. Eugenists engaged in mass sterilization of the mentally ill, and earlier eras persecuted them as witches and deviants. The old Act Up organization’s slogan, “Silence = Death” becomes the long term strategic reality.
If the long term survival of the closeted minority depends upon a Silence=Death strategy, your “friends” have an easy way of coercing you to join the cause, even if you believe that it isn’t in your personal interest to join this collective political effort. They can “out” you. Then, you have no choice other than to join them to survive, because you can’t go back into the closet, a strategy that was viable until the last few generations. This strategy has been used rather ruthlessly against conservative politicians who publicly fight for public toleration of who they are, even as they are what they claim to hate but live that life in the closet.
Another mostly unrelated reaction.
In the 1970s in China, they had big cities but they weren’t organized the way that Western cities are. Instead, they were vast numbers of little villages squished together. Each little urban neighborhood had one Communist party local office with a generalist government official (a bit like a village chief) who served as you exclusive point of access to the larger party and governmental structure.
Perhaps because so much of your life was confined to that urban village, attitudes towards privacy we also pre-urban. This meant that you had reduced freedom to not conform, but it also meant that the community would intervene much earlier in situations like a couple’s relationship veering towards domestic violence or a child starting on the path to delinquency, long before the lines that would constitute grounds for state intervention in the West would be crossed, when it was more feasible to do something about it.
So, in China, the anonymous city has been a much later development, even for the urban masses, than in the U.S. China cities were starting to have the levels of anonymity found in big Western cities for most of its residents only in the 1980s or later.
Further, the Internet, while pervasive even in China, has been so censored and monitored from the outset, that people have been much more wary about revealing themselves on it. So, the Internet has done less to erode privacy in China than it has in the West. Big Brother in China has forced people to keep their guard up, because little strikes by the state and the party at individuals those who do not do so, and the hardly remote memory of the Cultural Revolution, has constantly reminded them of the consequences of doing otherwise.
China is trying to institute a “Social Credit” system that uses technology to pervasively monitor the sub-criminal activity that would have been regulated with village gossip, which has met little resistance because the tradition of the social freedom that comes from anonymity is so short lived (it is hard to fight for something you’ve never had with conviction), and this too makes “coming out” (often politically or in other heterodox ways we don’t even imagine thinking about in the West), challenging indeed – in that political terrain it is too daunting to try to organize a movement that isn’t driven top down from within the Party.
@marcel: That’s most certainly right. Historically mass armies were always correlated with a more democratic or at least populist political development. Democracy without the Hoplite army is much harder to imagine and even as far as to the Celtic fringe of Europe more populist movements seem to have appeared from the Hallstatt to the La Tene period because of Greek influences and a more infantry, even Hoplite-style warfare.
Similarly, the Feudal Ages went in the opposite direction with very expensive knights and back with militias again.
So having a professional army, which gets smaller and smaller, more technical and automatised, will definitely be in favour of less democratic, less populist and less free states.
Automatisation is in general anti-democratic, because it makes the common man more expandable, or, at some point, even a burden for those in charge of the financial and productive means. This is no automatism per se, but its a tendency which will get more and more dominant if there is no political counterbalance.