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What Is Privacy For? | The New Yorker

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Ibelong to the last generation of Americans who grew up without the Internet in our pocket. We went online, but also, miraculously, we went offline. The clunky things we called computers didn’t come with us. There were disadvantages, to be sure. We got lost a lot. We were frequently bored. Factual disputes could not be resolved by consulting Wikipedia on our phones; people remained wrong for hours, even days. But our lives also had a certain specificity. Stoned on a city bus, stumbling through a forest, swaying in a crowded punk club, we were never anywhere other than where we were. Today, it is harder to keep one’s mind in place. Our thoughts leak through the sieve of our smartphones, where they join the great river of everyone else’s. The consequences, for both our personal and collective lives, are much discussed: How can we safeguard our privacy against state and corporate surveillance? Is Instagram making teen-agers depressed? Is our attention span shrinking? There is no doubt tha

Save this story Save this story I belong to the last generation of Americans who grew up without the Internet in our pocket. We went online, but also, miraculously, we went offline. The clunky things we called computers didn’t come with us. There were disadvantages, to be sure. We got lost a lot. We were frequently bored. Factual disputes could not be resolved by consulting Wikipedia on our phones; people remained wrong for hours, even days. But our lives also had a certain specificity. Stoned on a city bus, stumbling through a forest, swaying in a crowded punk club, we were never anywhere oth

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