The Obsolescence of Privacy 1

Günther Anders
1958

1. ‘The world is not only delivered to the house’, the inverse is also true,
‘the house is delivered to the world’
In Volume 1 of The Obsolescence of Human Beings I described how television and radio
‘brings’ world objects and events ‘into our home’ just like gas and water are brought
in.2 I discussed how the world, channelled in through even the thickest walls and across
the greatest distances, loses its quality of being outside as well as its reality. It isn’t
encountered as ‘world’ anymore, but it hasn’t simply turned into an ‘image’ either: it
has become something of its own kind, a ‘world-phantom’. This phantom, I showed, has
achieved a higher level of pragmatic realism than many aspects of the so called ‘world’,
for it acts as a ‘matrix’ that moulds us, who actually consume this phantom, and the
way broadcast events unfold.
The supply3 of world-phantoms is not simply a curious, isolated phenomenon,
but a process that has completely transformed the relationship between the human
and the world. As such, it is of fundamental philosophical significance. This does
not say that our existence today exclusively unfolds as instances and processes of
receiving deliveries, or even that it has become one single, vast consignment, for
there is a complementary process that shapes our existence no less decisively than
‘the supply of world’ (Belieferung), namely, ‘being supplied and surrendered to the world’
(Auslieferung).

CounterText 3.1 (2017): 20–46

DOI: 10.3366/count.2017.0073
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/count

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 The Obsolescence of Privacy

These two processes are often not merely complementary processes, but
components of a single transaction which entails the delivery of the person, or group
of people ‘A’, and the consumption of this delivery by the recipient group B. Popular
‘Reality-TV shows’ (Besuchs-Sendungen) illustrate why it would be futile to try to fix the
boundary between ‘being supplied with’ and ‘being supplied to’.
In the United States there are TV shows (such as Person to Person or Strike it Rich)
that broadcast the home-life of real people or families to millions of viewers. Sitting
in front of a screen, say in New York, the front door of the anonymous family X or
the famous actor Y opens for us. Members of the household introduce themselves or
are introduced and show us around the home.4 Fido jumps up at us as if we were
old neighbours. Sexual problems, trouble at school, and yes, amazingly, even financial
difficulties are most confidentially laid out in front of our eyes.
This lack of inhibition has here not yet been realised in its ideal form, because we
are being supplied with people who are our voluntary victims. The ‘optimal’ interplay
of ‘being supplied with’ and ‘being surrendered to’ is only achieved when those on
air are as ignorant as other types of commodities are, and do not know that they are
being supplied and are unable to counteract it. This is often achieved (in shows like
This is Your Life) by luring people, unsuspecting victims, to a location where they will
be in the scope of a recording device. There, they will undergo an immensely exciting
experience in wait for them (well, not actually for them, but for the viewer). This
experience can now be channelled to customers in its freshest state, complete with
screaming fits, tears, or fainting. Genuine scenes of reunion, faithful to Aristotle’s
Poetics, are arranged: family members, separated for decades and cast to the farthest
corners of the world, suddenly face one another, no longer having dared to hope to ever
do so again. In past, more naïve times, stories were made attractive by the disclaimer
‘true to life’. Today–because progress must be–‘true life’ is produced; the non-simulated
scream, the real tear and actual faint are the choreographed reality produced to provide a
story, offered and consumed in its phantom-form.5 One has transformed the viewer
into a phantom-cannibal, who devours fellow humans who are ensnared by recording
devices, a cannibal who is nervous, even feels betrayed, if the meal is not served at the
usual hour or is taken off-the-air completely.
Put otherwise: the social situations ‘to encounter’ and ‘to visit’ are transformed
into modes of consumption in which one human being is ‘surrendered’ to another who
‘is supplied with’ him or her.6 The goods on offer now include our fellow humans, yes,
primarily these: we have all become virtual eaters and a meal for others and as such the
situation is cannibalistic. A complete view of our existence today is not possible without
considering the cannibalistic practices of eating and being eaten.

2. Today’s thief steals without stealing–he ‘only’ steals images

We don’t always know that we are being surrendered and that we are being consumed.
Especially in acoustic matters we are exposed without realising. I am speaking of

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‘wiretapping’. This has made it possible and normal for our conversations and
sounds–even the most intimate ones–to be intersected.
‘No!’ I hear in protest. ‘It’s misleading to speak of actual delivery. When it streams
into our house transmitted by radio or television, the world does not cease to exist
at source, where it really is. Likewise, we do not stop being ourselves when our
voice is tapped and channelled somewhere else or to many places at once. The world
transferred into our houses by radio and television is but its phantom-like double and
we too are not actually delivered in a corporeal manner when being recorded.’–
These analogies are askew and the objection is amiss for two reasons:
1. Originals don’t remain intact ‘behind their reproductions’. They don’t stay what
they ‘are’; in the cosmos of consumption no ‘thing in itself’ exists. Reproduction
affects originals, even when these are merely poised to be reproduced: they change
for the sake of it. An unrecorded parliamentary session, for instance, or a trial,
happen differently to one that is also meant for millions of TV-customers. The
‘reality’ supposedly being reproduced does not ‘actually’ happen.
2. Those eavesdropping on us, or storing our expressions in the lasting form of a thing
(a ‘recording’), do not only own ‘reproductions’ or listen to ‘reproductions’. True,
the voice they hear may ‘only’ be a reproduction, but pragmatically speaking this
‘only’ is inconsequential. For they now effectively have what was vocalised at their
disposal, and now also dispose over us.
In truth, ‘recordings’ of us that are in the control of others mean that we, actual
humans, are also handed over into their control to be at their mercy (for instance by
becoming susceptible to blackmail on private, economic or political grounds). The
industry of creating phantoms through reproduction results in new realities–we shall
get to know figures confirming this.
It is thus wrong to assume that we aren’t affected and stay ourselves when being
recorded, abducted, robbed and stolen from, or even when there is only a possibility
that this might happen. This is important to emphasise, because, to make us indolent,
we are talked into believing that we aren’t affected. This indolence is one of the basic
delusions of our age, a lie that plays down the utterly changed situation we are in or
even makes it invisible. This change is effected by the following precedences: (1) a
completely new type of thief exists: the image-thief, and a new form of property crime
(Eigentumsdelikt7 ): image-theft; (2) we are exposed to a completely new danger, the
danger of being deprived of our appearance and expressions.
In the age of reproduction, thieves enjoy the characteristic excuse of limiting
themselves to taking possession of images of humans and things instead of claiming
humans and things. With every theft, they have the possibility to assert (and even
convince themselves) that they aren’t stealing anything, not really.
The consequences of this excuse are enormous. In the course of history, there were
probably only few opportunities to become a fraud that were as seductive as this one,
few that were exploited as universally and fully. A widespread ‘ikonokleptomania’

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has developed from the possibility of stealing images with a good conscience: a habit
and addiction to make away with the recorded appearance of things in the world
(particularly of things one does not own) and to regard this recorded appearance (the
image) as one’s property.8 We all, and not just this or that individual or criminal,
are seduced by this ‘ikonokleptomania’. We all have become used to rummaging
through the department store called ‘world’, to filch eye-catching items by taking
their pictures and to clutch at the famous individuals we wish to ‘have’ or sell. All
the while, none of us is suspected of committing a property crime. On the contrary,
everyone is under the illusion that the originals are left unchanged and in the place
they were before they were taken.9
The opportunity photographers or wire-tappers enjoy when they limit themselves
to relieving us of reproductions (or our words) is to not steal whilst stealing. This ‘not’
is decisive. This ‘not’, which everyone can call upon, lends our sanctimonious age its
clean conscience and aureole. The wallet of the business man whose phone is tapped
by a ‘snooper’ is not stolen. Not. The girl, covertly photographed in a ‘pin up’ pose,
is not being robbed of her virginity. Not. A few metres of recorded magnetic tape
have been stored, a few films more are in the world; nothing else seems to have
happened.
No, nothing has happened; we are not alone in being unsuspecting. After the
property-crime is committed, we, the victims, are not alone in living on unchanged
without feeling loss. The thieves, too, are oblivious. Although they have added another
item to their loot, they have nothing the other misses. Just as nothing has happened
to us, they have done nothing, nothing to us. Whereas their classical ancestors, the
righteous highwaymen and pick pockets, created unambiguous outcomes–victims
truly miss the objects taken away from them–their grandchildren create a completely
indistinct state of affairs. Their activity results in a situation in which those who were
stolen from by having their picture taken is the following, as paradoxical as this may
sound: They seem to have lost nothing, which is to say, they have lost their feeling of loss.
Their forefathers knew exactly what they were doing while stealing louis d’ors and
pocket watches. Their grandchildren, who merely take reproductions, remain so
dreadfully guilt-free and ignorant that they follow their line of work with the best
possible conscience. They can wash their hands in innocence. When confronted, they
always have an alibi, provided for them by the victim. This is an additional peculiarity,
for this alibi is actually our alibi, the fact that we are elsewhere. They can always point
at us to prove the ‘not’, that we are not in their hand, but are elsewhere, alibi, in the
place we ‘really’ are. They can always claim that we live on unchanged, untouched and
without any verifiable detriment, just as we were living before the theft. In brief: there
seems to be no talk of a perpetrator, of a deed, a crime, guilt, or reasons for shame and
remorse.
Nothing is more difficult than figuring out the connection between ethics and the
respective historical stage of technological development. We have not yet learned to
do so. The assertion might therefore sound strange that our conscience and capacity to

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feel responsible are on the edge of wasting away because of the modes of reproduction
we have learned to take for granted. We will need to learn something new.

3. Listening devices are totalitarian

The expressions ‘to hand over and surrender the human to the world’ only seem to
be other names for political totalitarianism, for the kind of system that specifies what
an individual should do, a system, in which all this individual does and feels has to be
exposed to the surveilling gaze of power to be controlled. It is no coincidence that
totalitarian governments in all their guises have shown a voracious appetite for the
devices we are about to discuss (devices which promised a maximum level of control
until it was possible to achieve perfection).
By the same token, every society that allows itself the use of such devices inevitably
acquires the habit of considering humans as fully exposable and as entities that are
allowed to be exposed. Whilst acquiring this habit, societies inevitably risk sliding
into political totalitarianism.10 As we have seen, technological innovations are never only
technological innovations and this makes the danger so great, for nothing is more
misleading than the assertion that machines are ‘morally neutral’. This particular
‘Philosophy of Technology’ (which is rarely explicitly elaborated, but is presumed
self-evident in right and left wing politics) asserts that machines are at our disposal.
It claims that machines are open to any use; what matters is only how we use them
and what purpose we give them after their creation: moral or immoral, humane or
inhumane, democratic or antidemocratic.
This widespread idea needs to be combatted. It gives right of way to every gadget,
and declares philosophy a straggler because it suggests that the articulation of ethical
implications only needs to begin after the fact.
With this, the capitulation of ethics is pronounced. The moral philosopher is palmed
off with the pathetic task of approving already existing machines (regardless what
they may be), or, in the best case, with explaining to his contemporaries what their
machines may or may not be used for.
Or, put otherwise, the hypothesis about the ‘moral neutrality’ of machines must be
combatted because it is an illusion. Technological man, homo technicus, only indulges
this illusion so that he can maintain a calm conscience when confronted with his own
machinery, which is accumulating daily and outgrowing him. It is simply not true that
we keep our freedom opposite the machines we have built and that we can choose or
determine the way in which they are used.–
Once a machine exists, the fact that it works is already a kind of use, and its
specific performance gives each machine a (socially, morally or politically) prejudicing
role. Ultimately, we are immediately shaped by the mere existence of a particular
machine. Every machine either prescribes a certain relation between us and our
fellow human beings, between us and things, between everything and us, or ‘posits
the ground’ for this relation to unfold. Every machine shapes us like this regardless of

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the particular purpose we deem to use it for, or what we plan to achieve. Yes, and it
does so, irrespective of the political and economic system from within which we turn
to it:
Every machine is already its use.
I already tried to prove this unpleasant thesis in Volume 1 of The Obsolescence of
Human Beings, whilst discussing television.11
What reaches humans through the television set is inconsequential, a nuclear
explosion, a queen’s coronation or a beauty contest. Who sits in front of it is
inconsequential, a farmer in a Siberian kolkhoz, a tailor in London or the owner of
a petrol station in Colorado. What matters alone, is the circumstance that these events
arrive in a de-realised phantom-state and that the consumption of phantoms replaces
experience of world. This circumstance shapes and disfigures humans, this prejudices
the way humans relate to the world and vice versa.–
There is no reason why the thesis I advanced in my essay on the effects of this supply
of phantoms should only apply to ‘receptor devices’, the type of machine I discussed
there. If one accepts the thesis as generally applicable, its implications for ‘devices that
surrender and expose us’ (Auslieferungsgeräte) are as follows.
A specific mode of being-in-the-world is established when humans can be checked
up on as a matter of course and exposed to their fellow humans or to some authority,
or rather, when humans are viewed and treated as beings who are allowed to be exposed
and handed over. This is especially the case if their way of life reflects the fact that such
exposure might happen or is actually happening. Regardless of who is surrendered
to whom, regardless of the aim this exposure pursues, and regardless of the political
system in which this process unfolds, a completely new mode of being is established:
being-in-the-world without freedom. This differs so radically from the previous modes
of being, that the idea that devices-that-deliver-us could help uphold earlier ways of
being or principles, let alone the principles of democracy and human freedom, would
be nonsensical; as nonsensical as the suggestion that the extraction of coal or oil could
be modified with the assistance of nuclear power, thus preventing nuclear power from
triumphing over these older forms of energy production. And as silly as suggesting
that one could reanimate the old American frontier spirit with the help of the ready-
made camping equipment that can be bought in shops. From a historico-philosophical
perspective, such ideas are naïve. The formative power of the technological object–of the
means as a means–always triumphs over the intended end. The end is never strong enough to
compete with the formative power of the object.–
This section opened with the assertion that listening devices are totalitarian by the
very fact of their use. How so?
Because they eradicate, or at least correct, a metaphysical fact that resists totalitarian
demands: the fact of individuation, the fact, that every human being, just like everything
else that is, is fundamentally a discretum. Inasmuch as it ‘is’, every human being is
something that has become singular (vereinzelt), or is at least something that is also
singular.

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The ontological fact of singularity means that everybody–whether they like it or

not–represents an insular retreat, screened by walls. This obstructs, by default, the
aspiration of the totalitarian state to be omnipresent and omnipotent.
Or, more pointedly put: even though the totalitarian state grabs hold of single beings
to incorporate them, these remain outside and amount to gaps in its continuum and
blank spots on its map. They remain unobtainable and inaccessible.
I call this unobtainability of the parts by the whole ‘transcendence of enclosedness’
(Binnen-transzendenz).12 For the whole, this form of transcendence is a defect both
of itself and of its parts, the singularities it includes. The whole can deem to have
attained its ideal only when no blank spots are left on its map, only when it has the
desired massiveness, continuity and monolithic status: once the state is able to exist
in an Eleatic manner, as an entity ‘pre-empting’ all processes of individuation, or, and
this amounts to almost the same, once it is able to get hold of its individuals, because
these are public, voluntarily ‘eager to accommodate’ it and are transparent and without
walls.13 In brief: the totalitarian state would be perfect only if ‘discretion’ (as conceived
by natural philosophy) did not exist, not to mention selfhood, ‘privacy’ and ‘intimacy’
in the psychological sense.
Totalitarian power, only interested to advance and enforce demands, doesn’t value
theoretical insights. That’s why it doesn’t merely see individuation as a defect and a
metaphysical fact, but as a scandal; not so much a scandalous fatum but a scandalous
factum.14 If totalitarian power was given the opportunity and if it cared to articulate its
ethico-metaphysical principles, it would describe the process of individuation as sinning
against its monolithic entitlement. It would accuse the individual of having ‘embezzled the
self’, that is to say, it would allege that the individual has misappropriated the sum it
owes to totalitarian power: its own self, body and soul. It would accuse the individual
of establishing itself as an inaccessible, non-controllable, self-appropriated retreat and
thus evading its demand.
Because there is no cure for the fact of individuation, as this sin results from
the fact of existence itself, totalitarian power views individuation as an ‘original sin’,
as a condition that needs to be combatted by all means. This can only happen if
the two opposing sides, the totalitarian authority (against whom the ‘sinner’ ‘sins’)
and the ‘sinner’, take up arms in common cause. With this we have arrived at
our topic.
For one thing this means that totalitarian power must try to be ‘brazen, impudent’
(unverschämt) and ‘indiscreet’:15 it must try to break, or, as a minimum, look into the
‘discrete’ space of the individual. Totalitarian power ‘owes’ it to itself to at least try
to gain a foothold in the gap the scandal of individuation represents in its domain.
In its attempt to achieve total presence and authority in this space from which it
was excluded by the process of individuation, it employs spot checks and controls,
questionnaires, spying, and intimidation.

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The individual, in turn, has the duty to give up being discrete to become ‘unashamed
and unembarrassed’ (schamlos), it must ‘give ground’ (einräumen) and concede to
be the bearer of an a priori guilt. ‘Giving ground’, understood literally, means:
the individual must declassify and surrender to totalitarian power the ‘landlocked,
enclosed space’ that it had reserved for itself and occupied as an isolated, ‘discreet’
entity. The totalitarian state’s ‘expansionism into the landlocked interior’ is a process
that corresponds to imperialist expansionism. Wherever totalitarianism emerges,
the single individual is always its first ‘occupied territory’. Expansionism begins
at home.–
‘Integral brazenness’ and ‘integral unashamedness’ are the two correctives that the
state steering towards totalitarianism requires in order to actualise its ideal of perfect
integration.
With this we have arrived back at our object of enquiry. For, no measures and no
devices live up to bugging devices in this respect, none can guarantee an equally perfect
level of ‘brazenness’ and ‘unashamedness’. That’s why bugging devices were described
as ‘totalitarian machines’ above, for they are the best auto-correctives that could have
fallen into the lap of totalitarianism.
Not only are these machines characteristic of totalitarianism, they also ‘create
totalitarianism’. This inversion is no less consequential than the thesis itself: where
bugging devices are used as a matter of course, the main precondition of totalitarianism has
been established and totalitarianism is achieved.
It makes no difference whether the hypothetical state A makes use of bugging
devices because it is totalitarian, or whether the hypothetical state B becomes
totalitarian because it uses such machines. The end result will be the same: if they
use such machines without scruple, states A and B will soon start to look so much
like twins that no one will be interested in knowing which was the
ó
o
[the
former], and which the 
o
[the latter]. A French proverb says: ‘If a drinker is
ill because he drinks, or if his illness is drink, does not need to worry his children’.
Does not need to worry us.
4. Examples
The examples I provide now are all from the United States,16 because in the States the
facts and figures pertaining to bugging devices and the problems and dangers arising
from their use are publicly discussed in ‘official’ settings (‘State Judiciary Committees’)
and also in newspapers, and so forth. Such discussions are impossible in explicitly
totalitarian states. American data is thus more openly accessible than data of other
countries.–
I begin with three examples compiled at random.
1. The testimony of expert witnesses to the ‘State Juridical Committee’ in California
revealed that between 1940 and 1957 over 1000 buildings in Los Angeles were
wired with bugging devices.

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2. In 1952 (6 years after the end of the war), the American courts instructed the
police to wiretap 58000 individuals, companies, and societies. This is not a made
up number, but a figure provided by William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court
judge.
3. The police is not the only agency that conducts electronic surveillance; it
is probably the smallest. According to official estimates, ‘legal’ wiretapping
(insofar as the word ‘legal’ is appropriate here) amounts to only one fifth of
the interceptions actually undertaken. For 1952, we thus already arrive at the
impressive figure of 290000 individuals, companies and societies who were
‘acoustically naked’: when speaking, they were always doing so onto tape or
into unknown-listening ears. I say ‘individuals, companies and societies’ because
not only politically or criminally suspicious people are under surveillance and
recorded, or the many thousands in whose midst one might hope to find
someone who is politically or otherwise ‘incriminated’. No, politicians are being
eavesdropped on by other politicians, official bodies by other official bodies,
research centres by the military, companies by their competitors, consumers by
business people, business people by consumers, wives by husbands, husbands by
wives, and finally thousands of private and public individuals by so called ‘snoopers’
(who make a living by selling or threatening to sell secrets they have become
party to).
The figure 290000 in itself is evidence enough that here we are neither dealing
with a sporadically adopted emergency measure nor with a series of curious, isolated
scandals. What is at issue, rather, is the exercise of control over a wide section of the
population and a threat to privacy as such.
Even more so, because the figure is far too low, since no one can be certain or can
actually establish whether they too are under surveillance.
This form of ignorance is a social factor of principal significance. The recent
dictatorship established that one begins to feel and act differently the very moment one deems it
possible that one is under surveillance, or rather, the very moment one no longer deems it impossible
that this is the case. One conforms more, even entirely. The unverifiable possibility of being
under surveillance is of decisive formative power. It shapes the population as a whole.
The technologies of surveillance deployed are as fairy-tale-like as their effect. A few
reflections and data quickly corroborate this.

1. Let’s be clear what is recorded by phone ‘tapping’, or at least, what can be

recorded. Not only a single situation (as was the case, for instance, with a
discrediting photograph) or a single conversation. Once the phone is tapped,
every conversation can be intercepted. Not only those explicitly conducted via the
receiver, but every conversation happening in the vicinity of the phone: to keep
the line ‘live’ even when the ‘receiver’ is seemingly hung up is child’s play, and a
trick that is routinely applied.

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2. The distance between the listener and the person under surveillance has become null and
void. Today a businessman in Seattle only needs to pick up the receiver to hear
everything that is happening in the New York branch: because he can let any place
appear at any other one, linear distance (Luftlinie)–for instance between Moscow
and Lisbon–has been annulled, turned into air.
True, this ‘shrinking of distance’ is talked about everywhere. Its philosophical
significance, the omnipresence of the human, has not yet entered the consciousness of our
time, let alone of philosophy, which always lags behind. Until recently, the position
in space was the principium individuationis of human beings. As such, it had pragmatic
significance, because one was ineffective wherever one was not; ‘to be’ had always
meant to ‘be in a specific place’, whereas today one can be at more than one place, at
the same time everywhere virtually.
One will interject that this ‘ability to be everywhere’ liberates us from our narrow
imprisonment in space and is proof of a new freedom, a freedom from distance. In
a certain sense this is not untrue, but the counterargument is much more important:
the ability to be everywhere leads to the unfreedom of those who can be and are being
reached. If others are in a position to simultaneously occupy the space I am occupying, then I
have ceased to be the monopolist of my own position in space, and I have forfeited the last
and most formal minimum of my freedom. The others–this needs to be understood as
a technical term for today’s relationship between humans and, respectively, between
humans and the state–the others have become ‘inescapable’.
The so called ‘bugs’ are at least as significant as tapped phones. ‘Bug’ is the name
given to tiny microphones that one secretly installs to learn and register what is
happening inside homes. To be more precise: microphones that used to be installed,
because in the last years bug-breeding has reached a new, truly triumphant phase.17
These small animals who are quick and eager to learn no longer even need to infest
actual houses. They have been taught to take aim from hundreds of metres away to
suck up even most distant sounds, to ‘record’ and transmit. Bugs can now be colonised
outside of houses. It is also possible–the available choices are abundant–to carry them
concealed on one’s body. The snug, keen-eared variety of bugs who take aim from afar
is especially well-liked, because, as strange as this may sound, it seems to preserve
our moral frameworks. For it is evident that someone who wishes to trespass on
the integrity of the home no longer needs to risk trespassing in the conventional
sense: he no longer ‘needs to do anything, whilst doing something’, at least nothing that
is illegal.18
Examples: on 27 November 1956, Bart Berland, the president of Stephens Tru-
sonic-Inc. told the ‘State Judiciary Committee’ about 4/5c-surveillance devices that
can record conversations taking place 500 metres away.19 Another company owner
explained to the same committee that he had supplied the police with devices so small
that he would have to refuse to make a public statement.–As for tape recordings, the
machine required for this needs to be no bigger than a wallet. The ‘Minifone pocket

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recorder’, produced in the Federal Republic of Germany by the way, is even smaller,
and in Chicago microphones disguised as watches are offered and sold on the open
market.
With this we have arrived at another adventurous point, the question of obtainability.
I say ‘adventurous’, because such devices, at least in the case of phone-tapping, can
be bought for peanuts. The utensils required to assemble a ‘complete wiretap kit’ came
to 9.50 Deutschmarks (I’m quoting a 1955 issue of LIFE magazine). The cheap price
is understandable, because one needs no more than an inductor coil and ordinary am-
plifier. The degree to which the freedom to deprive others of their freedom had already been
established then is just incredible. In that technologically backward time, when it was
still unavoidable to enter the homes of victims and install bugs, the required burglar’s
tools were sold alongside bugging devices. All this can be read in a January 1957 edition
of Frontier; yes, these burglar’s tools were even listed in the catalogues of companies
offering bugging devices. In a certain sense it seemed ‘OK’ to do so, because bug-
ging devices would have been useless without these preparatory tools, as useless as a
fishhook without a line. Spelt out, the axiom of such catalogues would run along the
following lines: ‘If product A, which nobody speaks ill of, cannot be used without product B,
then the use and sale of product B is also morally justified; consequently its use cannot be immoral.’
But the dangers connected to surveillance are not yet exhausted. Not only the
victim is endangered, but also the listener, the one who has become used to being
indiscreet and enjoys being indiscrete.20 I’m not just thinking of a few police agents and
private eyes, who gain access to the private lives of the people they tap through their
profession (this is probably mostly unbearably boring, for to listen without freedom to
choose the victim under surveillance is no enviable job). What I have in mind, rather,
is the audience. For it is an audience that is at issue in today’s age of reproduction,
because every recording of a conversation or noise can become a matrix for others
and can be reproduced in countless copies. In California, for instance, there is already
a thriving black market for records that, in analogy to pornography, could be called
‘pornophony’. These play secret recordings of words, sounds, and noises that arise
from the most intimate situations. These records are, so to speak, ‘sellable key-holes
that have become things’. The price asked for acoustic nudity increases if the victims
detectable through the key-hole are ‘public figures’ (for it is only the identification of
the naked person that brings full gleeful satisfaction). The record turns into a rarity
and almost acquires cultural value, if intimacies are detectable that are classed as illegal
(adulterous ones, for instance). That occasions for blackmail can be savoured even if
they are never exploited does not need to be elaborated further.
The fact that people today, young people even, are surrounded by such products;
that they can buy extreme indiscretion; that they learn to arouse themselves at the lust
of others and enjoy sexuality via the detour of things, mediated by the utter defencelessness of
those who are secretly recorded, is so disgusting that even the most vulgar ways of satisfying
desire have really just become epitomes of honesty and cleanliness.

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 The Obsolescence of Privacy

For now, these examples will suffice. What have been the reactions to these
developments?
It would be unfair to claim that nothing is being done against these developments.
The uproar in a certain portion of the public is considerable. The legislative bodies
of certain states are seriously attempting to gain a picture of the extent to which
acoustic trespassing is practised, and what measures ought to be taken in view of
these new circumstances. The media (of both parties) are reporting on the issue.
As senior a judge as Oliver W. Holmes from the ‘Supreme Court’ publicly declared
that (his words), ‘it would be better if a few criminals were not arrested than seeing
the government getting involved in such dirty methods’.21 One must ask, however, if
such oppositional forces can succeed. Not only are the state and economic authorities
interested in controlling the public immensely powerful–the public itself, if it doesn’t
already actively endorse its own de-privatisation, offers only minimal resistance. And
this not simply because the mere existence of such recording devices always also entails
their use; no, it is principally because the efforts to exert control almost completely evade
control themselves. Only in the rarest cases can the use of such means be demonstrated;
also, everybody can practise abuse. The state, of course, any state and let alone
the police, believe themselves unable to forgo technological means that can be used
indiscriminately by private individuals.–
True, one decision has been reached: the Cahan Act.22 It ruled on two points which
have become law:
1. Data obtained by these methods are not permissible as evidence in court.
2. The secret installation of ‘bugs’ in other peoples’ houses constitutes trespass.
This Act sounds more impressive than it is.
The submission of such data as evidence in court is only one of its many possible
uses: to discredit others and to ruin them politically, socially or economically–to
deprive others of their privacy in this manner, data doesn’t have to be used in court.
As for the ‘bugs’, these are not prohibited by law. Only their installation in the houses
of others is prohibited and punishable. As we already know, such installations are no
longer even required. The ruling thus calls into the void, it condemns a state of affairs
that existed in the past, whilst leaving the main issue unlegislated. The key task is to
unequivocally state that the conventional definition of ‘trespass’, meaning the physical
intrusion into another’s home, is no longer sufficient today. Let’s spell it out: it is not
only the preparatory steps, the installation of bugs, that are acts of trespass but the surveillance
itself is, regardless from what purported distance it takes place, because the one who
listens to another from ‘outside’ is with the other, inside the others’ secret and with
this, inside the house. I say ‘purported distance’ because these devices exclusively aim
at abolishing distance and really achieve this, and so suspend the boundary between
‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
The introduction of ‘acoustic trespass’ and ‘acoustic theft’ into legal terminology is
imperative because our privacy is as destroyed by ‘bugs’ as it would be if we lived in

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houses made of glass, which would make us a victim to everybody (without our being
physically intruded upon).
This still does not address the main weakness of the Cahan Act, which is rooted
in a principle, the principle that only the ‘use’ of unlawful recordings is seen as an
‘offence’. This definition of ‘use’ is far too narrow. What is meant by this?
A comparison:
If only ‘use’ were criminal, nothing would speak against taking pictures of naked
people who are oblivious of the fact that they are acting as our models. We would
only become criminal once we sold these images or made use of them in some other
way. The crucial notion that the secret observation and clandestine photography are
themselves a form of ‘use’–an abuse of the privacy of the other and incursion on their
freedom–would fall away. The crudeness of this narrow definition can’t be denied, and
neither can that of the Cahan Act.
What’s more, the object of shame and embarrassment is here misunderstood in a
characteristic manner:
The truly sensitive are not embarrassed, at least not only embarrassed, because
their secret vices or transgressions are exposed, but because they are being exposed.
While the sensitive believe the private to be ‘off limits’ because it is private, the crude
conformists of today view it as self-evident that privacy is nothing other than the excuse
for hiding illicit acts. The phrase ‘but I have nothing to hide’, so frequently uttered by
totally guileless Americans (when alerted to an open door, for instance) is proof that
shame and embarrassment (Scham)–in the sense of ‘seeing in embarrassment something
that is necessary’–are already beginning to be identified with being immoral. Whereas
unashamedness, the attitude of ‘deeming the feeling of shame and embarrassment
unnecessary’, is regarded as moral.–

5. Arguments that present these developments as harmless

Now, it would be wrong to assume that arguments only exist in the camp of critics.
Those holding interests in such machines don’t limit themselves to sell and use
them–they also explicitly defend them, at least when feeling threatened or provoked.
Although it can’t be denied that the cases they make are of a thoroughly primitive
nature and are often jarringly stupid, this should not lull us into a sense of security.
Quite the opposite. The more stupid a line of argument gets, the more dangerous it
becomes.
Let’s start with two of the most stupid ones:
In the already mentioned trial before the Californian ‘State Juridical Committee’, a
business man explained how incredibly important targeted aural surveillance was for
business, because the recorded whispers helped to establish how far an offer could
be pushed. As a consequence, it would take less time to close a deal.–Because this
statement did not seem cynical, it really does appear to be the product of naivety.

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Another one, the owner of a company for bugging devices, bitterly complained that
the Cahan Act had obstructed his business.23 Everyone selling poison who is stopped
from doing so could sign up to his argument.–
These, as said, are the most stupid examples. Usually certain dangers are admitted
in order to trivialise the true danger or to allow the discussion to be exhausted with
the offer of pretend solutions. This is the most frequently used argument, which can
indeed be encountered again and again:
‘The danger is over the moment such devices are exclusively found in “authorised hands”, that
is to say, in the hands of the state or police.’
Let’s ignore the fact that the enactment and protection of a monopoly of this kind
is hardly possible, because much of the required paraphernalia is easily available and
operable even by technically unversed idiots.
But what would happen if we assumed a state monopoly to be achievable?
The very fact that the state could arbitrarily place private individuals under its surveillance
would turn it into an ‘unauthorised’, illegal authority. It would be guilty of the destruction
of the very right to liberty that it is constitutionally bound to protect. Ultimately,
this line of argument paves the way for all types of dictatorship, because it identifies
state power with morality. It is clear how welcome such a monopoly would have been
to McCarthy, had he been able to become the dictator of America. Would this have
‘authorised’ the means he would have deployed?
During the trial, various police bodies repeatedly underlined how obvious the
identity of ‘legal’ and ‘moral’ has become. Asked to justify their surveillance activities
and installation of bugging devices, they repeatedly reiterated that ‘everything is in
perfect order!’ They truly didn’t understand what ‘disorder’ could be implied in the
question, ‘because we never acted without the licence of the state’.
This line of argument is totalitarian, for the nature of a totalitarian state consists of
the suspension of the division of ‘legality’ and ‘morality’. As the saying goes, ‘You’re not
supposed to serve two masters.’ –
The third line of argument, the one especially liked by private detectives, is the
sanctity of private property. I cite an example from an article with the express aim of
playing down the issue, written by people who are in the business of surveillance.24
‘I beg your pardon,’ we can read the self-righteous defence, ‘we only listen to phone
calls of a woman if we have established by all available means that the phone itself really
belongs to the husband who asked us to tap it.’ Indirectly this means that every word
spoken into the particular piece of property–‘the phone’–belongs to the proprietor of this object.
Each word is regarded something that is at his disposal, something that he is at leisure to
also share with others. Translated into the optical realm, the argument this aural power
of disposal calls on, reads: ‘I beg your pardon, I only view and photograph the body of
a woman on petition of the husband, and only after positively establishing that the bed
she’s in really is his.’ Shame, embarrassment and discretion are here exclusively evaluated with
the category of ‘ownership’.

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 CounterText

The fourth line of argument is closely related. It uses as its justification the practice
of confronting accused people with secret recordings of conversations that prove their
guilt. ‘What progress,’ it reasons, ‘that offenders now accuse and convict themselves,
now that their incriminating testimonies have become fixed in the form of an object to
become “objective facts”! Instead of being accused by others, everybody now accuses
themselves!’
I’ll disregard the fact that the processing of Magnetophon tapes, the cutting,
reassembling and thus production of fakes, has no limits. Already with the deletion
of the word ‘not’ words can be put into the mouth of a suspect, which he never said
or would have said. I don’t have this form of possible abuse in mind, but the abuse
that ‘use’ as such represents. This is dreadful, because the confession that has turned into
a thing robs the accused of the opportunity to offer a real confession and show real
remorse–these are made superfluous.
Even as a mere possibility, self-accusation, because of torture or duress instead of
one’s own decision, is not exactly congruous with human dignity. Being deprived of
humanity in this way is still less severe, that is, less insincere, than the method of using
a self-accusation that has turned into a thing.
Augustine famously saw memoria–memory as introspection–as the vehicle for
discovering faults, conscience, and remorse. This human act of reproduction has
become superfluous. It has been replaced by a machine of reproduction, which
transform the committed error into something that is always presentable and always
present; what the reproduction has recorded can no longer actually be classed as being
past. The ‘peccavi’ of conscience has turned into the ‘pecco’ of the Magnetophon tape unspooling
whilst being played.
The fifth argument is only too well known in dictatorships: intimidation and
deterrence. ‘Believe me, dear Sirs: there will be significantly less immoral activity
when everyone feels uncomfortable because they believe that they are possibly under
surveillance.’ In other words, something immoral–spying–is turned into the guarantee of
morality.
This is still not the worst argument, which is only reached when resistance against
surveillance is presented as grounds for suspicion and is read as inadvertent self-
accusation. Here’s what an officer tasked with ‘phone-tapping’ argued:
‘Sometimes I’m asked by business people: “do you think that my phone is also being
tapped?” I tend to reply: “It is very interesting that you should ask this question–feeling
guilty? Well, what have you got to answer for?”’25
This crude response takes for granted that privacy serves only to hide what is
forbidden. Because illicit deeds happen in secret, secrecy and privacy as such are taken as proof
of a wrong. With this we have arrived at the final and decisive point:
We only fully describe de-privatisation once we include a counterpart of ‘impudence
and brazenness’ in our image: ‘unembarrassedness and unashamedness’.
Let’s imagine a population that is made up of extremely reserved individuals. Total
surveillance would here be utterly intolerable and ‘total absence of embarrassment’

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would only function with the aid of terror. ‘Total absence of embarrassment’ can only
be achieved, that is, achieved without friction, if it can count on individuals who have
been adequately prepared and so don’t mount any resistance and deem being under
surveillance ‘nothing to get excited about’.
This is still only the minimal requirement. Ultimately individuals are desired who
have been tailor-made for impudence; individuals who are ready with ‘their hands on the
zipper’ to be encroached on and strip-searched. Only those persuaded to actively and
‘happily’ partake in their own de-privatisation are deemed perfect. Integrated impudence
can only be achieved if it is met half way by an equally total degree of unashamedness and absence
of embarrassment.
This is easily said. Nobody can ‘master the art of total shamelessness’ overnight,
just like that, without practising. Nobody is born a master, not even a master of
shamelessness. It takes effort. In order to ‘desensitise our sense of shame’ those with
an interest in our transformation must exert themselves. Such an education can only
succeed with a transvaluation of shamelessness:

a) They must impress on us that not being embarrassed is a virtue.

b) They must transform us to such a fundamental degree that we become
incapable of living without this putative virtue.–

Regardless of how adventurous these conditions may sound, they are being achieved
in many parts of the globe. In the US ‘the desensitisation of the sense of shame’ is
almost complete. It’s almost unnecessary to offer examples illustrating that John Doe
is shameless, that is, unashamed and brazenly impudent to the same total degree, for
there are scarcely situations in his existence that couldn’t be offered as testimony for
this. If there is still anything that John is embarrassed about, then it is only because there is a last
residue of shame and embarrassment that he doesn’t believe he has overcome yet. Because every
Reader’s Digest and every Digest of Digests hammers home that shame is the symptom of
‘introversion’ (‘being withdrawn’ in the sense of ‘awkward’), because ‘introversion’
is presented as an ‘inhibition’, ultimately as a ‘frustrated social adaptation’, and failing
conformity, John’s shame is at best ‘exponential shame’, that is, shame about still feeling
shame.26
‘Exponential shame’ is, or rather was, his last shame. Today, there’s no longer
any occasion for this form of shame. He’d scarcely be able to detect its remnants
within. He shows everyone everything, is ‘unreservedly unreserved’. He has tacitly
replaced the motto ‘each to their own’ with the motto ‘what is mine is for everyone’, ‘everyone
is for me’. Americans of today keep their doors wide open–America is the land of
open doors. Not, however, so neighbours and pioneers pushing across the plains can
swoosh through them, but to prevent at all cost that those behind the doors remain
imperceptible to their neighbours (by the way: everyone is a neighbour). ‘Please have
a look, for I have nothing to hide’. They see themselves as common property, behave as
if they belong to everyone. They even perform this role with a certain passion, at least

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frantically, since they know they’d be viewed as ‘indecent’ and as suspicious if they
would openly refuse to behave like this. A few American examples:27
1. Our life has become common property. It’s taken for granted that we lay everything
bare in interviews. It’s deemed incomprehensible why this shouldn’t be done.
2. Our body has become common property. Especially the areas that are taboo. Naturally,
this primarily applies to the female body. Where once, at most, prostitutes would have
agreed to have their breast and buttock measurements taken and published underneath
their picture, today, this goes without saying for every girl, that is, for every girl who
does not want to appear as being ‘funny’.
3. Sex has become common property. Countless stories about the pleasures and
difficulties of sex are published, also in popular newspapers; at times written in a
friendly tone as if they were meant for my ears alone and not for a hundred million
readers, at other times written in the style of a ‘how to do’ piece.
4. Digestion has become common property. When the president, for instance, having
fallen ill, is asked during a TV interview how bad his diarrhoea is, he isn’t just
unsurprised, he responds with the greatest conviction. Amongst the millions of
viewers and listeners witnessing this nobody suspects that something else, apart from
the presidential digestion, might also be messed up here.
Besides these most substantial forms of shamelessness, so substantial as to almost
be disarming, there are a number of indirect, ‘more cultivated’ and sanctimonious
practices that can easily be regarded as variants of this phenomenon. One might call
these ‘bashful forms of shamelessness’.
5. ‘Self-expression’ is such a case.–A John Doe, who is fussier than the other John
Does, who believes he owes it to his social prestige to disclose his individuality and
his conformity in ways that are more individual and less in conformity with those
of his neighbours, reaches to procedures (offered on the market place of culture)
that teach him how to ‘give expression’ to his personality and make himself visible
and manifest to others. Every John Doe can find an activity that best corresponds to
his ‘self-expression’, as the methods kept on store are extraordinarily rich and range
from the composition of symphonic music to mastering the coping saw. Hundreds of
thousands make use of this abundance, so much so that one can really speak of a ‘self-
expression racket’, a most ingenious one at that; ingenious not only because everyone is
offered to express ‘themselves’, but also because the gift of an unusual opportunity to
be hypocritical is offered in addition. For every act of self-expression simultaneously
meets two contradictory desires.
It provides the satisfaction of standing out. As someone who ‘expresses himself’, John
belongs to the brotherhood of ‘the creative ones’, the Michelangelos, Beethovens, and
Van Goghs.
At the same time, it acts as a laxative. It prevents John from suffering psychic
constipation, it impedes the ossification of remnants of his private interior life which
would then be held within and withheld from the public. If everyone underwent this

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treatment, the ideal of shamelessness and the abolition of privacy would have been
achieved. That’s why taking this medicine is generally recommended, not only to
artists, who might be able to communicate something outrageous with its aid, but also
to infants, housewives, grandma Moses, and the estate agent, who might otherwise
not know what to do with himself on Sundays and could, therefore, expose himself to
the danger of turning into a misfit and nonconformist.
John Doe can of course also make use of psychoanalysis, its popular branches at least.
These advertise themselves as techniques of confession and disclosure in the service of
social hygiene, as methods that ‘create extroverts’ thus allowing John to socially adapt
and conform.
What was true of ‘self-expression’, it plays two parts at one and the same time, also
applies here in the context of psychiatry:

a) It gives John Doe the satisfaction of belonging to a modern movement, of being

up to date, thus boosting his confidence.
b) It produces his ‘adaptation’ and safeguards his conformity.

This contradiction is not new. Every fashion depends on its ability to simultaneously
furnish people with conspicuousness and conformity.
The bemusement expressed in a number of quarters about the fact that
psychoanalysis proliferates in America ‘despite’ the delicate subject matter and
‘despite’ the nation’s puritan past, loses its object in view of the interplay of
‘impudence’ and ‘shamelessness’ that our perspective provides as a context.
On the contrary, the proliferation of psychoanalysis is deemed alright. It is
sanctioned by the powers promoting conformity. These attempt to reveal all secrets,
make everyone visible to everyone else, label every form of guardedness an inhibition,
denounce every from of privacy as a breach of trust, without letting anyone live
behind closed windows. These powers accepting nothing that is not in their control,
whilst rewarding every voluntary exhibition of self as proof of loyalty and health–even
praising it as a source for happiness. If they afforded the psychoanalyst fewer
opportunities than the private detective, secret agent, and electronic bugging devices
working toward this end, they’d stupidly sabotage themselves, as the dissemination
and cultivation of shamelessness is orchestrated by the powers promoting conformity
themselves. Put otherwise, the psychoanalysts are cordially invited to contribute to the
effort of ‘desensitising the human’s sense of shame’. Not only does ‘it pay to be frank’,
it also ‘pays to make them frank’ and, as is confirmed by the fees psychoanalysts charge,
‘it pays to have them made frank’.
Psychoanalysis in the States, as has recently been shown, has fully inverted its
principles and shamelessly brought itself into line with the conformist American
‘way of life’, which has taken shape in the last ten years.28 The full extent of the
developments, however, is only portrayed with the addendum that America makes
use of psychoanalysis for the purpose of conformity.

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Today’s ‘unashamedness’ only makes ‘sense’ if it is understood to be the counterpart

of ‘brazenness and impudence’. There is nothing that makes it easier to rob people
than the prospective victims’ voluntary self-disclosure, and for this reason the robbers
attempt to persuade them to expose themselves. In the final instance, therefore, self-
disclosure is a form of assistance, it is a method applied to ensure that the victim can be
handled without effort. Each one of us has been given the homework to cultivate shamelessness
and become a collaborator in our own de-privatisation.
This does not suggest, of course, that we usually see through this trick. Quite
the opposite: we’re fully convinced that we are undressing ourselves when we are
coerced into dropping the cloak of privacy or when this is actually pulled from our
bodies. Whilst completing the assignment, we very rarely notice that it actually is an
assignment. We are often proud of our unselfconsciousness and sense of naturalness,
even though it is precisely this attitude that completes the assignment we were
given. Gentle totalitarianism loves to leave its victims in the delusion of their own
independence, or even creates this delusion first.29
After what was said, it’s clear why those treating ‘impudence’ and ‘unashamedness’
as separate phenomena flaunt the opportunity to see the functional whole of the
condition of life today.
The subjects of these two processes–the spy and the exhibitionist30 –can be separated
as little from each other as these processes themselves. These two types, rather,
play together in the same court, so much so, that they are interchangeable. Indeed,
it happens daily that the roles are swapped, for it does not matter who plays
which part. Nobody bats an eyelid if the TV presenter who yesterday jumped on
someone who was having a crying fit in order to serve it up to be consumed,
today discloses everything about himself without inhibition. Whereas he was initially
clearly ‘impudent’, he has now become ‘unembarrassed’. This changed position is
as natural as the changing roles of speaking and listening. I make this comparison in
earnest, because in mass society ‘entertainment media’ (Unterhaltungsmedien) are actual
methods that help the various links of this society to conduct their ‘conversations’
(Unterhaltung).
Just as we speak and hear; speak and hear simultaneously; speak only by also hearing
virtually (and vice versa), we are also ‘impudent’ and ‘unembarrassed’; both at once,
and ‘impudent’ only by also being ‘unembarrassed’ virtually (and vice versa).
The spy and the exhibitionist are thus merely two varieties, two halves of a single figure: the
contemporary. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that the ‘impudent’ are never perceived as
‘impudent’ by the ‘unembarrassed’, and vice versa. In fact, they seem normal to each
other, view each other as partners and as one of a kind. From their perspective their
life together leaves nothing to be desired.
We used the word ‘common property’ whilst listing the examples of ‘shamelessness
and missing embarrassment’ above. The life of the individual, for instance, was called
‘common property’.

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Because ‘common property’ is a socialist term, it probably took the reader aback.
And indeed, the claim that a country that is combatting any form of socialism is
practicing its own form of socialism must seem odd to the reader. It is conceivable,
therefore, that the word was taken to be a metaphor.
But I am emphatically not using a metaphor here. I am actually saying that the
condition conformity aims at is a form of common property; yes, one is even permitted
to claim that this movement toward common property is being directed by those who are directing
the fight against socialism.
To explain what is at issue we must clearly demarcate the variant of socialism we
have in mind from what socialism usually means.
While being expropriated, John Doe is not asked to forfeit something we usually
take to be his ‘property’. Neither the sacredness of his car nor the means of production
he may be in command of are infringed upon. He is merely asked to hand in his
‘particularity’ (Eigentümlichkeit), personality, individuality and privacy. He is only asked
to hand in himself. In contrast to usual forms of socialism, which have humans surrender
what they have, here ‘only’ what humans ‘are’ is communalised.
Up to here the idea is easy to follow. The next step is more difficult, yes, it even
sounds contradictory: this new form of socialism can only be justified by those who
define the human being as a property owner, as an animal habens. As such, it is secretly
underpinned by the notion ‘habeo ergo sum’, I have and own, therefore, I am. This step
is plausible too: the essence of the human has to be located in ‘what it has’ (Haben), no
longer in ‘what it is’ (Sein), if those performing the destruction of the human can be
convinced that they have left our humanity intact by protecting ownership. Only those
with this belief can maintain a clean conscience.
We already know that this conviction and good conscience are illusory. What’s left
after this act of expropriation is of course no longer a real ‘person’ and true individual,
but someone who is only ‘themself’ and ‘singular’ in a numerical sense. Their selfhood
and unmistakableness limits itself to the possession of the items A, B, C, and so on,
while their neighbours own A1 , B1 , C1 or, A2 , B2 , C2 (notwithstanding the fact that
these items are often identical, because they are from the same product series).
This condition is contrary to morality. Whereas the moralist ultimately deduces
the right to own property from the fact that humans are proprietors and masters of
themselves, they are here left with no right other than the right to own property.
But the disenfranchised take this situation for granted. If, as is totally customary,
even the ‘have not’ Mr Smith calls another Mr Smith ‘worth $275000’ or addresses
Mrs Astor as being ‘worth $200 million’, then this underlines that even those ‘who
aren’t much’ because they ‘own little’ have accepted this particular definition of the
human.
I have to forgo a discussion of how these circumstances can be corrected. I have
simply listed symptoms and it would be foolish to make suggestions for cures. One
will hardly expect a magic bullet against conformism as a whole, that is, against our
entire political and societal condition of today.

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I can, however, isolate the most terrifying aspect of the form of totalitarianism called
‘conformism’:
The fact that it is happening without terror.
This is not meant to be cynical. The absence of terror merely proves that the powers
of today can afford to renounce terror. This is possible because the raw material they
are working with–the human–has already been worked on. We who are sacrificial
victims have already made our sacrificial offerings without realising it, not only the
sacrificium intellectus, but also our own privacy and autonomy. Because we are allies of
the spies even before we are spied on.
In places where authorities can afford to renounce using terror, their machinery
works without making a noise. In the end it is so impeccably smooth and silent that we
are offered the renouncement of terror, which is the symptom of our unfreedom, as a
sign of freedom and humanity that we can loudly trumpet.
‘Minted coins’, in the words of a Molussian proverb, ‘don’t need to be coined’.31

6. Appendix: The ‘acoustic leash’

So far the portrayal of our ‘deprivation of freedom by acoustic means’ limited itself to
show that we no longer belong to ourselves once we are under electronic surveillance,
but become public property. With this, however, we have only described one half of
the phenomenon. We are not just being deprived of our freedom to live without
being listened to, but also of the freedom of living without listening.–What is meant
by this?
Not merely the trivial fact that we are forced to live in a world that is getting
louder from day to day. Not only that we must hear, but, what’s worse and much more
humiliating, that this is regarded as something that we are to do, that a demand is placed
on us to listen.–Put the other way round: noise is not merely an irritant, it serves a
function. It reverberates with the demand that we make our own contribution to our
own de-privatisation. Noise is one of the main instruments of conformism.
This sounds peculiar. One calls to mind, however, the part the act of also-listening-
in (Mithören) to certain broadcast official speeches played during the Nazi dictatorship.
One should remember how natural it was to make oneself loyal by turning on a Hitler
or Goebbels speech. Loyalty was here not so much displayed but secured, and not
merely secured, but actually produced. It was really a duty to expose oneself to the
din of those speeches and to subject oneself to it.–Put otherwise: noise was tasked to
make us submissive, to enforce conformity and co-ordination (Gleichschaltung), and to
de-privatise us.–
This is true, mutatis mutandis, of almost all other forms of noise.
The suggestion here is not, of course, that there was an evil genius, an ingenious,
totalitarian psycho-technician who planned and consciously organised the noisiness of
today’s world in order to subject us by acoustic means. Such a proposition would

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belong in a Swiftian Satire. No, the inference is alone that noise, now that it is here,
is being used and applied. It is applied as a means of prevention. It is turned into an
instrument that has the function of preventing us from escaping and adopting paths of
our own. It blocks the notorious path of ‘introversion’. Noise functions as a device that
frustrates possible acts of de-solidarisation.
As we know, the aim of every monolithic society (not only of violent totalitarian
societies, but also of gentle conformist ones) is to hold the single individual in an
inescapable grip; to force the individual to assume a communal way of being (Mitsein)
that is so unyielding that those who are bound into this societal construct are left with
no possibility of breaking the bond.
‘Acoustic submission’ is one of the means by which this condition is produced today.
The very instant an individual is sentenced to live in a world in which no quiet place
remains, the moment it must hear, it no longer has any option other than belonging to
this world and becoming obedient (gehorsam) or even being fully under its spell (hörig).
If humans are not allowed to escape being reached acoustically and available in this
way, then soon they are also prevented from not being reached and available in all
other ways. The condition of being available and graspable will then turn into second
nature. In the end, humans will even cultivate this enslavement themselves, so much
so, that they will feel lost as soon as they cannot be reached.
That acoustic devices work so effectively and prove themselves to be such excellent
machines of subjection cannot be surprising for anyone who realises the fundamental
philosophical condition that our ability to hear arrests us in. The acoustic realm is the
realm of unfreedom. As hearing beings, we are unfree. It is more difficult to listen
away than to look away. This fundamental difficulty is rooted in the fact that we
have not been granted ear-lids. Expressed from the viewpoint of phenomenology this
means: the audible world, in contrast to the visible world, is uninvited, indiscreet,
and intrusive. It can find its way in without requiring an explicit intentional act
of our own; it can force us to participate, like it or not. No listener exclusively
resides within the space he or she occupies. Because sound simultaneously exists in
the place from which it emanates and in the place where it is received, the listener
is forced to occupy both places at once. Even though this person is ‘here’, he or
she is always also ‘there’. In this way, sound creates an association and binds us into
a relation.
Because the act of not hearing requires freedom, that is, an act of abstraction and
the strength to develop ‘concentration in the negative’, and because only very few
people have this ability, most of us can be subjected by noise. Yes, incessant noise can
prevent people from ever becoming themselves. And with this the conformist ideal of
de-privatisation is achieved.
To listen means to participate by listening (Mit-hören). Whoever is in the vicinity of a
certain acoustic world and hears this world (because the act of not hearing cannot
be performed) is caught in the web of sound and tied into it. Yes, he or she is
caught with others. A well-known radio magazine adopted as its title a command to

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conform, Participate in Listening! (Hör mit!), instead of opting for the more obvious
Listen! This title is anything but a coincidence. Whoever thought it up was–consciously
or unconsciously–part of the school teaching conformity. This school has the task to
make people listen, because listening creates conformity.
Like small children we are kept on a leash, on ‘the acoustic leash.’ We also behave like
good children. That is to say, we find our satisfaction within a horizon that is traced by
the acoustic leash. And usually we even enjoy being good.
Once we have become used to this leash–and most of us are of course–then we do
not only find satisfaction in the space enclosed by this horizon, but bliss. Those who
take their portable radios for a walk provide evidence that they voluntarily carry their
leash with them. The following example shows, however, that they panic when it tears:
About ten years ago I climbed Mount Washington together with two American
friends. A cheesy song sounded from the hotel speakers in the valley. I won’t say
anything about the song’s suggestion that ‘love is only love in Honolulu’. What matters
is that for several hours it was impossible to escape the music. My companions could
not understand why this made me nervous, for not only did they not mind this
circumstance, they thought it rather pleasant. Apparently they felt safe as long as
they heard music, as long as they were still down ‘there’, ‘immersed’ in the music.
They were like aviators, who enjoy maintaining a reliable connection with ground
control. They were not yet lost, the acoustic leash tying them to the valley had
not yet torn.
While I was deeply tormented by this apron string, my companions only became
irritated when we were no longer patronised by the music.–‘Sort of weird’, said the
guy on the left after we had crossed the acoustic boundary and while he was attempting
to catch even the faintest sound of the Honolulu song from the valley.–‘Why weird?’
I asked. ‘Have we not finally reached the outside?’ ‘Outside!’ he repeated my words
whilst shrugging his shoulders. ‘What else?’ The guy on the right responded, ‘I would
rather say that we have entered a sort of social stratosphere’, before adding with a jolt ‘let’s get
it over with as fast as possible’. I could not understand this, as little as I could understand
the sudden energy with which the two set off.
After a while, however, his words became clear. For suddenly we heard music again;
no, not just music, but the same boldly monopolistic assertion that ‘love is only love
in Honolulu’. Apparently this voice had reached the summit of Mount Washington.
The tune had taken an audacious augmented leap of twelve scales, with which it had
swung itself up high above our heads to sing its advertisement for Honolulu down to
us from crisp mountainous surroundings. We had entered the field of the speaker on
the summit, raking the mountain flank like the lamp of an acoustic lighthouse. This
moment, acoustic darkness, nothingness, had been left behind.
We had never truly ‘been outside’, we had never really been ‘free’. We had merely
passed through the narrow strip of the acoustic no-man’s-land between the acoustic
fields forming circles around the two speakers.

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My companions now stopped again. ‘Wasn’t it like crossing a river?’ the one on the
left said, pale as if he had been treading on thin ice. The one on the right responded
with a face glorified by relief. ‘Isn’t it nice to be there again?’
‘Awfully nice,’ I admitted, but merely to get some peace, for I was exclusively
occupied with listening into this ‘there’, this curious ‘there’. I realised that the two had
felt themselves to ‘exist’, be ‘here’ again (da sein), only after they were also ‘there’,
and ‘part of there’. Then I understood that with this ‘there’ they had surrendered the
secret credo of conformism: ‘I am participating there, therefore I am here, therefore I
am’. I had a vision:
As if in an abstract image, I saw countless circles in front of me, bigger ones and
smaller ones. Their surface areas overlapped to such an extent that most points on the
image were enclosed by several circles at once. Only a few points were not in any. It is
not necessary to explain this image. The circles showed the territory that was covered
by speakers. The spaces between circles was the scarce no-man’s-land we have just
encountered and the whole image was the map of the acoustic landscape of the unfree, a map
that had never been drawn before.
It would be foolish to believe that such experiences can only be made in America and
that only Americans are irritated when the ‘acoustic leash’ is torn. In Upper Bavaria I
recently had a very similar experience. There too a strenuous march was necessary in
order to enter the vicinity of silence. Amongst the few walkers who could still be seen,
there were also those who avoided–perhaps unconsciously–to tear themselves loose
from the acoustic leash that was anchoring them in the valley. The phenomena being
discussed have long since become global. They are our epoch’s phenomena of bondage
(Hörigkeitsphenomene).
Translated by Christopher John Müller

Notes
1. The Obsolescence of Privacy’ appears here as presented to the Lessing Society Hannover, under
the title ‘Acoustic Nakedness’, in October 1958. [Source Text for the translation: Günther Anders,
‘Die Antiquiertheit der Privatheit’, in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens
im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution, 3rd Edition (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002), pp. 210–46;
pp. 446–9–Trans.].
2. [A translated, radically abridged version of this essay is accessible online under its original
title ‘The World as Phantom and Matrix’: < http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/
projects/anders/Anders1956DissentWorldPhantomAndMatrixOCR.pdf > –Trans.].
3. [In their passive form, words derived from the verb liefern (to supply, to provide, to deliver) undergo
a marked shift in meaning: ausgeliefert weden suggests that one is ‘being surrendered, handed over,
supplied, exposed’, for instance to an enemy or the elements. I have usually opted for ‘being
surrendered’ but have at times varied the wording–Trans.].
4. Or rather, we don’t approach their home; their home approaches us. To save us from the effort of
moving and ‘accommodating’ the world, the process of being ‘supplied with the world’ also unfolds
through the continually moving image, which ensures that the world keeps on moving towards us even
after it has already arrived in our home.

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5. Art Linkletter, the inventor of the TV series People Are Funny permitted himself the following monstrous
audacity: Having sent a couple away on holiday under some false pretence, he had their villa
disassembled whilst they were away. So it happened that the couple, pulling up in front of nothing
instead of their house, lost their composure and began to frantically chase after 
ν [that which is
not]. But it’s wrong to say ‘so it happened’. For the illustrious TV presenter only thought up this neat
trick in order to produce this bewilderment and harassment and serve it to his customers as delicious
fare. This process corresponds to the production of artificial pearls. A living being is wounded, in order
to turn this wound into an object of enjoyment.
6. The following two reflections clarify how the act of visiting unfolds in these TV programmes. 1. The
situation is unclear: on the one hand, we, the viewers stay at home, and because we are actually sitting
at home, we, apparently, seem to receive visitors.–On the other hand, the ‘visitors’ show up in their
own home, so they now seem to be the hosts, we the visitors. 2. The situation is phantomesque:
although everyone seems to be at everyone else’s, nobody is visiting anybody. The partners interact
without ever being acquainted: whereas those who are ‘surrendered’ are blind toward us, the viewers,
it is impossible for us who are ‘supplied with the transmission’ to make contact in anything but a
voyeuristic sense.
7. [In addition to ‘property’, Eigentum can also signify the ‘quality of being eigen’: that is, being
‘particular’. A more literal translation might have read: ‘a self-ownership crime’, a nuance which
tacitly redirects the customary use of ‘property crime’ throughout this section–Trans.]
8. In the time of magical existence, the theft of images was considered to be an ordinary everyday crime,
mostly concerning the theft of gods, because every image was seen as being a part of the subject
depicted or even as identical with it. This crime, however, no longer had much significance in our
demystified world. The reappearance of this type of crime as a part of our existence today seems to
provide evidence that our dialectical development has been cast back to a state over which rationalistic
Europe had thought to have triumphed; a triumph that had been one of its proud foundations.
9. This illusion is possibly strengthened by the fact that we create these images ourselves whilst taking
photographs. For the idea that something that we ourselves have created might simultaneously be
something that was stolen is truly very outlandish.
10. Postscript 1979: Mechanical surveillance and ‘recording’ is not used ‘against’ those who are suspected
of something, on the contrary, those who attempt to evade surveillance are regarded as suspicious.
Because, for some idiotic bureaucratic reason, those who are ‘recorded’ are always suspicious anyway,
not to mention guilty.
11. See Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1, p. 99.
12. ‘Transcendence of enclosedness’ can be detected in systems of the most diverse kind. It covers all
processes that are today classed as being ‘unconscious’.–Even though they happen ‘within us’, we
cannot experience or reach most bodily processes, therefore, they are ‘transcendentally enclosed’.
Likewise, for someone used to air travel, and thus accustomed to jump from one point to the next,
the land between these points is ‘transcendentally enclosed’. The same is true for the sounds between
the steps on the diatonic scale, which remain inaccessible to the musician. Because of the theological
origin of this concept, this variety of transcendence was never the subject of philosophy.
13. It is very possible that the triumph of transparency (i.e., glass) in architecture in the last quarter-
century is linked to the de-privatisation that is happening today.
14. It is a characteristic of totalitarianism that it transforms fate into fact: that is, into something that is
done (for instance being Jewish into a malefic act).
15. One should understand these expressions as technical terms (terminos technicos).
16. Addition 1978: the number of machines and devices has multiplied since 1958, their capability has
improved.
17. Written in 1957; since then, ‘bugs’ have improved much further.
18. [This was indeed the law. The legislative frameworks (or rather lack of them) outlined in the following
sections of ‘The Obsolescence of Privacy’ seem accurate. A 1969 article for the California Law

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Review occasioned by the first comprehensive but ‘flawed’ scheme to contravene the ‘unrestricted
use of electronic snooping devices’ in 1967 (p. 1183), opens its survey of US surveillance law
as follows: ‘The history of federal statutory law was notable chiefly for congressional inaction.
Electronic eavesdropping was completely free from regulation’ (p. 1188). For further details of
the legislative framework Anders is referring to see H. Lee Van Boven, ‘Electronic Surveillance in
California: A Study in State Legislative Control’, California Law Review, 57: 5 (1969), 1182–1256,
esp. pp. 1186–1211–Trans.].
19. [The reference is probably to a so called ‘shotgun mike’ operated by a battery powered pre-amplifier.
Although the direct source of the information could not be established, the October 1957 issue of
the magazine Popular Science (accessible online) discusses some of the examples and the State Judiciary
Committee hearing Anders refers to. See ‘Secrets of the Electronic Snoopers’, Popular Science, 171:4
(1957), pp. 126–30, continued pp. 238–40–Trans.].
20. More will be said about this in the section on unashamedness below.
21. [The reference seems to be to the case Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928). Holmes
went on record with the opinion that ‘the Government ought not to use evidence obtained and only
obtainable by criminal means . . . . We have to choose, and, for my part, I think it a less evil that some
criminals should escape than that the Government should play an ignoble part’–Trans.]
22. [See People v. Cahan, 44 Cal.2d 434. The defendant Charles Cahan was charged with ‘conspiring to
engage in horserace bookmaking’ (and found guilty), but the court ruled that much of the evidence
brought against him was obtained unlawfully, by breaking into the defendant’s house ‘“through the
side window”’ and placing ‘“a listening device under a chest of drawers”’. (Full text available:
< http://scocal.stanford.edu/opinion/people-v-cahan-24075 > )–Trans.].
23. Had he been given the opportunity for pathos, he would have exclaimed: ‘Freedom is in danger! Oh
no, not only mine: the freedom to sell! But also the freedom of the buyer to use the money he so
honestly earned as he pleases! Are we not all buyers and sellers? Hence our freedom is in danger!’ He
would have seen himself as awakening the population.
24. See ‘The Truth about Wire Tapping’ by H. E. M. Bernhard and Harry M. Kean. In: Pageant, 11: 2
(1955).
25. See ‘Wired for Sound’ by William L. Roper, Frontier 1957. [The article was reprinted in The Dispatcher
as ‘Wired for Sound: Don’t Say It–“Big Brother May Be Listening”’ and can be accessed online:
< http://archive.ilwu.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/19570301.pdf > (p.7)–Trans.].
26. One should note the matter of fact manner in which health and conformity are equated here. There
is a structural resemblance to National Socialism here, for in National Socialism the production of
political conformity [Gleichschaltung–Nazification of state and society] was identified with belonging
to the healthy race.
27. Most examples that follow concern sexuality, which has always been the homestead of the taboo and
thus of shame and embarrassment also. When shame even ceases to be operative in this realm, it is
plausible that it has even less inhibition to vanish elsewhere.
28. For the most competent discussion of this, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955), pp. 238ff.
29. This is by the way not only the case with gentle totalitarianism. In terms of structure, the relationship
of ‘impudence’ and ‘shamelessness’ advanced here isn’t new. It corresponds to the interrelation of
terror and voluptas contritionis that we know from openly totalitarian dictatorships. During political
trials in the Soviet Union there were, as is well known, defendants (even ‘innocent’ ones) who did
not need to be pressed in court, because they voluntarily accused themselves, and this even ecstatically
so. It is as misguided to suggest that such ‘confessions’ are baffling as it is to explain this behaviour
on medical grounds. The behaviour is simply occasioned by the circumstance that the defendants,
on account of their long-term or lifelong existence as party functionaries, were already de-privatised
before the trial. They conformed to such an extent that they continued to do so after being selected
as victims of the system of terror. They accused themselves in order to continue to be a positive part

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of the system, in order to support it automatically. Their behaviour is only ‘baffling’ if one falsely
assumes that the defendants were accusing themselves whilst acting as individuals. This was precisely
not the case, for they were still acting as parts of the terror.
30. I use these expressions in a much broader sense than usual.
31. [Molussia is a fictitious land of Anders’s invention. Anders’s writings frequently evoke stories, sayings
and songs from Molussia as a stylistic device–Trans.].

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