At a party a few years ago, a young reporter bounded over to my cluster of social nodders and, with the breathlessness of a born tweeter, chirped: “What’s the new hot thing?!” I replied: “Anonymity.”
She looked befuddled. I continued: “To be Googled and to have nothing turn up. That’s hot.” Too late, alas, even then.
In these post-Snowden days, the notion of anonymity is ludicrous. But so it has been for some time, though recent disclosures bring pause even to the habitually inured. While Americans bemoan their loss of privacy, it is helpful to recall our own role in this gradual process of, shall we say, regurgitative knowingness. That is, our apparent willingness to show and tell every little thing in the quest to be known. Fame and Celebrity are by comparison higher callings than whatever compels strangers to display, say, their tongues (or other points of anatomical interest) in the public forum of social media. These acts of baboonery, not so feigned after all, are unsubtly reminiscent of chimpanzees, who, unconsciously aware of the camera’s hostile intrusion, try to offend it with grimaces, grins and lingual extrusions.
Now, suddenly we’re offended that national security operatives are following our behavior patterns? Whether Edward Snowden, the self-admiring 29-year-old who decided to save us from ourselves, if not our enemies, is hero or villain will keep us amused until time tells. Most likely he’s a hybrid of the two, the heroic concentrated mostly in his having spawned an urgent and overdue debate about the costs of privacy in the service of security.