I finally found an answer to the "why privacy is important?" question, which is not about the individual, and their rights. Are you interested? :)

The majority pf privacy justifications I've seen focus on the individual, and frame it from that perspective: in a space free from observation and judgement one can develop their own self, ideas, politics, etc. I was long looking for an argument which focuses on the social. 1/lot

I was looking for an argument which justifies privacy from a social perspective, something that understands it as a relational, transactional phenomenon, or which is seen as important as a communal quality. 2/lot

An angle which links privacy not to fundamental human rights, but to discourses of governance and power: the structuring of social, economic, political processes, networks, organization. 3/lot

I found an answer while reading Scott's Seeing like a state, Porters' Trust in Numbers, and Foucault's Security Territory population back to back. They all speak about the same thing: how in the last 3hundred years government developed new modalities, technologies of power. 4/lot

In brief: standardization, data gathering, insight generation, statistics, administration, are now the dominant forms of how power structures the social. It is not only the legal codes, or the disciplinary mechanisms that structure the social and economic space but insight 5/lot

and prediction. The current pandemic is illustrative: both the new rules and laws, and the quarantine is modulated, shaped by the administrative insight, and analytical power of the state, the extreme of which would be the contact tracing apps. 6/lot

Central bank issues digital currencies, Social credit systems are comparable examples of how state relies of such techniques to govern populations. Zuboff argues that private parties also use the same techniques to govern economic processes. Taylorism, social engineering, 7/lot

AI/ML based prediction and optimization are all the same forms of power and governance. (see the latest season of Westworld for a popculture version of this). I do not see the development of this form of power reversible. ( 8/lot

I don't know if the juridicial (punishment of what mustn't), or the disciplinary (practices of the obligatory) are preferable to the mechanisms of security (optimization of the social), but with the digital revolution this technique can only expand, and intensify 9/lot

So back to privacy. Privacy (in theory, and in the fact of obfuscation, anonymization, encryption, etc) is the only construct that can resist this juggernaut of governmentality, the insight and prediction based control of our social, economic, political, biological space 10/lot

it is the technology (in a wide sense) that can still render not just the individual, but whole communities, and practices not so much invisible, but illegible for this form of power.
11/lot

Now, we must ask, why such illegibility is important, or necessary? Or to put it in another way, how this approach to privacy is different from the individual approach? The individual, emerging from their privacy is defenseless in face of the power described above. 12/lot

Especially with such fine grained digital surveillance, predictive power of ML and nudging capacity of digital interfaces. On the other hand, illegibility of whole communities of practice is like the blank spaces on the map. 13/lot

'Here be dragons' - wrote the cartographers on uncharted territories on 16t century maps. These dragons now are alternative forms of social, economic, political organizations. in the current power relations they are dangerous, but only because power does not extend to them 14/lot

in fact they are dangerous, because they carry the potential of alternative arrangements of power. they are insurgent, potentially revolutionary. Privacy is endangered because it is the greatest hurdle to the current operation of power. 15/lot

it is easy to neutralize it and render it impotent if we only see its relevance form the perspective of the individual. An individual, even if they have reasonable levels of privacy, is impotent alone. 16/lot

Privacy, maybe paradoxically, must be seen as an opportunity of communal dissociation from the social: a space into which one steps out to meet others, rather than a space into which one retreats to be alone. end/lot