Liberal privacy rights ran into a hilarious crisis yesterday — and of all places, at a Coldplay concert. That’s where tech CEO Andrew Byron got caught on the kiss cam embracing a woman who was clearly not his wife; evidently she is one of his employees. “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy!” Coldplay frontman Chris Martin joked to the crowd as the two hid their faces in embarrassment.
The situation was too ridiculous for most people to do anything but laugh about, but 404 media’s Jason Koebler wasn’t having it:
The gleeful doxing of someone cheating in public is bad even if they are a CEO and even if they are a Coldplay fan. It's bad because this kind of thing is happening to random people on TikTok for such crimes as "sitting silently on a plane" or "being attractive"…
While Koebler’s objection has been met with a wave of criticism, folks seem to be having a hard time pinpoint what exactly he is getting wrong. It’s completely true that the widespread accessibility of personal information on the internet — especially coupled with OSINT strategies and technologies like Google dorking and facial recognition searching — has been facilitating the widespread harassment of ordinary people. One need only spend a few minutes on 4chan to find endless threads dedicated to digging up information on women in particular, an exercise that often ends in a flood of unsolicited contacts or even more sinister behavior (like “chadfishing”). And that, it seems, is how at least some folks figured out who Byron was.
One common response has been to insist that since the couple were attending a public concert they had no reasonable expectation of privacy; but while this is legally true, the ethics and politics of the situation are less certain. While audiences always enjoy kiss cams and some of their targets do too, it’s clear that a lot of people do not go to stadium events because they want the attention of thousands of people. And that is qualitatively a very different experience than the default experience of being “alone in a crowd”, just another anonymous attendee who most people will ignore. There is no logical reason why the experience of attending a public event needs to be bundled with the risk of being made a public spectacle.
Still, the comparison seems intuitively off. Judging by the responses, most people seem to think that Byron getting caught cheating on his wife is a different situation than (say) some random women getting swarmed by online goons for being Hot In Public. But while liberalism would say that this shouldn’t matter when it comes to privacy rights, I’d like to propose that the most important difference in these scenarios is also the one that’s the most obvious: Andrew Byron is rich.
While it’s hard to say how rich, the Economic Times places Byron’s net worth at around $20 million. From a Marxist perspective this places him firmly in the bourgeoisie. If Byron wanted to, he could stop working tomorrow and live an extremely comfortable life off of interest. He can also, of course, do exactly what he has done: invest that capital in owning a firm, which allows him to control the lives of his employees. Unlike your average kiss cam target or online doxxing victim, Andrew Byron possesses extraordinary economic power over our society.
Even under liberalism we have often recognized that the economic good of the public often requires people to waive some of their rights to privacy. For example, we generally expect everyone to disclose their income for the sake of taxation, and while the rich do their best to hide their money with various offshoring and accounting schemes the popular sentiment is generally that they should not be able to do this. Similarly we often expect people to disclose to the public how much they are spending on political lobbying and campaigning, and when they try to hide this with “dark money” schemes most people regard that as a scandal. Even radical libertarians like Glenn Greenwald for example have often argued that political spending needs to be transparent.
We also recognize other exceptions to the privacy norm that extend outside the world of finance. In the workplace, for example, it is often understood that while dating between colleagues is inevitable and fairly innocuous, relationships between managers and subordinates need to be formally disclosed. And the rationale for this is straightforward: since one of the parties is in a position of power over the other, these relationships are potentially (perhaps even necessarily) coercive. This point, incidentally, seems to be lost among most of the commentary about the Coldplay Couple: this was a PDA between a boss and his employee!1
What all of these exceptions to the privacy norm have in common is society’s need to constrain the machinations of the powerful. We generally recognize that while there is a social benefit in letting people keep certain secrets or hide certain things, sometimes that benefit is completely outweighed by the problems that privacy can cause for society. Liberalism, incoherently, tries to frame this as a conflict of “rights” — as if it makes sense to say that we all have a right to privacy except when we don’t. But what’s really going on here is that no one actually believes that there is a right to privacy. There is a privilege of privacy that society grants people, but that privilege is and must be rescinded in certain circumstances where it would cause much more harm than good.
This reasoning is the basis for Marxism’s historic conception of privacy as a “bourgeois right”: that is, as a privilege that when enforced as absolute and universal only benefits the bourgeoisie. Today it seems to make liberals feel better about the problem to play a word game and pretend that the right should be upheld but that we should also enforce exceptions to it. But Marxism, in this case, is blunt: rights are absolute and universal, and thus privacy should not be a right. If we insist that everyone has an unchallengeable right to privacy then what you end up with are terrible situations where an employer is pressuring his employee into a relationship and no one even knows what is going on.
That, by the way, is also why Marxists call for the abolition of “private” property. Of course there are situations where what one person wants to do with property should prevail over what another person wants to do with it; you should not be able to take away my toothbrush just because you personally want it. But it is a dangerous mistake to try to defend such personal privileges by creating an absolute and universal private property right that cannot be abridged under any circumstance; that is how you end up with the enormous concentrations of wealth that emerge under capitalism.
Accept this point and Koebler’s ad absurdum defense of Byron’s privacy falls apart. It is good that we all know who he is and what he is up to, and the reason for this is that he is rich. In a better world, our ruling class would have a stadium camera broadcasting everything they do 24/7; I think it would be extraordinarily educational to the public. In the best world, of course, the rich simply wouldn’t exist, and neither would these concerns about whether or not to violate their privacy.
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It really wasn’t that long ago that there was a general consensus extending from the conservative right to the feminist left that employer-subordinate workplace relationships should be regarded with extreme suspicion. Recall that this was, for example, one of the primary objections to Bill Clinton’s “affair” with Monica Lewinsky: that she was not in a position to give what we now call “enthusiastic consent” since she was a vulnerable intern and he was the most powerful politician in the world. That most folks seem to be shrugging off the issue these days is probably a dark testament to consolidation of power among the rich and the return of a kind of modern droit du seigneur to American society.