Down the Long Shadows

There was a time when privacy was taken for granted. Before the internet, before the rise of civil surveillance, before the increase in governmental monitoring, before credit profiling and cellular telephony and smart debit cards and supra-national data sinks. There was a time when privacy was the norm.

There was a time when if you wanted to disappear, all it took was a willingness to change everything about yourself.

Now it's different. Now if you want to disappear, you have to disappear.