Advanced society has made solitude and inner secrecy technically impossible

Evidence

The prescriptions for inhumanity and injustice are being administered by a rationally organized bureaucracy, which is, however, invisible at its vital center. The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the “meaning” of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 321

Categorization

• XREF: Solitude as technically impossible is the structural twin of attention capture: no unmonitored inner space remains.
• SEED: Essay angle: polling the soul — how survey/data culture forecloses genuine inwardness.
• DEEPTHINKING: The dense claim that solitude itself — not privacy of data but the inward condition that sustained critique — has become technically contingent.