Loss of private opacity makes people forget mediating material infrastructures

Evidence

If Roland Barthes could still conceive, in his reflections on photography back in 1980, of “private life” as “that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object,” then it seems clear that the 2020 vision of digital-image society preserves virtually no privacy, legal or metaphysical. … Unable to withdraw, subject to demands for transparency at once personal and political, we lose our own opacities, we forget that the chronically manifest self is not all, and, in this forgetting, we overlook the material infrastructures of its illusory emanation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 92

Categorization

• QUESTION: This links transparency-demand to misperceiving infrastructures — the crux of her whole argument that immediacy hides its own material supports. Worth squaring with her existing claim in earlier chapters about the economic base.
• XREF: connects to: Digital media blur the private-public boundary even though its structural basis persists — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 22