Skinner believed technical advances would dissolve privacy norms entirely

Evidence

Such conflicts would be resolved, Skinner reckoned, by the gradual retreat of privacy norms as they fall to the advance of knowledge: “The line between public and private is not fixed.” Like today’s surveillance capitalists, he was confident that the slow drip of technological invention would eventually push privacy to the margins of human experience, where it would join “freedom” and other troublesome illusions. All these would be replaced by the viewpoint of the Other-One embodied in new instruments and methods: “The boundary shifts with every discovery of a technique for making private events public.… The problem of privacy may, therefore, eventually be solved by technical advances.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1175

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘Other-One’ viewpoint connects to Foucault’s panopticon and to Zuboff’s thesis about the radical asymmetry of surveillance-capitalist observation. — connects to: Skinner anticipated surveillance capitalism’s practice of rendering private life into behavioral data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1174; Skinner saw freedom and accidents shrinking as computation expands knowledge of behavior. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1167; Skinner held that gaining knowledge destroys the illusion of free will — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1153
• QUESTION: Skinner’s confidence that privacy would ‘eventually be solved by technical advances’ — does the phrase ‘be solved’ imply privacy is a problem to be eliminated, not protected?

Broader Connections

• Skinner anticipated surveillance capitalism’s practice of rendering private life into behavioral data #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1174
• Skinner saw freedom and accidents shrinking as computation expands knowledge of behavior. #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1167
• Skinner held that gaining knowledge destroys the illusion of free will #expands (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1153