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OK, so I'm
delighted to see so many people here
in the morning kind of,
um, wanting to hear a talk
about Hannah Aron's political philosophy
of privacy.
This is Yulia Maria Munich.
She has written her dissertation about
this topic and about Hannah Arendt.
And I think she just
was very successful.
And I don't know what the title, again,
in English is defending it.
So give her a warm applause for that.
And her current project is
called The Luxury of the Private Life,
a privilege for the Lucky Few.
So maybe this is a question of her.
Talk to her talk will be all
about the philosophical
concept of privacy,
why we need to protect it
and why
we need to protect it, because we want
to prevent totally totalitarianism.
Sorry, it's very early for me, too.
So I'm very
yeah. Delighted to to hear that talk
because I'm a fan of Hannah Arendt
myself.
So it's your stage now
and have fun.
Thanks.
Thank you for the kind introduction.
I'm very excited to be here and that
the organizers picked my talk.
Um, yeah, you can see the
topic and the title of my talk
on my first slide.
And I have to admit that there are
already a few questionable
points about it.
Actually, all of them, as you can see
now, I don't know.
Louder. Do you hear me now that
the big speakers.
OK,
OK. So can you hear me better now?
Should I speak louder?
Does it help.
Yeah. OK.
OK, thanks.
You
OK.
Thanks. So if you can hear me
now, I'm going to tell you
what you can question about my title
first. It's a notion of household
which has been criticized as
a concept of privacy by
the feminist feminists.
Sorry theorists.
If you say that the private realm is
just the household sphere, I'm
going to come back to all of these
topics. Just a brief
idea on why every
title can be questioned
and then the totalitarianism point.
I don't know if you know that
totalitarianism is a term which
has been
defined in the 20th century to
describe what is common between
what National Socialism
and socialism do have in common.
And that's why some people are
not very happy with this talk.
It was this term. Sorry.
Um, and then the word cyberspace,
I guess. And this was this
audience. I don't have to explain
that it is rather old
fashioned by now already
like a 90s term.
And then I promise you that I'm going
to talk about philosophical perspective
on privacy, but I'm going
to talk about other concepts, too,
because today's privacy research
is very interdisciplinary.
OK.
OK, um,
and that
might be too loud.
OK, so I'm going to talk about the
definitions of other disciplines,
too, is that my fault?
No, it isn't. Um, and then yesterday,
a person pointed out to me that even the
word privacy, of course, is problematic
in itself, because some people
do claim that we are in a post privacy
era now.
And then. Hannah Arendt, as I'm going to
explain later herself, is also
a kind of problematic
theorist in some points.
So what I'm going to do today is I'm
trying to briefly define
what privacy means
and then I'm going to say what
Hannah Arendt means by privacy,
and then I hope I can make some points
about why we need to protect privacy.
And I'm going to draw on some examples
from the current discussion
today.
So that's why if there is one thing that
privacy scholars and privacy activists
do agree on, then it is that privacy
is hard to define.
And that's the reason why we very
often use metaphors to describe
the private, for example, the word
realms of private around the private
sphere. Very often they are
spatial images to grasp
this concept of the private.
And then there is another
problem that is a German
term that I use that are being used like
Pivot's favor or cannibalized
private labels, which is a term
by the German Constitutional Court.
They don't have the exact same meaning
as the word privacy in English.
So we have to deal with that, too,
and a lot of these definitions are
negative definitions, which means
they do describe the opposite
of the public or let's say
the private is only defined
as the opposite of the public,
which, of course, poses the question
whether the private doesn't have a
point in itself and and
yet can be defined as a
concept by its own.
Um, and attempts to define
privacy are mostly
normative,
and some of them are descriptive.
But as I brought this quote
by the idea of Asla, as nothing
belongs by nature in the realm of
private, of course those concepts are
normative and very often they already
claim that the private needs to be
protected.
And there is a
close relation to other abstract
nouns like freedom and security, as,
for example, you know, a lot of
politicians try to tell us that
we only can have one of them and not
all together.
So brief historical overview,
the first definition
of privacy can be seen
in Aristotle's politics
when he describes the difference between
the oil, which is the household, and the
policy, the political public sphere.
But it has been questioned whether this
is really the exact same thing
that we do mean when we talk about
privacy and public publicity today.
Um, so in the medieval
times in the Middle Ages,
the private public distinction didn't
play a big role
because the church was influencing
everything. So it's actually
with the liberal theorists of the
17th century that the real
debate about public and
private does begin,
even though some of them don't use the
word privacy.
For example, Thomas Hobbs, which I've
named here as a first example,
he talks about expression of free,
free expression of mind and.
Um, about the
religious freedom so that
that can be seen as a private, um.
And then at the end of the 19th
century, a very influential
paper by Samuel Warren and Louis
Brandeis, which some of you might know
because they defined or they
claimed a right to be, let alone.
But those are lawyers, not philosophers,
so.
And then in the 20th century,
I have another ileus
who already
talked about the private before the
Second World War.
But the others I've named here, they
are dealing with the private
in relation to what happened
in the during the Second World War
or during the Shoah.
You have to say very important,
sort of the feminist critique in the
1960s and 1970s.
I already mentioned it earlier.
Then I brought up some of
the names of the feminist theorists
who have written influential
papers, because,
of course, if we consider the private
realm as a realm in to which
the state of the government isn't allowed
to interfere at all, then this
realm can, for example, cover up violence
against children.
And so, of course, there are legal issues
with this, and in Germany, for example,
related to this feminist critique
is a marital rape,
which means a forgive.
The ear is only
Strath.
But I use the words
since 1997, which means that
a wife which has been raped
by her husband
didn't had any have any chance
to report this to the police
or she could report it.
But it wouldn't have been considered as
a crime as far as, say, as
long as they are married as well as
education without violence.
I translated it.
It's, um, that's what I try
to assume for children, for Kinnah
in 2000.
Uh, it's, um.
Yeah, in German we say it's the to
or Fargood in his childhood, which
finally did become a crime.
And of course there is the infamous
and all of that, especially among the
information of self determination,
which has been defined
by the, uh, the
Constitutional Court in nineteen
eighty three in
terms of the micro
and macro sense of um.
Um.
OK, sorry.
And here we already see that those
are all issues which
are can be defined as private issues,
but they are so broad that
a scholar has tried to
grasp them better by defining
dimensions of privacy.
And for example, there is a proprietary
privacy is a local dimension
of privacy.
The decision, a dimension of privacy,
then informational privacy and
very important of the temporal aspects of
privacy.
And to define those
better, I'm again
quoting the two of US law
who says that decision is privacy, which
is closely related to
decision of freedom, actually
is a claim is when someone claims
the right to protection from unwanted
excess in the sense of unwanted
interference or literal enemy in our
decisions and actions.
So we have to be able to
make our own decisions.
And this was a decision of privacy
comes from the US American debate
about abortion, for example,
then information and privacy.
This is what we also call data
protection.
It means when people claim access
to information about them that they have
no desire to see in the wrong hands.
And then there is the local dimension of
the private, which is sometimes
considered to be
the classical
definition.
It is the right to protection against the
admission of other people to spaces
or areas and the proprietary
dimension very closely related
to the letter one.
So I come to the philosophy that I'm
going to talk about today, Hannah
Arendt, who is a
political theorist from the 20th
century, she was a German
Jew and she had to emigrate from Germany
in 1933, first to
France, then later in the 40s
to as USA.
And she
was a philosopher before she
had to emigrate.
But then she said she doesn't want to
touch any intellectual thing
again.
Luckily, she changed her mind on that
later on because otherwise she wouldn't
have written all these great works.
But she first didn't write
anything again because she said, how
could I with what is happening in Germany
or in Europe, how could I just
write philosophy again?
And so she she kind of changed to
political theory.
And her most famous books are
a report on the Iceman trial
in Jerusalem, Eichmann, Jerusalem.
And it has been criticized
a lot because, um,
yeah, it was a real
because it caused the debate in,
um, the Jewish community,
in the state and also in Israel.
Um, and
to other famous books of hers are the
origins of totalitarianism,
which appeared already and was published
in fifty one already.
And the human condition, which in German
is called VITAC Tiva and
is also very interesting about our
because a lot of her works do have two
separate versions, like the English
version she wrote, and then she herself
made the German translation and
changed a lot of the text.
So she has been criticized, as I already
said, about Eisemann trial,
and she has been criticized because she
was not a feminist
and might even
be considered to be antifeminist.
And her methods are kind
of interesting because she has kind of an
eclectic style and she
quotes from the Bible and from poems.
And so it's really kind of
a mix. But she said she wrote
to be able to understand and that's what
interested her.
She didn't want to write a coherent
theory as such.
And one thing she was
criticized about, too, was her
paper on the Iraq debate.
I'm going to come back to that
later.
Hannah Aron's motto, as I call
it here, is this never
to have happened, this had to negotiate.
And in German, she
meant by this as she clarifies
herself, the Holocaust, the Shoah,
but not only, as she says,
the number of the victims
and the brutality of what
has been done, but the
mass fabrication of bodies,
these are her words that
the the
terror and the murder was industrialized.
And this is also the starting
point from her political theory.
I give you a very brief overview
about her ideas, other than her ideas
on the private, which I will
explain later, because in
fact, she is a philosopher
of the public.
Actually, the public
realm was very important to her.
She wanted to protect it because it was
what had been destroyed in
totalitarian systems.
The realm in which people can come
together and act freely together
politically, we've seen that,
interestingly, in the Arab Spring,
Arab Spring, sorry, where also
people needed spaces to come
together and act together.
Um, and here we
also see that the
totalitarian systems for her
are different from what had been
there before, because
the public realm, as Aron says, was
already destroyed and dictatorship
before. But so to say, tearing systems
also destroyed the private
sphere.
So we need this public
realm to act together politically
and this action on
how our and defines it does have
unforeseeable consequences and
is a spontaneous thing which
is in contrast to
mere behavior.
Very important for our is also
the what what she what she calls
natality, because usually
philosophers since Socrates
are saying that what makes
a human human is that he's mortal.
But our ancestors, before a human being,
is mortal.
They do have to be born
to be able to start a new beginning.
And the other term, which is important
for plurality, which means that
we always are in the world
with other human beings and we
are always born into the world, which is
already made by human
beings.
And the political tradition since
Plato, as well as
the totalitarian systems, they tried
to replace action with
behavior, as Aaron calls it, they
only wanted people to
behave because behavior apparently
is predictable and whereas
action isn't at all.
And one famous claim
aren't made to was the so-called
right to have rights because
based on her experiences in
the 20th century, she said
it happens that the rights only
were for people who had a certain
nationality or citizenship and not to
everybody.
And a lawyer once
told me when I when I when I mentioned
this in a talk, he was
like, Yeah, but we have the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
Why do we need this?
But I guess yesterday in the talk from
Anna about the NSA
shows this problem came up
again, that sometimes
the rights only
are for universal rights, only for people
with a certain passport.
So what does Aron say about
the private in the already mentioned
book, The Human Condition, she
undertakes a historical analysis about
what has been private before,
and she said that in the ancient
Greek polis
in antiquity, the public
and the private have been separated
by war, which was
the wall of laws.
Actually, the laws were like a free
political thing, which
they kind of redefined.
And then after this, after the
constitution of the polis
existed like this and there
were no possibility that
the public affairs became private
and the other way around.
But then, as Aaron says, in
modern times.
The private things are some
private things came
into the public sphere.
One example for this Aussie example
is political economy,
which Aron says had been an
oxymoron for the for the ancients.
But now it's important to
talk about economic affairs
in the public sphere.
And that's how the society came
into being the social.
And then there was the intimate, which
kind of was invented, as she says,
to replace the private because people
need this realm. And so since
it wasn't there anymore, we had the
social and the intimate and the public
and the private world merged into the
society.
And then in totalitarian systems,
as I already said, they tried to
influence every aspect of human
life and so ideology
kind of influenced everything.
And according to our end, um,
that's what they tried, um,
they didn't succeed to it
entirely. But
this is public, private in the
totalitarian systems.
I rent herself, makes clear
that she's interested in
the local dimension of the private, and
she says this is from a talk in nineteen
seventy five just
right before her death, um,
she says that it should be clear
that my distinction between private
and public depends on the locality
where a person moves.
And very closely connected to this local
dimension is a proprietary dimension,
in fact, the dimensions are not
separated,
like exactly separated they are.
They very much interfere with each other
or they can interfere with each other.
But the proprietary dimension is,
as R.A.F. defines as
it sorry,
it's the property is
a precondition for local privacy.
She says privacy was like
the other, the dark and hidden side
of the public realm.
And why it be political men
to attain the highest possibility of
human existence?
To have no private place of one's own,
like a slave meant to be no
longer human.
So this really sounds hard.
You can see why people were criticizing
her, of
course, slaves were human, but she's
talking about the ancient
world view.
This is what usually is considered
as private insurance philosophy, and what
I did in my PhD thesis is that I
argued there is more to it.
And for example, I found an
example for the decisional
dimension of the private
in her work.
But before I'm going to read the quote,
I just want to briefly
explain the context of this
of these quotes, because
they are from the already mentioned
article on Little Rock.
And Little Rock is just a city.
It's the capital of Arkansas.
And this article by Arendt
was published in nineteen fifty nine
after she had first put it, but then
it was still published.
And it's based on
the fact that in 1954
there was a decision by the Supreme
Court in the USA that
African-American students were
allowed to attend former all white
schools.
And so the governor of Arkansas,
he didn't agree with that, as did others,
uh, from the from some states,
and he sent troops to prevent
the students from entering the school in
Little Rock.
It was there were only like nine
students, but that was what happened.
And then President Eisenhower sent
troops to in September
1957.
And so the
students were protected by military to
go into school.
And and
so our end saw a picture
of it in the newspaper.
And there was a, um,
Afro-American girl who was, uh,
like harassed by her, her,
um.
Her white fellow students
are not yet fellow students, and I
was like, this shouldn't
happen because we should never
fight our political fights
with our children, because the children,
they need to be protected.
Um, she kind of didn't think
it through, so to say.
And in the end, she kind of sided with
race segregation.
So that's why this article is
always irritating.
I think it can be explained why she did
this mistake. But, um, yeah,
that's just the context of these quotes.
I think it's about interests in mind.
But still, she says the
government has a stake in the education
of my child in so far
as this child is supposed to grow up into
a citizen.
But I would deny that government had any
right to tell me in whose company
my child received its instruction,
it's the right of parents to decide such
matters for the children until they
are grown ups are challenged only
by dictatorship's.
And in the same paper, she says
the right of parents to bring up their
children as they see fit is the right of
privacy belonging to home
and family parents.
Rights of the children are legally
restricted by compulsory education
and nothing else.
So is a decision that I mention
parents should be able to decide for
their children.
There are also the temporal aspects of
privacy. They are kind of clear,
but, um, in
the, um, debates, they
are sometimes not, um,
underlined enough.
So that's why I brought this
example again from from the
Antiquity by Aronne says,
the disappearance of the Gulf that
the ancients had to cross, they need to
transcend the narrow realm of the
household and rise into the realm
of politics is an essentially
modern phenomenon.
Such a gulf between the private and
public still existed somewhere in the
Middle Ages, though it had lost much
of its significance and change
its location entirely.
So we see you're the, uh,
head of the household is allowed to
cross the road daily
and of course, um, it was only
the male Greek citizens who had this
privilege and not the other
members of the household.
But the point was here that they had to
cross it daily. So the temporal aspect
of privacy.
I also brought two
quotes for the informational dimension of
privacy in Ahrons work,
and, um, this
is maybe something which isn't
too surprising today
and for this audience, actually.
But I'm going to read this first quote.
The police and the satellite countries
kept cader cards for every citizen in
the country.
On which presumably not only
compromising information was recorded,
but information on associations,
friends, family and
acquaintances, which is much more
valuable for totalitarian terror.
And so some of you might already
see where I'm going with this,
of course, today, it's not not not
a secret anymore. We heard that some of
you might have heard the talk by Simon
yesterday about the Stasi files.
Of course, this is this totalitarian
system did keep files on
every citizen.
But to clarify what I want to say,
I brought another bit longer
quotation. I'm sorry for that.
But it's just so good that I have to read
it entirely.
Um, the Krasna the
secret police is reported
to have invented the filing system
in which every suspect was
noted on a large card in
the center of which his name was
surrounded by Red Circle.
His political friends were designed
designated by smaller red circle and
as nonpolitical acquaintances, but green
ones, etc.
cross relationships between
the suspect's friends, political and
nonpolitical.
And the friends of his friends were
indicated by lines between the respective
circles.
Obviously, the limitations of his message
are set only by the size of
filing cards and theoretically
a gigantic single.
She could show the relation
and cross relationships of the entire
population.
And this is the utopian goal of
a totalitarian secret police
now the police dream that one look
at the gigantic map on the office
wall should suffice at any given
moment to establish who
is related to whom and in what degree
of intimacy.
And theoretically, the stream is not
unrealizable and realizable,
although it's technically the execution
is bound to be somewhat difficult.
If this map really did exist, not
even memory would stand in the way of the
totalitarian claim to domination
that might make it possible to
obliterate people sorry
without any traces as it never existed
at all.
Sorry, yeah, and some of you might
already know what I want to say,
because apparently Aaron is talking
about metadata without using the term.
And so there isn't even
anymore the
waters of the map of the world, because
we have this thing where
people are giving the data
voluntarily.
And this is just nothing
surprising for this audience, but
a figure that an Internet Facebook
made from metadata about friendships
between different cities.
What was.
The quotes from the book was
published in 1951,
so it's from the end of the 40s,
but the method already is
since he's talking about the sorest
secret police.
Yeah, the question was what he as a quote
was from. But, um, yeah.
Um, yeah, it's already early
already, you know, like at the beginning
of the of the 20th century.
So the metadata I'm
no kind of jumping into the
into today to today
does the current debate.
So because
our end wasn't about influencing
our behavior and she said, of
course, the tradition tried to replace
behavior with action because
that's what they can calculate, what they
can just foresee, what we are going to
do. And as we all know,
that's what's being done.
I just read something about
China's citizens score, which is a
new thing. Apparently, they are
collecting all information and they
are actually giving points
for the behavior, for the correct
behavior.
And for example, if a Chinese
person wants a visa
to come to Europe, they must have
a certain score to be able to leave
the country.
And they are like collecting all
information about Internet
searches, etc.
and of course, about relationships.
I mean, it's important who is my friend
when I don't want to leave the country,
isn't it?
So, yeah,
that, of course, is behavioral
advertising, which even has the word
behavior in its
title
and where companies
are interested in our search behavior
to predict it and to send us
targeted advertising.
And of course, there is a filter bubble.
I guess I don't have to explain it here
further that the problem is that
the more I do certain search,
the more I see the
results which are related
to this search.
Interestingly, there is native
advertising, which seems
to be a new
phenomenon because,
yeah, we do use ad blockers, et cetera.
And so native advertising
means that articles
in newspapers are sponsored by companies,
which is also not new as such,
but it depends on whether we can
see it or not.
And so this is also very interesting
because it might also lead to the fact
that some people see certain articles
which others can't see, etc.
Then of course, there's profiling and
redlining as price discrimination
and being able to order
certain products if one lives
in a certain area of the city.
And if you live in the in a
less time frame,
what's the word in a less good
neighborhood, then you might not be able,
for example, to order online
and to describe all this.
I have this
concept.
It's just briefly from the article
again, that the cognitive
and volunteers of asymmetry
of surveillance, I think that's a good
idea to grasp
this what is happening, because
she makes a difference between cognitive
symmetry, which means I know
that I am being under
surveillance, but I don't want
to. That would be Volante of
Asymmetry.
And then there's, of course, volunteer
asymmetry because
theoretically it might be possible that I
want to be supervised.
Like if I get the
credits from a from
a customer card and.
Yeah, you know, like I want to
want them to store my data.
I don't want them, but I want to have the
bonus. So that's what I'm doing.
And so I just think these are that's
why I mentioned it here. These are some
interesting concepts to grasp what's
really happening here.
I come back to end because what's all
this sorry, with all these examples,
we.
Can do one thing, because what our friend
also told us was that we never should
refuse from judging
and judging means because she
I quoted this never have happened phrase,
but it also was her goal
to prevent what
never would have happened from happening
again.
So what we can do to do to prevent
it is to judge about political
circumstances and
we can judge by examples.
Unfortunately, she never finished her
book on judging, but there are some
lectures cetera about where we
already get an impression on what she was
aiming at.
So this judging
is what is
necessary to prevent moral catastrophes,
and we can do it by examples.
And now I'm going to I'm trying to
combine the present
with our ideas from the
1950s and
70s, because I
think if we see those attempts to
influence our behavior like we
advertising, then we have to
keep in mind our warning
that we need to act and not just to
behave
as totalitarian states.
Goal was to reduce human beings, to
just behave in creatures.
Another example on which we could use to
to judge is cyber mobbing.
There is Ahrons warnings that the tyranny
of the majority of children
can be very bad for one
child if children are left
alone, which is which each
other.
I've elaborated on this in my thesis
of every anyone is interested in reading
more on this, I'm happy to send
you.
I see this.
And then we have the secret services,
because, of course,
I was about to say, Aronoff,
analysis of the totalitarian state
and the origins of totalitarianism,
um, did also.
She also looked at secret services
and she said that what they did was
they weren't only secret services
anymore, but they were secret polices.
So they were secret services with
the possibilities of
police forces.
And she also talks
about the state inside of the states.
So if we look at
these examples, we also
should be very careful about what's
happening today.
Aron says that we should protect
the private as well as the public and
with two last quotes, I'm going to come
to my conclusion.
Aron says, As the public realm has
shrunk in the modern age, the private
realm has been very much extended.
And the word that indicates this
extension is intimacy
to today's privacy is very much
threatened again today.
We are in the 1970s, in 1975,
but the threats are rather from society
than from government.
We'll have to discuss if answers right
here, if the society, which
would be, for example, companies work
together with the government.
But we should also protect the public
realm because they are closely
interrelated
and if one of it dies, the other one
dies, too. So what is necessary for
freedom is not wealth.
As Aron says, what is necessary
is security and a place of one's
own shielded from the claims
of the public.
What is necessary for the public realm
is that it be shielded from private
interests which have intruded upon it
in the most brutal and aggressive form.
So the public and the private,
the protection of the private does have
an individual and a common
value, which is one point
I'm going to conclude on now,
we need to protect the private as well
as a public sphere and
the private for the public sakes, but
also the public for the private sector,
because this individual value
of privacy, which means it has
a value for the individual,
for the citizens, and
also a common value of privacy.
That means if all our
privacy are protected,
then it's also better for the system.
And we need to
act spontaneously and our
individuality and authenticity,
as it is called in today's private
discourse, need to be protected.
And as Aaron says, we should never refuse
from judging.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Julia.
You now have the chance to
ask some questions.
We have some microphones here,
one there, one there and there.
And you can also ask questions
if you were watching the livestream
in the I.R.S.
chat room.
So any questions?
Yes, you
can start.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you very much. I was really
interested in these Fender diagrams
you were showing about these different
spheres overlapping and
interacting also,
because I'd always read
it a bit differently
or the way I sort of understood
reductive. I like in particular is
that this rise of the social what
you also which kind of coincides
with the disappearance of the Gulf with
what you quoted,
seeing that more as a kind of, well, the
social sphere arising as a kind of
interface or maybe sort of API between
the public and private realm,
which kind of informs either way.
And in that sense,
I'd be interested in maybe just
understanding these dynamics that go from
both realms
more clearly. And in that sense, that
maybe there's also a kind of danger in
withdrawing, in protecting the
private sphere in that
sense that you can't partake in
the social sphere, in the in the
political activity.
And I'd like to hear your take on that,
because that's like the down side or the
other side of the metal, really, that
there's some.
Well.
What I always took from Victor Activa is
that you can't really that
partaking in the political sphere is
basically essential to actually living
your life fully
in that sense.
So can you exist in this private sphere?
And don't you think there's also kind of
danger in in this step
back in this sort of other direction?
Any thoughts on that?
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for your question.
Um, actually, yeah, there is this
problem, um, which
I ran might have
not seen or some
theorists have criticized her because
she didn't see what exactly what you just
described, that we have this
strict separation between the private
and the public and especially
with his politics, with this
with this ideal of the of the ancient
polis, then there are certain
people who are excluded from
participating.
And that, as you said, and we active the
human condition, people should be able
to participate and people
should be able to decide whether they
want to participate or not.
And your second question I heard there
were two questions is about the social.
The reason why our end is so
critical about the rise of the social
is because the mass
society was one reason
why the totalitarian systems
could come into being.
That's how she puts it, because
in the mass society, people
only behaved.
They only were interested
in consuming, in working
or laboring, actually.
And there were individuals.
And this is like one of the preconditions
why the totalitarian system that
the two systems could use,
because they were no longer the
relationships between the people
and no longer
this kind of, um,
of sticking together.
I'm sorry, but we have
more questions here.
I hope it's OK.
So over there, please.
I think she was first.
And now we're just switching,
OK,
when stating that
we should never refuse to judge our
and take into account that we can only
judge based on the information we have
available, because
what I'm seeing now is that
control over information is pretty much
the most important thing, as we saw
yesterday with the NSA.
Yeah, very important point.
Thank you.
Actually, she kind of did
consider it or I'll take
it into account, but not in the
way you just described it are.
We would describe it today because she
said, um, we have
to judge by examples
and she didn't kind of
make clear where these examples are.
Oh, she actually proposed that these
examples could, for example, come from
fairy tales.
This is
blog about I don't know what this is
English word like we if
you have this really cruel figure from
a from a from a fairy tale, if
someone says, I want him to be my friends
and I should be very suspicious
and not be friends with that person
anymore. So she makes some propositions
where we get the examples from.
But the information where we get
those from is a problem.
I mean, of course, she was aware about
propaganda because she's analyzing the
totalitarian systems
and she even says that mass,
um, uh, advertising
has some parallels with propaganda.
She already sees that.
But she said that a lot of information.
So to finally answer a question,
uh, should come from education
or for children, for example, we should
educate them like in a, um,
traditional way.
So they
learn traditional information
and they learn about, uh, authority
and religion.
And, uh, but she doesn't make
clear how those children
who learn these traditional things can
become, um,
uh, revolutionaries.
Um, so even if the German
citizens.
Sorry, self-determined said.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. And even those those
self-determined citizens who can act
with something new and can start
something new and can start a revolution,
which is a good thing in her in her way
of use.
Thanks.
Are there any questions from the
Internet. No.
OK, so we.
Come to you, I thank you very
much for your talk.
I have a question. Well, the the
background that you cite as being the
foundation for Alan's analysis
is that in all these social contract,
philosophers like Locke and Hagel and
Kant, and then there is a clear
distinction there between the private and
government or like the social contract
being created to prevent terror.
But then with the rise of the social as
being the normative entity, which is
creating that, how are we
to protect the private if
if there's not very there's not a very
clear delineation between private
and public in this.
So if you take a private
company, which in the United States is
like a person, then how can you how
can you protect privacy when that
demarcation becomes very unclear?
Mm hmm.
Yeah, that's a good question,
because I don't actually.
She wanted this demarcation, as you say.
She she said we need this to protect both
the private and the public from the
interference from the atmosphere.
But I think that it's it's
more complex these
days. And that's
why this model
from from the ancient times
doesn't apply anymore.
And that's why today scholars are using
the dimensions, because,
for example, my local
privacy is a local dimension of my
privacy can be protected, perfectly
protected when I'm sitting at home.
But when at the same time the
NSA has hacked my computer, it's like
not information and privacy that I have
at that time. So that's why we
need to think about it more complex.
And that's also why we need to think
that there are some cases where
it is OK
when the private is over that I didn't
want to say it like this, but like it was
a feminist critique.
There are cases when there
must be a possibility to interfere with
what is what is happening in the private
realm. It can't be totally
sealed because there must be some
exceptions.
They have to be regulated.
And but the state is at the same
time the one who needs
to interfere in some cases.
But it's also the actor
who,
uh, from whom we should
be protected, but then becomes very
if if the state can call out if the state
says, OK, now we want this information
from some private company that has been
collecting data about their customers,
for example, then you have this constant
switching between the private and the
public.
That and how do you how do you legislate
that?
So could you.
All right. I don't know, it just seems
I guess it's complicated.
Yeah, it's complicated.
And just on the first part of the of your
question, as it's not only the background
of around all those theories
I didn't I mentioned, but
it's it's just the privacy discourse
I was referring to.
But our end, of course, is influence.
And she's also quoting and referring to
Locke, for example.
Thank you. Thank you so so over
here again, I have actually have a
question from Ishy, from our Gierach.
Um, do you think surveillance also
plays a role in destroying the public
sphere, the absence of Richwood?
Sorry, could you speak more to the
microphone? We continue to
watch the.
What role do you
think surveillance also plays a role in
destroying the public sphere, the absence
of which would prepare the way towards
dictatorship, uh, also because of
chilling effects which discourage
social participation and experimentation,
could you ask the question again?
I'm sorry, I didn't understand very well.
Sorry.
I try to talk right into the mic.
Um, do you think surveillance
also plays a role in destroying the
public sphere, the essence
of which would prepare the way towards
the dictatorship because of chilling
effects which discourage social
participation and experimentation?
Thank you.
Yeah, of course, surveillance does play a
huge role. And I mean, I like
the question was if I sing it, but I have
like my opinion and I read.
But I also was
taking into account surveillance
in her analysis of the totalitarian
states. And it's
like what's very important or
what she's criticizing is that the
neighbor might become more
dangerous and the police, if he
or she is spying on me.
And the surveillance is like, really?
And as we saw also yesterday in times
talk, in all the, um,
all of the, uh, uh,
spheres of the society and not only like
from agents, uh, from,
um, the secret services
and of course, um,
the surveillance.
Sorry.
Um.
And that's destroying the public sphere
as because I can't
behave as I would
if there wasn't weren't sorry,
there weren't any surveillance at all.
So by destroying my privacy,
it does destroy the public sphere.
Very,
um.
Was that question answered?
Yeah, so we go over here.
Hello. I just wanted to bring a little
bit more context,
of course, also and in the
context of politics and what you were
saying on behaviorism as well.
Pretty interesting
notion of of the space
of public. But I wonder whether Hannah
Arendt also in the later later writings
also was mentioning the markets
as market, as a form
also of defining
the the these fizzling
gray border between the private and the
public and privatization of the private
information by the market as something
that actually erases
the space of public and space of
political, as was understood by Aristotle
is what I mean by that is, for example,
in a way it was Matt was mentioning
football is a rival of
the
ever penetrating notion of normality
and that notion of normality, occupying
the space of political, let's say
in politics, becoming obsolete to the to
the capitalism in this way.
And politics becomes too big of the
equation of the uncertainty
to become the danger for
India in this sense of
of new balance of effectiveness
in the society.
And therefore, the whole notion of public
in our in becomes obsolete and therefore
the totalitarianism arrives
as as the necessity to increase
this efficiency in the society.
I wonder if if I went in the
later writings mentioned market in this
way is something that comes into the
into the plate. Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for mentioning
Fuku.
Unfortunately, apparently they didn't
read each other or at least they didn't
quote each other because they have a lot
in common. I think they would have been
very interesting.
But yeah, that actually that's
already in the human condition from 1958
or partially published in 1958,
that Ireland is very critical about
the market, not exactly in the way you
just said, or you would
call would explain it.
But the market is already a problem
in the modern
times, like when as
a society, we still have the slide
here as when the society comes into
being, as Ireland calls it,
the market interests kind
of do take over
the public sphere.
And that's the problem because there's
no, uh, there's no space
anymore for the political.
And I think that
the economic
affairs shouldn't be discussed
in the public.
We have the social sphere for that, as we
said, and we can discuss
it. But it's not not a political,
um, topic, just a little follow
up.
So she meant political and she defined
political as a space of unpredictable,
as a space of unknown space where space
of potentiality or other political,
as a space of a dialog or there is no
such is a space of
dialog.
But it's also this unpredictable
unpredictability does play a role
and it's also an agonistic
sphere because there should also
every time be this again in the
in the in the Greek way
that people should be, um,
debating and kind of, um,
having a battle between the opinions.
Thank you very much.
One last minute for one last question
and one last answer.
Your turn.
I tried to give our best.
Can you hear me clearly?
I have a question with regard to, uh,
hotelier's. And up
to now, we have had, uh,
systems which are very much related to
one person, so to name Hitler, to name
Stalin and whomever you want to call.
And now I see a change
here to a multitude of,
uh, corporations, if you want to.
And, uh, the state and the politicians
are, uh, like a Muppet Show.
And I would like to have a question.
What do you want to elaborate on that?
Is there a change in the definition of,
uh, totalitarianism?
And, uh, how does this affect.
Hmm.
Yeah, thank you. Um, I tried to answer
briefly that the
current Arin's idea of protectionism
is with some, as I call it, the classical
definition. And after that, people have
expanded the definition of
totalitarianism because, for example, for
our end, this, um,
Fula Poncy.
So to say, like you only have one
person at the top, as you said, is
important for, um, a real
totalitarian state.
But then also later on, she kind of
changes a little bit and she speaks
about totalitarian elements and
and and, um.
Yeah. Phenomenon's.
But, uh, I'm not sure I
think you're right.
And I think one could apply
Arantes, um, theory,
because she also sees that
there are those puppets who are
being.
Played like a puppet show by a puppet
master.
Um, but yeah,
actually, it's different from what you
just described as different from what she
defines as like clearly utilitarian.
OK, thank you very much for your
good talk about Hannah Arendt and
privacy.
Thank you very much now.