We are currently experiencing in our beautiful France, several episodes of
real life that look remarkably like those we are only accustomed to watch on
reality TV shows:
The players of the French Football team, who should get even behind closed
doors, are leaving more or less voluntarily in the open some of their
dialogues of anthology. A friendly wealth manager lets record a conversation
without his knowledge in which he gives to a billionaire instructions she is
supposed to have given him. We learn from unauthorized information that our
ministers are spending each month, on taxpayer expense, only for their
amusements, much more than the average income of the French.
All these events have in common that they are made public without the
consent of the players and stage a reality for us to live like a fiction to
which we would be brought to and given access. A world where reality looks
more and more like fiction which it was supposed to mimic.
We indeed invented fictions which were to enable us to enter into an
intimacy more or less fictitious with more or less famous people. The
pleasure was in the feeling of voyeurism, of transgression, in a
reconstituted reality.
in fraud, the real private life of real people, and to mediatize it. This is
true, for now, for more or less famous people, with considerable stakes. But
do not be deceived. It is also getting ready for the private life of all.
Soon nobody will be immune. Facebook, Google, Tweeter, Dailymotion and
others are getting ready to allow us to make available all information we
may have on others.
It is already possible -tomorrow it will be current practice-, to broadcast
live or slightly delayed, in order to protect the anonymity of the person in
charge, what happens in a classroom, in an office, in a workshop, in a
bedroom, in a restaurant. Without the agreement of those who will thus be
exposed.
Nobody will be immune to the curiosity of others, if we let strangers,
whoever they are, into our intimacy.
The loss of privacy will have tremendous positive impact, by bringing in
the open many hypocrisies. But it has tremendous negative consequences,
making privacy impossible, a prerequisite for the success of any
negotiation, any social and sentimental life. It will transform everything
into a show, introducing a third party in any bilateral relationship, making
us players of our own lives, data to be seen by random spectators. Finally,
it will send us back to what has always made most of the show: death, sex
and money. Our lives will lose in nuance, delicacy. Art will be no more but
life itself. Instead of being its sublimation.
It is urgent to rediscover the meaning of discretion, to refuse the tyranny
of transparency, to restore the taste for intimacy, of whispering and even,
supreme obscenity, the pleasure of silence.