Chris: Welcome to hell. Please select your eyes.

Tim: You should see the farms where they harvest those.
Tim: Actually I guess you couldn’t. Because it’d have to be dark there, wouldn’t it?

Chris: They are harvested by feel.

Tim: The hands doing the feeling have way more than 5 digits.

Chris: Yes, but you have to return them at the end of the work day.

The photo is by Chris, taken at Nakano Broadway.

Why it matters and What to say

They’re listening to us too much, and watching too. We’re not happy about it. The feeling is appropriate but we’ve been unclear about why we’re feeling it.

This causes two problems: First, people worry that they’re being unreasonable or paranoid or something (they’re not). Second, we lack the right rhetoric (in the formal sense; language aimed at convincing others) for the occasions when we find ourselves talking to the unworried, or to law-enforcement officials, or to the public servants minding the legal framework that empowers the watching.

The reason I’m writing this is to shoot holes in the “If you haven’t done anything wrong, don’t worry” story. Because it’s deeply broken and we need to refute it efficiently if we’re going to make any progress.

Privacy is a gift of civilization

Living in a civilized country means you don’t have to poop in a ditch, you don’t have to fetch water from the well and firewood from the forest, and you don’t have to share details of your personal life. It is a huge gift of civilization that behind your front door you need not care what people think about how you dress, how you sleep, or how you cook. And that when communicating with friends and colleagues and loved ones, you need not care what anyone thinks unless you’ve invited them to the conversation.

Privacy doesn’t need any more justification. It’s a quality-of-life thing and needs no further defense. We and generations of ancestors have worked hard to build a civilized society and one of the rewards is that often, we can relax and just be our private selves. So we should resist anyone who wants to take that away.

There are bad cops

The public servants who are doing the watching are, at the end of the day, people. Mostly honorable and honest; but some proportion will always be crooked or insane or just bad people; no higher than in the general population, but never zero. I don’t think Canada, where I live, is worse than anywhere else, but we see a pretty steady flow of police brutality and corruption stories. It’s a fact of life.

Given this, it’s unreasonable to give people the power to spy on us without factoring in checks and balances to keep the rogues among them from wreaking havoc.

The cop-culture problem

It seems universally true that public-safety staff develop powerful tribal cultures, with intense inward-facing loyalties, and an attitude toward outsiders that smells paranoid to many.

History is full of examples, ranging from the commonplace cop-screws-up-and-department-covers-up to the-secret-police-stage-a-coup. It’s a systemic problem and nobody’s figured out how to make it not happen. Thus we need to watch the watchers, assume they will sometimes act stupid or paranoid or corrupt, and deal with that when it happens.

Talking points for everyday use

First, it’s OK to say “I don’t want to be watched”; no justification is necessary. Second, as a matter of civic hygiene, we need to be regulating our watchers, watching out for individual rogues and for paranoid culture.

So it’s OK to demand privacy by default; to fight back against those who would commandeer the Internet; and (especially) to use politics to empower the watchers’ watchers; make their political regulators at least as frightened of the voters as of the enemy.

That’s the reasonable point of view. It’s the surveillance-culture people who want to abridge your privacy who are being unreasonable.

Privacy Primer was originally published in I. M. H. O. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Legislative Mechanics of Texas Feminism

If you weren’t watching the livestream (courtesy of The Texas Tribune; that link is to their excellent morning-after piece) you missed an astounding piece of drama. I only caught the last 90 minutes, but wow.

Wendy

The charisma and eloquence of Senator Davis were remarkable. By the time I started watching, she’d been silenced by the Republican legislators’ tactics and spoke only with her erect presence, watching and smiling.

Gaming the System

I don’t think the transparent sleaze of the efforts to rule her out of order was all that terrible. The whole point of being governed by elected legislatures is that it’s rule-based, and wherever there are rules they can be gamed, and that’s OK. Ms Davis gamed the rules to head off an awful piece of law that would restrict access to abortion to rich women in urban centers. The Republicans gamed the rules to try to push it through. The real issue is the legislated policy, not the legislative tactics.

Sports Metaphor

Looking past the real issue, those tactics were pretty damn gripping to watch. At 2:57AM Texas time, the bill was officially dead; and, if I may be forgiven a view through baseball lenses, this was small ball; Hustling out a bouncer to first, getting to second on a sacrifice and third on a passed ball; then beating the throw home on a short fly-out.

First, Wendy Davis held the floor for all those hours and kept the openings for opportunistic Points of Order to a minimum; forcing the Repubs way into transparent-overreach territory.

Second, the immense legislative skill of the Democratic Senators in running out the clock. There were lots of them, but in particular, the lawyerly silver-haired lizard-skinned slow-talking Texas-drawling Senator Kirk Watson burned an incredibly valuable 15 minutes or so of the last hour politely dissecting the finer points of the motion to close debate on the motion to appeal the ruling on the motion to kill Wendy Davis’ filibuster so they could pass the motion. I’d hire that guy to represent me in a complicated big-money litigation, any time.

Third, the eloquence and timing of Senator Van de Putte, rushed to the debate from her father’s funeral, carefully ignored by the Republican chair as she ventured a procedural delaying tactic, raising the stakes from rules-gaming to gender-politics with “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?”

Which only reinforced the visual context: pudgy old white Republican men silencing strong-voiced women speaking for other women. This can’t be good for them, electorally.

Fourth, the activists in the gallery who, when the majority had mercilessly squished all the Democratic legislative tactics, just started screaming and wouldn’t shut up till the clock ran out. At ten minutes to midnight, I said to my wife, equally fascinated beside me on the sofa, “That gallery has staying power” and yeah, they did.

The real inside-baseball Texas-legislature cognoscenti will have more to say about how the Republican backup chair was out-dueled by the Democratic point-of-parliamentary-inquiry veterans, on average at least twenty years older than him by the look of them. But at the end of the day it wouldn’t have worked if a bunch of ordinary people hadn’t come to scream at the people they elected; and I can’t imagine a more fundamental exercise of democratic power.

What a show. My faith in the usefulness of democracy is refreshed. And I’m not even American.

Sidebar: I published this on my blog as Texas Politics; Evan Hansen reached out and wondered if I’d like to run it here. I’m perfectly happy with my blog and not sure what (if any) the benefits of being in Medium are; so let’s find out, since while I don’t get paid, it also doesn’t cost me anything.