CYBERSPACE – I’m writing from deep within cyberspace, from the seeming safety of my home, where my wife sleeps and my children play with their toys. I don’t feel particular safe, though. To the contrary, I feel as though thugs with machine guns might be just outside the window, watching my every move, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. What the hell is wrong with me?

One would think I’d be used to the idea of unauthorized intrusions by now, having worked for more than a decade covering a robust sector of online activity (porn!) that tends to cede itself far more flexibility in terms of respect for certain boundaries than most would find appropriate. But I am a codger.

Among many of my colleagues, whose ages often run a few decades younger than my own (gulp), there is a openly expressed belief that privacy is an antiquated concept and that those who cling to it are idealistically naive and need to move on. They are not cynical when they say, without a hint of self-doubt or regret, that not only is there is no such thing as privacy anymore but it is a battle not worth fighting.

These are not stupid people, either, but very bright and accomplished individuals, many of whom are engaged in the construction of business models and network archtectures that will come to define how we interact with one another in the very near future, i.e. now. What these people believe about what we should expect from communications systems and networks cannot help but become integrated into those very systems. This is obvious, of course, but all the more unnerving.

But you don’t have to travel far, and certainly not to Britain (where 1984 takes place, young’uns!), to see the encroachments taking place, the rights being peeled away and the real-life fallout of our mad rush to self-inflicted suicide in the guise of protecting our children, national security, national heritage, place in the world, corporate integrity, traditional values, etc., etc., etc.

Do I inappropriately conflate these issues? I don’t think so, but then I see immutable connections all around, the result perhaps of my extreme unease with complacency. There is no need to succumb to outrageous conspiracy threories to be painfully aware that new protections the Obama administration wants to put in place regarding government immunity from lawsuits over invasion of privacy are novel and scary. In effect, as Jonathan Turley was saying yesterday on MSNBC, we have a Fourth Amendment that gives us rights, but now we have no mechanism with which to enforce them.

I would simply suggest that if you have not already done so, now is the time to go back and read Orwell, and not just 1984. Read or re-read as many of his works as possible, especially his “non-fiction” works on propaganda and writing. I also love his early works, such as Down and Out in Paris and London and Burmese Days. They are not polemics, to be sure, but they help understand the development of one of the world’s great critical thinkers.