Strangers and Intimates review: Are we killing off the idea of private life?

Strangers and Intimates
Tiffany Jenkins (Picador (UK, available now; US, 15 July))

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned privacy? Nowadays, practically everything about us is known, traded and exploited by social media platforms, even when we aren’t opening the curtains on our inner lives ourselves. Click. There’s the sourdough your smug uncle made this morning. Click. There’s your friend crying about a missed promotion. Click. There’s a stranger inviting you – for a fee, of course – into their bedroom.

You would expect a book called Strangers and Intimates: The rise and fall of private life to have views on all of this – and it does, except that they are less straightforward, more considered and much richer than most others in this area.

As its author, the cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins, puts it: “Many blame this situation on narcissistic individuals who broadcast their lives online or on tech companies that devour personal data, but this overlooks the deeper changes at play.” And hers is a text about those deeper changes.

In Jenkins’s account, these mostly took place in the 20th century – and they were multifarious. Chapters are devoted to everything from the prying capabilities of smaller cameras – “Kodak fiends” were a particular turn-of-the-century nuisance – to the broader implications of Bill Clinton’s trysts with Monica Lewinsky – the private suddenly became fiercely political.

Among the book’s highlights is its story of how radical US groups in the 1960s, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), fought for personal independence only to end up killing it. As the SDS demanded purer and purer participants, one activist couple was even reprimanded for the terrible crime of “flagrant monogamy”.

Scientific thinkers aren’t exempted from this narrative. The behaviourist trinity of Paul Lazarsfeld, Edward Bernays and Ernest Dichter receive special attention for their collective work, in the first half of the 20th century, to turn humans into data and data into marketable insights. None of them acted maliciously, but they helped erode the sense that certain parts of life should be off-limits, rather than grist for corporate interests. Much the same could be said of biologist Alfred Kinsey’s famous surveys of people’s sex lives. Is nothing sacred?

Of course, privacy didn’t face a straight decline in the 20th century. It adapted, it moved, it pushed back. Jenkins dwells on cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Katz v. United States (1967), which established important protections for US citizens against state interference. She understands that her subject is complicated – encompassing law, culture, technology and even housing policy – and embraces that fact.

But there is no escaping Jenkins’s conclusion that privacy has declined overall, not least because the first half of the book does such a thorough job of charting its preceding rise.

Starting with the revolutionary appeals to personal conscience by Martin Luther and Thomas More in the 16th century, and continuing through various religious and personal freedoms in the 17th century, Strangers and Intimates really lands a century later.

It was, argues Jenkins, the 18th century that “heralded the arrival of public and private realms”, two distinct areas of life that allow for two distinct sides of the human character. In fact, the book even suggests, persuasively, that this development trumps all others of the Enlightenment. This is the sort of history book that makes you look at all history anew.

Which brings us right back to our highly surveilled present. “Had there been a strict separation between the public and private worlds when the world wide web took off,” argues Jenkins, “the online world today would be very different.” Since the 18th century, we have allowed our worlds to become compromised and blurred. The private is increasingly public.

And what do we stand to lose? Many things – although they aren’t all gone yet. “Originality begins in private,” writes Jenkins in her epilogue. From which we can only surmise that Strangers and Intimates began with blessed privacy.

Peter Hoskin is books and culture editor at Prospect magazine

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