Following last week’s publication of my article “Do I have something to hide?”, several questions were put to me, extending the reflection. Why do we so readily abandon our privacy, even when we know what it entails? What deep values do we forsake by yielding to this imposed transparency? What becomes of individuality if it is no longer protected? And above all, what does this new voluntary servitude say about our era—this servitude that leads us to become the jailers of ourselves?
These questions pushed me to write the text that follows, as a necessary continuation. Not to repeat, but to deepen, by exploring the philosophical, existential, and symbolic dimensions of this strange evolution in which we accept—sometimes with resignation, sometimes with carelessness—to surrender what constitutes us most intimately.
Why, even when we know, do we so readily abandon our privacy today?
We know. We read the warnings, we hear the alerts, we see scandals pass by. Yet, when it comes time to click, we yield. A quick gesture, a reflex that has become banal: “accept cookies,” “share my location,” “continue with Google.” Lucidity fades before convenience.
This abandonment of privacy is not a considered choice, but the result of progressive conditioning. Platforms have fashioned interfaces where vigilance is made costly and capitulation easy. The infamous dark patterns, these design tricks that guide our decisions without our knowledge, pepper our screens: the “Accept All” button highlighted, account deletion made labyrinthine, the pre-checked box that must be unchecked. These artifices exploit our cognitive biases, our laziness, and our fear of missing out.
To this is added cognitive fatigue: configuring each option or reading interminable terms and conditions would require energy we no longer have, saturated as we are by the flow.
Then an illusion: believing that our small habits interest no one, that we are too insignificant to be truly monitored. Yet, it is precisely the accumulation of mundane details that feeds the power of profiles.
Finally, there exists a subtle psychological pressure: FOPO (Fear Of People’s Opinions), the fear of others’ judgment. Not to post, not to expose oneself, not to “play the game” can seem strange, almost suspect. We dread being perceived as withdrawn, even marginal. So we yield, not from conviction, but from social conformity.
We resemble Narcissus, fascinated by his reflection: he believes he is contemplating an image he controls, but he loses himself in it. In the same way, we believe ourselves free in our sharing, while we are drawn into the digital mirror that conditions us.
Thus, even warned, we yield. Not from ignorance, but from conditioning. It remains to understand what this renunciation carries away with it.
What ontological values do we forsake in doing so?
Renouncing one’s privacy is not surrendering a practical detail; it is weakening fundamental values of human existence.
We forsake interiority: that space where one can think, love, doubt beyond any gaze. When every gesture is archived, interiority shrinks like shagreen.
We forsake forgetting: an essential capacity to reinvent oneself. To forget is to free oneself from an error, to begin a story anew, to forgive. Human memory is selective: it sorts, hierarchizes, erases what no longer makes sense, and preserves what nourishes the future. It is this active forgetting that makes pardon and rebirth possible. Digital memory, by contrast, preserves everything indiscriminately. It imposes a frozen past that can no longer be reworked by consciousness. It replaces the living thread of our interior narrative with a raw recording, objective in appearance but mutilating in its rigidity. It condemns us to relive our traces indefinitely, like Sisyphus forced to push his rock endlessly. But unlike the ancient hero, we no longer even have the space for revolt that Camus evoked: the digital rock never falls back down; it accumulates, and each new piece of data reinforces the weight of previous ones.
We also forsake plurality. In the physical world, we don’t speak to a professor as we do to a friend. Pessoa called this heteronomy: this faculty of being several at once, of unfolding into distinct voices, each having its legitimacy. But in the digital universe, all these voices are melted into a single homogeneous image. This richness is lost, and with it our capacity to be multiple.
Finally, we forsake autonomy. To be autonomous is not simply to act without external constraint; it is also to decide for ourselves what we reveal and what we preserve. Yet, in the digital universe, this boundary dissolves: our gestures, our tastes, our hesitations are translated into data that speak for us, sometimes better than we do ourselves. We believe we want such product, to watch such video, to explore such subject, when these desires have been discreetly oriented by algorithms that know our weaknesses better than we do. Autonomy does not disappear brutally; it erodes in small touches, replaced by a factitious freedom where we choose only from what has been prepared for us.
Thus, we lose on two fronts: on one side, autonomy, the freedom to be oneself and to decide for oneself; on the other, heteronomy, the freedom to be several and to choose which face to show. We cease to be both authors and actors, to become transparent silhouettes, calculable and homogeneous.
This double dispossession reveals an even deeper mutation: that of our relationship to time. For to lose autonomy and heteronomy is also to lose mastery of our temporality, the power to let our errors die and our possibilities be reborn.
When time ceases to be reversible
One of the dramas of digital exposure is that it upends our relationship to time. In real life, each moment consumes itself and disappears, giving way to another. Forgetting is the breathing of existence: it allows us to free ourselves, to begin again, to be reborn.
But in the digital universe, time freezes. Every gesture is archived, every word inscribed, every image preserved. Nothing comes undone. What was meant to be an instant becomes a trace, and this trace becomes eternal data. We thought we were publishing in the ephemeral; in reality, we are engraving on a stone that does not wear away.
It is a paradoxical temporality: it imposes both the frenzy of the instantaneous and the heaviness of permanence. The instantaneous, because we must react quickly, be present, visible, lest we disappear in the flow. Permanence, because everything we leave behind continues to exist, indefinitely reactivated, reinterpreted, reused.
Thus, the digital denies the reversible character of existence. Where forgetting allowed reinvention, we are now condemned to live under the weight of our own archives. Our errors no longer age, our awkwardness no longer fades, our past faces no longer dissolve in the course of time.
We are no longer carried by the flow of becoming, but held in a frozen eternity. And in this paradox—instantaneity without respite, permanence without forgetting—a new form of captivity is at play: that of a saturated present that no longer leaves room for metamorphosis.
What does the notion of individu(ality) that we refuse to preserve imply?
After the general conditions of being, let us look at what is at stake for each person, closest to consciousness and the narrative of self.
An individual is not the simple sum of their observable gestures, nor the statistical curve of their daily behaviors. They are an irreducible singularity, that is to say something that always exceeds what can be measured or represented of them. A human being is a story that writes itself in time, traversed by contradictions, ruptures, new beginnings. It is a consciousness capable of looking at itself, judging itself, transforming itself.
This consciousness is not only memory, it is also forgetting. It chooses what it keeps and what it lets disappear. It hierarchizes, it interprets, it rewrites. It is what gives meaning to our experiences by connecting them, and what allows us not to be prisoners of each isolated moment. Yet digital memory, which preserves everything indiscriminately, threatens this faculty. It imposes a frozen past that can no longer be reworked by consciousness.
By refusing to protect this individuality, we accept a reduction: we become exploitable profiles. Every detail, every click, every hesitation is transformed into raw material. We cease to be unpredictable subjects, capable of diverting the trajectory, and we become calculable resources, inscribed in a logic of exploitation.
This loss also brings about the end of metamorphosis. To be an individual is to be able to change faces, to reinvent one’s relationship to the world, to choose which role to assume. But digital portraits, by accumulating our traces, freeze us in an identity predicted by our past behaviors. The future becomes an extension of the already-lived, and the unexpected is reduced to an infinitesimal margin.
We then resemble Prometheus chained: his liver, constantly regenerated, is eternally devoured by the eagle. In the same way, our data, constantly regenerated by our daily gestures, feed a system that feasts on us.
To preserve one’s individuality is to refuse this reduction. It is to affirm that the human is not exploitable data, but a being capable of surprise, of the unexpected, of rupture. Without this preservation, we lose our very dignity, but also the selective memory that makes us beings of narration and transformation, and not simple living archives.
The reduction of the individual is not an accident; it results from a regime of power that has become intimate. This shift is not only a matter of data or profiles: it translates the emergence of an unprecedented power, which no longer constrains us from the outside but installs itself within us, at the very heart of our gestures and thoughts.
What does this new voluntary servitude say about our evolution?
It says that we have changed regimes of power. Once, constraint came from outside: prohibitions, censorship, visible laws. Today, it is internalized. We no longer need to be constantly monitored: we monitor ourselves.
But this shift is not the fruit of chance; it results from patient training. Interfaces have accustomed us to yielding, social rewards have incited us to show ourselves, algorithms have oriented our choices without noise. Step by step, we have learned to adjust our behaviors to what the machine expects of us. We have been trained in transparency, like animals learn to execute a gesture through repetition and reward.
This servitude is called “voluntary” because it does not rest on force, but on seduction and fluidity. We believe ourselves free, while following paths marked out by others. We accept being oriented by notifications, recommendations, feeds that exploit our vulnerabilities.
It is a form of modern panopticon, like the one Bentham imagined. But here, the guard no longer even needs to watch: we have integrated his gaze. We have become our own jailers. We censor our words before writing them, we filter our photos before posting them, we repress our gestures before anyone even observes us. Surveillance is no longer only an external device; it has become an interior reflex.
This evolution says much about our era: we have traded uncertain freedom for the comfort of the frame, unpredictability for predictability, the plurality of our voices for the uniformity of a profile. And if we do not take care, we will no longer say: “I have nothing to hide.” We will end up saying: “I have nothing left to preserve.” That day, we will no longer merely be observed: we will be accomplices in our own captivity.
Why this irrepressible need to exhibit ourselves while believing we are showing our singularity?
This training has found such fertile ground because it is rooted in very ancient reflexes, inscribed in us since time immemorial. For our need to show ourselves, while believing we are affirming our singularity, is not an invention of platforms: it is an archaic mechanism that the digital has amplified.
Around the Primitive Fire, man existed only through the gaze of others. To be seen was to belong to the circle; to disappear into shadow was to expose oneself to death. This archaic reflex remains in us: each “like” is a spark from that ancient fire that reassures us, confirming that we still belong to the tribe.
Then came the Collective Mirror. Man learned to imitate himself so as not to risk exclusion. To show oneself was no longer simply to appear, but to resemble. The displayed singularity was only a conforming mask, a variation permitted by the fashion of the moment. Better to be an accepted copy than an erased face.
Finally appeared the shadow of Icarus. Man no longer wanted merely to be seen or accepted; he wanted to shine brighter. His wings, made from the gaze of others, carried him as high as attention sustained him. But as he rose, he became dependent on this fragile light. And when the flow turned away, he fell back down, prisoner of his own pride.
Thus, our era endlessly replays this triptych: the Fire (the archaic need to be seen), the Mirror (the requirement to belong), and Icarus (the temptation to dominate through exposure). We believe we are showing our singularity, but what we often offer is only a disguised uniformity, dictated by ancient masters we have never ceased to serve.
How much longer will I remain capable of preserving what makes me a free being?
We live today in a strange bestiary of revisited images and myths. Like Narcissus, we lean over the digital mirror, fascinated by a reflection we believe we control, but which gradually engulfs us. Like Sisyphus, we bear the burden of a memory without forgetting: each accumulated piece of data adds its weight to the rock, which never descends and crushes our present under the repetition of the past. Like Prometheus, we see our data regenerate endlessly, offered as fodder to a system that feeds on our intimacy as the eagle feasted on his flesh. As in the Panopticon, we live under the invisible eye of algorithm-guards, but worse still: we have learned to become our own jailers, to anticipate this gaze, to train ourselves in conformity. And finally, as Pessoa foresaw, we lose our heteronomy: the richness of being several, of keeping our masks, our multiple faces. We are reduced to a uniform, smoothed, totalized image.
This convergence of myths says one and the same thing: we are not only losing data; we are losing essential dimensions of our humanity. The interiority that allows us to think without witness. The forgetting that makes rebirth possible. The autonomy that gives us the strength to be ourselves. The heteronomy that authorizes us to be several at once.
Digital servitude does not need chains; it needs habits. It does not impose itself through violence, but through comfort, fluidity, seduction. It is a patient training that teaches us to yield without even realizing it, until we end up finding it normal to deprive ourselves of what constituted us.
And if one day we have nothing left to preserve, then there will remain of us only calculable profiles, frozen archives, docile shadows projected on the walls of a world we will no longer even have the strength to question.
The true question is therefore no longer: “do I have something to hide?”, but: “how much longer will I remain capable of preserving what makes me a free being?” And the answer depends less on machines than on each person’s courage to raise their head, to say no, and to reconquer the interior space where human dignity is forged.