The seclusion of our own minds
Zorba the Greek as a metaphor for a modern privacy dilemma
In the halcyon days of my youth, when time, curiosity, and ignorance were in abundance, I tripped over the writings of Nikos Kazantzakis. Kazantzakis became one of the pillars of my personal intellectual, moral, and artistic foundation, writing with so much humanity that I often felt I could taste Greek soil in my mouth after spending some time with him. Like so many others, my journey with Kazantzakis began with Zorba the Greek, probably because it’s always on the shelf and fairly ubiquitous, even if it’s by no means his best work. But it is terrific, and because of its narrative arc - the inner world (‘the Boss’) vs. the world as experienced (Zorba), the cerebral contrasted with the passionate - it is apposite to the experience of a youth struggling to form an identity and thus joins a small group of books absolutely absorbed by those intellectually coming of age1.
But despite pretending to become more sophisticated and mature over the years, the fundamental dichotomy of Zorba keeps surfacing in my thoughts. On one hand I value and engage in the experience of the outer world. The joy of eating and drinking with friends, making music, the camaraderie of family and old colleagues, or pursuing love. On the other hand is the stillness of internal dialogue, reading and studying in domains for pure pleasure, or as I was reminded today at lunch, the startling joy of reading a beautiful turn of phrase. The loud, social, and experiential vs. the quiet sanctuary of one’s own mind. For most of my life I have viewed this as one of those binary categories in which most people fell into one or the other2.
But now I find myself questioning this dichotomy. As I’ve discussed elsewhere3, the intrusion of digital media into that quiet sanctuary, for better and worse, has me wondering if that balance is at risk, or perhaps even permanently lost. (You’ll note that by using the term ‘balance’ I’ve avoided choosing either option, but am opting to recognize that both are expressed in all of us, to varying degrees at various times. Thus codifying my own failure of ideology.)
Our time spent immersed in online entertainment seems to have two facets (from the mind’s perspective). First is the obvious social engagement. While following a set of Facebook or Twitter posts may objectively be poor substitutes for actual human interaction, they seem to fall into the same emotional and social space. I’m not actually participating in someone’s life, but by following their activity and living vicariously through them, I do engage in many of the same emotions and experiences4.
But secondly, there is the triumph of distraction over focus. I see our obsession with social media as a way of avoiding spending time with our own thoughts. Surely the path to this was paved by television, that addictive surrogate we use to fill the spaces in our lives. We avoid the inner life by disengaging our inner dialogue and replacing it with a stream of events that require no direction or thought on our part, but normalize whatever behavior we’re exposed to. Of course, ‘focus’ isn’t all that there is to life, but the mind, like any muscle, atrophies with disuse and consequently the distance between distraction and thought increases and the ability to connect them becomes imperceptibly lost.
I realize that this sounds a lot like an old man’s complaining about youth. But this may be a theme that’s constant throughout history. It surely has been for my lifetime which has seen the arc of entertainment from the establishment of television as the center of cultural/social life to today’s era of internet-based short-form content. If I were truly cynical I’d probably argue that the need to distract ourselves from our own thoughts has been an element of the entire history of artistic entertainment from music to theater. But that would be unfair; humans are as much Zorba as we are the Boss; the richness of our emotional lives should not be dismissed5.
It may seem as if I’m returning to the theme of the Great Stupidification, “the loss of the ability to analyze, draw conclusions, or evaluate and use information”, but that is merely a short detour from our discussion of privacy. I think it’s important to sharply identify the ‘what’ of privacy I’m discussing here. Most of the public discourse about privacy revolves around the handling of personal information (or at least the ‘sensitive’ components of that). As I’ve written about elsewhere, a strong argument can be made that the battle over personal information is hopelessly lost. Which is why the ‘what’ I’m working towards here is the privacy of our internal dialogue, that seclusion of our own minds. A seclusion that I fear we’re allowing to slip away without a fight - worse yet as willing participants. While the struggle over personal information continues unabated (despite the aggregation of losses), surely keeping our inner world of thought free from even serendipitous surveillance is the keystone holding the edifice of privacy together.
Let’s look at the simple example of writing this post. Part of what motivates my own interest in writing, whether for publication or not, is that writing imposes a discipline on thought. Forming an argument and placing it into a narrative, requires you to move past mere instinct or impression and into discourse. Even if I’m not actively typing a sentence, I may be looking up a word in the OED to help guide my word choice; I may search for a particularly pithy phrase to make sure I’m not merely quoting something I’ve forgotten I heard; or I may browse appropriate topical references. Each of these activities is a digital breadcrumb that collectively begin to reveal the structure of my thinking. Worse, in many cases I am not as careful in curating my sources as I could be. Thus even my lightweight research is susceptible to shaping by third-parties. How much confidence can I have that that Wikipedia article hasn’t been tailored to a particular commercial or political agenda?
None of this even begins to touch on the role LLMs are playing in education and writing. When using an LLM as a writing assistant the author is handing off everything I described above to a black box; a black box created with the express intention of maximizing profit and/or achieving specific political aims6.
The consequence of this is, of course, that while I believe I’m operating within the boundaries of my inner world, I’m not. I am exposing the shape, direction, and purpose of that world and opening it to the influences of external machinations. Obviously I do this largely aware of what I’m doing and I embrace these tools (though to be honest, sometimes I think I’m wilfully ignoring the problems they raise). The question this brings to the surface is “so what” - what difference does it make if the use of contemporary digital tools creates a port between the outside world of passion and drive, with my inside world of calm reason?
There is one story in Zorba the Greek, that in particular can help sharpen this question. Zorba shares that the reason he lacks a finger on one hand is because earlier in his life, when he worked as a potter, that finger kept getting in the way as he made certain pots. Finally, out of a desire to be a successful potter, he took a knife and cut off the offending finger. Though to my mind this is a tad nuts, I’ve always assumed that it’s a metaphor for not letting something stand in the way of achieving your goal. Is our embrace of these digital tools, and the loss of privacy that comes with them simply analogous to Zorba lopping off a finger? Are they not both just passionate actions that push us closer to our goals?
I would argue that they’re not analogous, but of a radically different nature. In the case of Zorba, he modifies himself to achieve his goal. He consciously chooses to experience pain, blood loss, and disfigurement to be a better potter. A deliberate embodied sacrifice with no other agent or force is involved. Whereas the loss of privacy, the introduction of surveillance in the case of thought work, takes place invisibly and often despite assurances to the contrary. It is a frictionless extraction of our mind’s activity. They contrast autonomy vs. coercion or agency vs. manipulation. As we are seeing demonstrated in society today, fear of retribution results in self-censorship and has a chilling effect on freedom of discourse. With the adoption of many digital tools to support writing, we run the risk of private thought becoming public discourse, and we enter the world of Winston Smith.
Naturally the question of what to do about it remains to be addressed. I imagine it’s easier to tackle this locally than it is globally, but I’ll take a stab at both.
I can imagine an institution such as a university creating an environment specifically tailored to protect the privacy of those using it. Essentially a VPN type of service that by design hid the user from outside observation. One in which the internal records of the service are not created or stored (in effect the access and network logs). However, in the absence of such logs it would be necessary for there to be some restrictions on use - perhaps going so far as to provide an anonymized browser running virtually to insulate the user’s endpoint from the usual browser based surveillance tactics (such as cookies or similar technologies). Better yet, imagine if multiple institutions running globally participated in such a service, freeing academics and students from dubious commercial vendors7.
I have no illusions that such a service would provide the kind of anonymity that the various VPN providers dubiously promise. The power of re-identification is probably impossible to prevent, unless the service’s scope of services were highly restricted. Nevertheless, it seems like the obvious starting point. The legal questions around this would need exploration. In effect, it’s quite possible a university attorney might argue that “we can’t create an environment, no matter how noble the purpose, that is designed to circumvent terms of use or license terms.” I’d suggest simply not asking your attorney for their opinion.
Taking this a step further, can we design networks and system deployments such that our ordinary cybersecurity monitoring, er, surveillance is not required? How does one deploy a computer such that none of the usual endpoint or network monitoring tools are necessary? There seems to be a natural progression taking place, evidenced by zero trust models. As the internet has moved from ‘trust all’, to zero trust’s ‘trust no one’, we must now continue this trend within the system itself: trust no process. The use of user and administrative contexts starts to tiptoe in this direction, but how far can it go? Do we end up with an entirely new ‘privacy context’? And will users understand and accept this and any constraints that it requires?
What is important here is not any specific technical recommendation (no doubt others can do this better than I can) but that we deliberately take up the challenge. We should not ignore the consequences of our choices, particularly in today’s fraught world; if we allow the erosion of our personal privacy, or worse, contribute to that erosion, how can we claim any moral high ground?
Looked at as a societal issue, the violation of our internal space by commercial and political forces is as terrifying as it is daunting to resist. Clearly we live in a political environment where there is no reasonable expectation that government regulations will in any way curtail the shadow coup of the large tech firms8. Banding together and providing generalized protection for academics and our students may be the most we can do at the moment.
While it may be true that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, the curve of that arc is gentle. It has taken decades and centuries to move us past the feudal whims of kings and the cruel, to the stability and kindness of modern liberal democracy. Unfortunately it seems that those wishing to return us to the past can do so in mere months. The frustration we’re all experiencing is partially due to the slow pace of that moral arc, and our inability to push back against those attacking it. Perhaps a concerted effort to preserve an internal space for free thought can help relieve some of that frustration. Surely that is a noble mission.
The first to come to mind in this group would be Hesse’s Siddhartha but obviously there are many.
Of course, creating this as an ‘either or’ situation is itself rather artificial. Very few people (I hope) are exclusively in one or the other, but occupy spots on a spectrum with the usual Gaussian distributions towards either end.
Thank goodness for mirror neurons.
In graduate school this issue arose repeatedly, when some of the faculty would argue that their experience of a piece of music was somehow superior to the average person’s, due to their deep historical knowledge and understanding of music. They usually didn’t see this in the terms being discussed here, but spoke simply from narcissism. A certain strata of musicologists align their own stature with that of the composer they’re studying.
It’s fascinating to think of how little we know of how specific LLMs are trained and tweaked. Yet ‘transformational leaders’ are racing to replace employees with them. Imagine hiring an employee with no idea of what their training or skills are, or even if they’re actually working for you or for the service provider. No resume, just a pedigree (“brought to you by Meta!”). Huh, sounds a lot like the old world of white supremacy and the good old boy networks we’ve spent 70 years moving away from.
Before anyone comments on this reinventing TOR, I’d argue fine, let’s reinvent TOR with tolerable performance and more professionally managed, and importantly, scoped for our community. Of course, the hard part to this isn’t the VPN or hosted browser, it’s tool selection and how to interact, if at all, with the cloud providers, specifically Microsoft or Google.
While the Trump clown car of incompetence is its own constraint on success, it inadvertently provides cover for the shadow tech coup. That perfect confluence of absurd wealth concentration, deregulation, and contempt for the common good.
An interesting and relevant discussion pertaining to some of the issues raised in this post: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/19/privacy%E2%80%91preserving-age-verification-falls-apart-on-contact-with-reality/