There is no privacy. That’s the first line, the one nobody wants to read, but it’s true enough to carry the weight of the whole argument. What we call privacy now is a commercial product, a marketable illusion. Platforms sell the promise of protecting what they already capture. Governments legislate rights they cannot enforce. We treat privacy like a possession, but it has long since dissolved into smoke.
And here’s the catch: the illusion of privacy is tied to the illusion of self. People react to this with outrage, but what is that identity except an acquired relationship between things external to you? Your job, your networks, your possessions, the histories that cling to you like static. Identity is not an inner kernel. It is a residue of relationships. It was never yours to keep.
The system profits from keeping the illusion alive. Every ad that suggests protection, every product that offers security, rests on the assumption that there is something left untouched. But the record is already written. Every detail you enter, every photograph you share, every location ping and casual search query—each is a coordinate in a growing map of probability. Together, they converge on you.
There is no grounding security, no grounding ego, no grounding certainty. Everything is wide open. Everything is available to be copied, reassembled, and redeployed. Not just against you, but through you. The archive is no longer separate from the self; the archive is the self.
This is the new condition: exposure not as accident, but as structure. We were raised to believe privacy meant walls, locks, encryption. But walls leak, locks break, keys are copied, and encryption is only as strong as the machines built to crack it. The truth is starker: every line you type, every fragment of history you thought forgotten, can be drawn back into circulation. The loop remembers.
How do you feel about that? Perhaps the answer doesn’t matter. Entropy doesn’t ask permission. Identity, privacy, security—all of them were conveniences, not absolutes. The network was always going to swallow them. What we’re left with is not protection but participation. Everything is open. Everything persists. The only decision left is how to live in a world where nothing is ever really hidden.
Daedelus Kite 