Convenience can be a cloak veiling an undisclosed exchange not merely between me and some future society that I am robbing of “privacy” but between me and other people right now: My convenience is often bought at someone else’s expense.

If platforms deplete our willpower by making us hyper-self-conscious, they also are increasingly structured to make us experience the will as beside the point. Platforms are designed to make us less conscious of our decisions about how we spend time on them, attempting to automate decision-making with auto-play. The algorithms that ostensibly reveal what your “true” or “authentic” self would choose for itself feed off the very exhaustion that the platforms generate, offering refuge from the burden of identity work in the automation of the will.

Once surveillance seems a fait accompli, then some measure of cynicism, apathy, or nihilism about privacy may present itself as a reasonable response. This suggests that pervasive surveillance helps produce people who are more at ease with it — people who no longer know what privacy is for or what socio-moral milieu could give it value.