Sanctuary in the Panopticon: Reclaiming Privacy as Radical Praxis

Introduction: The Paradox of Connection

This essay is an invitation to pause and look closely at something we’re told is fading, suspect, or even selfish: privacy. In a culture obsessed with sharing and visibility, where every moment can be broadcast and every thought is up for comment, the very idea of keeping something for ourselves—or for the people and places that matter most—has become radical. What follows isn’t just a defense of privacy, but a call to reclaim it as a practice, a right, and a source of strength for both individuals and communities.

Privacy, to me, is the everyday work of drawing the lines that let us decide what’s ours to hold and what’s meant to be shared—sometimes for ourselves, sometimes for the circles and communities we build together. It’s the freedom to choose what is shared and what is held close, to decide when to step forward and when to step back. Privacy is the space we carve out to breathe, heal, imagine, conspire, mourn, love, and dream; it’s as much about the quiet of a closed door as it is about the trust of a circle that keeps its own counsel. It’s not just a shield for the solitary—it’s the commons where solidarity is built, where the seeds of resistance and belonging are planted.

Privacy is also a ground for spiritual centering, for the cultivation of internal space that is both psychological and sacred. Solitude—especially in communion with the natural world—reminds us that we are, paradoxically, alone and never alone. The trees, the wind, the slow movement of clouds, the rhythm of the tide: these are witnesses and companions, not voyeurs. In these moments, privacy is not isolation but a return to the source, a reminder that our deepest selves are both singular and woven into the fabric of everything.

We’re living in a moment where the lines between public and private haven’t just blurred—they’ve been scattered across timelines and feeds, caught in the teeth of algorithms that never sleep. The paradox is as clear as it is unsettling: we’re more “connected” than ever, and yet the sanctity of privacy—real privacy, the kind that lets us breathe and become—is under siege.

Today, privacy isn’t simply vanishing; it’s being recast as a liability. The desire for space, for a room of one’s own, is met with suspicion. If you’re not sharing, you must be hiding. If you’re not visible, you’re untrustworthy. Secrecy and privacy have become wrongly synonymous with suspicion, while the “community” we’re offered in exchange for our exposure is often little more than a digital mirage—a feed, a comment, a like—leaving us lonelier than ever.

So what is privacy worth in a time when everyone shares their business, when the self is always already on display, curated, commodified, and surveilled? Is the right to be left alone a quaint relic, or—as Warren and Brandeis argued over a century ago—the very cornerstone of our “inviolate personality”? If we’re going to make sense of what privacy still means, we have to look to those who’ve wrestled with how to hold something back in a world built to expose us—people who’ve lived the questions, not just written about them. This isn’t just theory for theory’s sake; it’s about survival, dignity, and the possibility of building lives and communities that aren’t always on stage.

Privacy: The Crucible of Autonomy

Privacy isn’t just the absence of observation; it’s the crucible in which autonomy is forged. To be private is to have the freedom to think, feel, and decide without the omnipresent gaze of others. This is not just a matter of comfort, but of existential necessity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms privacy as a fundamental right, essential for both personal safety and the freedom to live authentically.

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, in their seminal 1890 essay “The Right to Privacy,” saw this coming. They understood that as technology advanced, so did the capacity for intrusion. Their insight was that privacy is the bedrock of the “inviolate personality”—not a luxury, but a precondition for self-determination.

Yet our culture has flipped the script. The desire for privacy is now often cast as unhealthy, antisocial, or even dangerous. Anita Allen calls out this move, insisting that privacy isn’t about secrecy for its own sake or about withdrawal from the world. It’s about the ability to shape our own narratives, to control the boundaries of self-disclosure, and to resist the gaze that seeks to define, discipline, or commodify us. Mariana Ortega and María Lugones deepen this, showing how privacy is essential for negotiating complex, intersectional identities—spaces where the self can inhabit multiple worlds, resisting the flattening gaze of dominant culture.

Internal Space, Spiritual Centering, and Nature

Privacy is also the soil where the internal world grows. Thomas Merton wrote that solitude is not found so much by looking outside the city walls as by stepping inside your own skin. In his monastic tradition, the cell or hermitage is a sacred space—not just for withdrawal, but for encounter. The inner room becomes a sanctuary where the spirit can listen, undisturbed, to the deeper currents of being.

Velma Wallis, in Two Old Women, brings us a story rooted in Athabascan tradition—a tale of two elders abandoned by their tribe who must survive alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Wallis’s narrative is not just about physical survival, but about the power of solitude to reveal strength, wisdom, and the capacity for renewal. In the silence of the snow and under the vast sky, the women discover that being alone in nature is not the same as being isolated. Instead, their solitude becomes a communion: with the land, with their ancestors, and with each other. Wallis’s work reminds us that privacy and internal space are not luxuries, but vital resources—spaces of spiritual centering where we remember that we are at once alone and never alone.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, drawing on both scientific and Indigenous knowledge, describes how the forest teaches us about relationship, reciprocity, and the sacredness of boundaries. Privacy, in this sense, is not a wall but a membrane—permeable, living, always negotiating the dance between self and world. The mosses, the rivers, the wind: in their company, we are reminded that solitude is not the same as loneliness. We are alone, yes, but never truly separate.

In these traditions, privacy is a spiritual practice. It is the cultivation of an inner sanctuary, a place to meet the self and the world in their fullness, without the distortion of constant surveillance or the demand for performance. It is here, in the quiet of the woods or the hush of early morning, that we remember who we are—and that we belong to something larger.

Radical Critique: Privacy as Resistance

Radical thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Frantz Fanon have long understood that privacy can be an act of resistance. In a world that demands constant visibility, to withhold, to refuse, to remain opaque, is to assert one’s agency.

But the demand for transparency is, in practice, a demand for compliance. Lorde’s “erotic as power” isn’t just about sexuality—it’s about cultivating an inner life that isn’t up for sale. bell hooks insists that the private realm is where healing and transformation begin. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera explores the psychic and social borders between public and private selves, and the necessity of private, liminal spaces for identity formation and resistance.

The tradition of private spaces—kitchen tables, barbershops, beauty salons, sweat lodges, and ceremonial grounds—as incubators of resistance and solidarity is echoed in many communities. These are not just places to escape the dominant gaze; they are crucibles of creativity, strategy, and healing. In this sense, privacy is not the opposite of community, but its precondition. Yet, in the dominant culture, these sanctuaries are often pathologized, seen as spaces of secrecy, mistrust, or even subversion.

José-Antonio Orosco and Carlos Alberto Sánchez extend this analysis to the politics of migration, citizenship, and transnational identity. For many, privacy is not only about individual autonomy but about collective survival in the face of surveillance, border enforcement, and the policing of identity.

Indigenous and Community-Based Conceptions of Privacy

To understand privacy’s full scope, we have to look beyond the individual. For many Indigenous communities and other groups with communal traditions, privacy isn’t just a personal right—it’s a collective, land-based practice essential for autonomy and self-determination. Privacy enables communities to protect their cultural heritage, prevent external control, and resist exploitation and surveillance of their lands and identities.

Data sovereignty has emerged as a powerful instrument, reinforcing the right to define identities and stories. The OCAP principles—Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession—assert authority over data related to communities, guiding research and data practices to uphold their rights and agency.

The struggle over data collection and narrative ownership isn’t just about data rights; it’s about privacy and the right to self-determination. As Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias argue, data colonialism extends the logic of settler colonialism into the digital realm, normalizing the appropriation and exploitation of communities through data. In response, data sovereignty and privacy are not only about protection from surveillance, but about the freedom to define, narrate, and defend one’s relationship to land, community, and history.

This collective, land-based sense of privacy is exemplified by legal victories in Ecuador, where the right to privacy and self-determination was asserted against the state’s attempt to commodify and sell ancestral lands. Similarly, struggles against eviction in Tanzania are struggles for the privacy and autonomy of the community, inseparable from their relationship to land and tradition.

Radicalism: Privacy as Survival

For many, privacy is a matter of survival. Surveillance technologies—biometric databases, facial recognition, predictive analytics—are deployed at borders and within immigrant communities, turning privacy into a battleground. Anna Sampaio has analyzed how immigration enforcement erodes the privacy of migrants and refugees, exposing them to new forms of violence and exclusion.

Safiya Umoja Noble, in Algorithms of Oppression, and Ruha Benjamin, in Race After Technology, have demonstrated how digital surveillance disproportionately targets certain communities, reinforcing existing inequalities. Eduardo Mendieta and José-Antonio Orosco have analyzed how surveillance technologies are deployed at borders and within immigrant communities, turning privacy into a matter of life and death.

Philosophers such as Henry Odera Oruka and Miguel van der Velden foreground the relational nature of privacy, autonomy, and knowledge. Privacy is not merely about individual withdrawal but about the protection of practices, rituals, and knowledge that sustain communal life and resistance.

The Communitarian Critique: Privacy and the Commons

Raymond Geuss and Michael Sandel have argued that the liberal conception of privacy is not without its limitations. The communitarian critique warns against an atomistic view of the self, suggesting that privacy must be understood in relation to communal practices and obligations. Privacy is not merely the right to be left alone, but the protection of practices that depend on being sheltered from the view of others.

But the erosion of privacy in the name of “community” is often a bait-and-switch. We’re told that giving up privacy is the price of admission to connection, but what we’re actually getting is a hollowed-out version of community—a thin, algorithm-driven facsimile that leaves most of us lonelier than ever, scrolling for meaning in the endless feed. Real community isn’t built on exposure or forced transparency. It’s built in the spaces where we can risk being vulnerable, where we can trust that not everything we are or think or feel will be turned into content.

Philosophers such as Ortega and Lugones have explored the tension between individuality and community, particularly for those who inhabit multiple, intersecting identities. Privacy is necessary for negotiating the demands of different communities, and for resisting assimilation into any single, dominant narrative.

Privacy in the Digital Age: Surveillance Capitalism and Algorithmic Control

The rise of digital technologies has transformed the landscape of privacy. Data—once scattered and ephemeral—is now aggregated, analyzed, and commodified on an unprecedented scale. The logic of surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff terms it, is predicated on the extraction and monetization of personal information. The result is a world in which preferences, relationships, and even moods are tracked, predicted, and manipulated.

The utilitarian calculus, often invoked by governments and corporations, suggests that the collection of personal data can be justified if it leads to broader benefits—improved security, better healthcare, greater convenience. But this logic is fraught with peril. The harms—identity theft, loss of autonomy, discrimination—are not merely theoretical, but real and pervasive.

Helen Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity, Daniel Solove’s taxonomy of privacy, and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “cluster of rights” all offer ways to conceptualize privacy beyond the simplistic binary of secrecy versus exposure. Privacy is best understood as a family of related concepts, situated in context, and always subject to negotiation and contestation.

Privacy by Design: Building Sanctuary

If privacy is to survive in the digital age, it must be built into the very architecture of our technologies. “Privacy by design” is not just a technical principle, but an ethical imperative. It means embedding privacy protections into the systems, processes, and cultures that shape our lives. This is not a matter of adding privacy as an afterthought, but of making it foundational.

Philosophers and technologists alike have emphasized the importance of privacy as a shield for experimentation, dissent, and healing. Privacy is not the enemy of connection, but its guardian. It is the space in which eccentricities, contradictions, and dreams are cultivated. It is the soil in which dissent takes root, the crucible in which solidarity is forged.

Privacy and Epistemic Justice

Privacy is not only about autonomy and resistance; it is also about epistemic justice—the right to control one’s own narrative and knowledge. José Medina and others have foregrounded the importance of privacy for resisting epistemic violence, the process by which dominant groups define, surveil, and police the knowledge of marginalized communities.

Ortega’s In-Between and Lugones’s work on decolonial feminism both argue that privacy is essential for the flourishing of “multiplicitous” identities—those that cannot be reduced to a single narrative or perspective. Privacy allows for the cultivation of “worlds within worlds,” spaces where new forms of knowledge and solidarity can emerge.

Privacy, Land, and the Collective

For many Indigenous communities and those with communal traditions, the right to privacy is deeply intertwined with the land—not as individual possession, but as a shared, collective heritage. In these worldviews, autonomy and self-determination extend beyond individual rights to encompass collective rights that defend the integrity of the community as a whole. This stands in sharp contrast to dominant Western property regimes, which prioritize individual ownership and often treat land, and by extension privacy, as commodities to be bought, sold, and surveilled.

If this collective ethic were universally held, we would not see the rampant privatization, extraction, and surveillance that define so much of the modern world. Instead, what we witness is an ongoing struggle between those who defend communal, relational approaches to land and privacy, and those who uphold systems rooted in individualism and profit. The tension between these visions is at the heart of many contemporary battles over territory, data, and the right to remain unseen.

Digital tools intended to document territories can increase the ease with which governments, corporations, and other entities track, monitor, and collect information about these communities without their knowledge. Research has shown that land defenders using digital tools are exposed to new invasive surveillance threats, including phone tapping, device hacking, and tracking. In this context, technology meant to protect and empower communities can inadvertently expose them to even greater risks.

This underscores the urgent need for a redefined understanding of privacy and robust privacy safeguards—especially for those whose traditions and survival depend on collective autonomy. Communities must be able to control their privacy and their narratives without fear of exploitation or surveillance. Only through the recognition of these rights can they fully assert their self-determination and protect their land, culture, and heritage from external forces that seek to dominate or control them.

The Vocabulary of Privacy: A Lexicon of Resistance

To speak of privacy is to invoke a lexicon that is at once technical and poetic. Words like “autonomy,” “inviolate personality,” and “sanctuary” are not mere abstractions; they are the building blocks of a life worth living. In an age of ubiquitous oversharing, it is tempting to dismiss privacy as an anachronism, a vestige of a more innocent time. But to do so is to misunderstand its radical potential.

Writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, in their anthology This Bridge Called My Back, have articulated privacy as a space for “theories in the flesh”—a site where lived experience becomes the ground for theory, and where the boundaries between public and private are negotiated and contested. This tradition continues in the work of contemporary philosophers, who argue that privacy is essential for the flourishing of “in-between” identities.

The Future of Privacy: Toward a New Social Contract

The challenge before us is formidable. The forces arrayed against privacy are powerful, relentless, and often invisible. But the stakes could not be higher. Without privacy, there can be no autonomy, no dissent, no genuine community. The right to be left alone is not a luxury, but a necessity.

A new social contract is needed—one that recognizes privacy as both an individual right and a collective good. This means resisting the logic of surveillance capitalism, demanding transparency and accountability from those who collect and use data, and building technologies that prioritize the dignity and autonomy of the individual.

But privacy is always situated, always negotiated, and always contested. It is not a static right, but a dynamic practice—one that must be continually reimagined and defended in the face of new threats and possibilities.

Conclusion: Privacy as Radical Refusal

Privacy in this country is too often cast as a liability, a symptom of mistrust, or a sign of something to hide. But this suspicion is a tool of control—a way to keep us exposed, available, and easy to manage. The more we’re told that privacy is dangerous, the more we’re nudged to perform our lives for others, the more isolated we become.

We’ve been sold the idea that surrendering privacy is the price of community, but what we’re offered is a shallow imitation—a digital commons that rarely delivers real connection. True community grows in the spaces where we can be vulnerable without fear, where not every thought or feeling is up for public consumption.

Solitude, especially in nature, is a reminder that privacy is not abandonment but a return. When we walk alone in the woods, sit by the ocean, or simply close our eyes in the quiet of our own room, we discover a kind of company that escapes surveillance—a communion with what is greater, older, and more enduring than any algorithm. It’s in these moments that we remember: privacy is not the enemy of community; it’s the soil from which meaningful connection grows. In a world that pathologizes privacy, choosing it is not just self-preservation—it’s a revolutionary act.

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