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Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of privacy as an object of technological intervention in Silicon Valley. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork carried out in 2016-2017, the dissertation revolves broadly around the privacy and security engineering team of Mozilla, developer of the Firefox web browser. It shows how, following Edward Snowden’s 2013-2014 revelations of government mass surveillance, American engineers and computer scientists asserted themselves, by virtue of expertise, ethical commitment, and global reach, as the social actors best positioned to steward privacy through the turbulent present. Through the perspectives of software engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers, it analyzes what it means for American understandings of privacy for engineers to join lawyers as agents of its future. The dissertation argues that technological stewardship is transforming privacy’s logic, form, and sensibilities according to the value systems and historical projects of Silicon Valley-style software development, speculative venture capital, and the national security state. Privacy, in consequence, is “going private.” Rather than claiming privacy as rights-bearing legal subjects, Americans increasingly “experience” it as technology users on functional and aesthetic terms determined by private corporations. In the name of individual will, tech companies offer privacy to users as choices and configurable options, thus imposing it as a continuous responsibility of individual self-management. Finally, having bound privacy’s fate to the usability and market appeal of consumer technologies, tech companies are recoding it in the language of human preference, cognition, and perception. In these ways, technological stewardship enrolls privacy in the processes by which corporations “mobilize” consumers, addressing them as embodied members of a sensuous social order to intervene in and direct their consumptive habits. As the practically-available forms of privacy become valorized, like networked technologies and users themselves, for ‘performing’ smoothly and rapidly, privacy’s sensuous presence is being calibrated against the capitalist demand for productivity and the capitalist fantasy of ceaseless, frictionless exchange.

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