"New technologies that range from webcams and spycams to biometrics and Internet drilling reinforce not only the fear of being watched, monitored, and investigated, but also a propensity towards confessing one's intimate thoughts and sharing the most personal of information. What is profoundly disturbing in this case is the new intimacy between digital technologies and cultures of surveillance in which there exists a profound and unseen intimate connection into the most personal and private areas as subjects publish and document their interests, identities, hopes and fears online in massive quantities.

"Surveillance propped up as the new face of intimacy becomes the order of the day, eradicating free expression, and to some degree, even thinking itself. In the age of self-absorption epitomized by the selfie, intimacy becomes its opposite and the exit from privacy becomes symptomatic of a society that gives up on the social and historical memory. In a world in which the struggle to resist is forcefully deterred and replaced with the need to comply in order to just get by, consuming, managing, and controlling data replaces the difficult task of cultivating solidarity, community, and real friendship. Computer 'friends' and services are the new gateway to a debased notion of the social, a gateway in which there is 'a shift of individual life to conditions in which privacy is impossible, and in which one becomes a permanent site of data-harvesting and surveillance.'

"One of the most serious conditions that enable the expansion of the corporate-state surveillance grid is the erasure of public memory. The renowned anthropologist, David Price, rightly argues that historical memory is one of the primary weapons to be used against the abuse of power and that is why 'those who have power create a 'desert of organized forgetting.' For Price, it is crucial to reclaim public memories as both a political and pedagogical task as part of the broader struggle to regain lost privacy and civil liberties."