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impossible,” and advocates for a “navigation of these two states which amounts to ‘discretion,’ which is nothing other than the sense of justice with respect to the sphere of the intimate contents of life.”6 Here discretion, knowing what should be hidden and what should be open, has significant resonance with Stiegler’s notion of maturity. In the case of maturity with regards to nescience, the minoritized adult will have a drive to know everything, to consume knowledge without care for what should be left unknown, a condition that has plagued Western culture, mostly fragrantly in the sciences. The minoritized, or immature, person tends to consider the issue of secrecy as a kind of economic problem. That is to say, they believe the problem is not the existence of secrets, but rather that there is an inequality of it. There is an overaccumulation of secrets. One must wait for great secrecy crashes (data dumps of leaked material) which rob the larders of the secrecy barons and level the playing field. This is anti-nescience at work and this attitude is all too familiar in the world of digital social networks. In Dave Egger’s The Circle, the titular anti-anonymity tech giant seeks to cure the ills of the world through a state of total transparency. The company has consolidated its online power through TruYou, a unifying internet identity system that single-handedly civilized the internet through personal accountability. They then encourage the installation of better-than-HD micro cameras all around the world and broadcast the video feeds to any soul who’d care to take a look, a system surpassed in invasiveness only by the next project: a Google Glass type, near-twenty-four-hour personal video necklace that quickly becomes de rigueur among elected officials. The company, prone to sloganizing even the blandest of corporate platitudes, epitomizes this trajectory during an allstaff meeting by projecting the words:7 SECRETS ARE LIES SHARING IS CARING PRIVACY IS THEFT
If these mantras have a totalitarian communist flavor to you, you’re not the only one. The attitude expressed in them is adroitly summarized as ‘infocommunism’ later in the book. But let us leave the economic model of secrecy for a moment to focus on that second tenet because of its apparent relevance outside of Eggers’s not-too-distant-future, dystopic tale. Sharing is a concept vital to our particular moment. Every trip through the web elicits countless admonitions to share what we’re doing, where we did it, and with whom. Jenny Kennedy remarks Simmel, Georg. 1906. “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” American Journal of Sociology. 11 (4): 441-498 6
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Eggers, Dave. 2013. The circle: a novel. San Francisco: McSweeney's.