What happens when everything becomes public – our thoughts, our feelings, even our intimacy?

In this sweeping and brilliant talk, we trace the collapse of the boundary between public and private life, showing how an idea once central to Western freedom – the right to a private self – has quietly disintegrated. From 17th-century sermons warning against “doing in private what you’d fear in public,” through the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the novel, to the cultural revolution of the 1970s and the surveillance anxieties of today, this is the story of how privacy was born, deformed, and finally dissolved.