What is privacy? Niffari–a strange Sufi mystic–offers us a unique way to consider this question. Let’s try and reproduce what he is saying step-by-step for a modern audience.

This piece was co-composted with Octopusyarn

Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) addresses our right to privacy, stating that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home, or correspondence, nor to attacks upon their honor and reputation. Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) mirrors this, emphasizing the prohibition of unlawful or arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, and correspondence.

Clearly, “arbitrary interference” is the issue. We might expect that privacy is how we protect against said interference, but in both statements, privacy is some thing alongside family, home, correspondence, honor and reputation. What is this thing which we have the right to protect from interference in the same way we might protect home, family, honor?

The Cypherpunk Manifesto states that, “Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.” Here, privacy is not a noun like family, but a power. The manifesto goes on to explore the tension between privacy and free speech–both of which it posits as “fundamental to an open society”–and so advocates “that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction”.

It’s fascinating to consider why privacy might be fundamental to an open society, especially when it is considered as a power to select how, what, and when you disclose something.

So, our guiding questions as we explore Niffari’s poem and its relation to privacy are:

Our enquiry begins where free speech and privacy meet: communication itself. This is because as soon as something is communicated, it is interfered with. It enters into a symbolic exchange which makes it something other than what it already is. In this sense, privacy is like an asymptote we can never reach once we have the desire to communicate anything.

The emphasis in the UDHR and the ICCPR is on the word “arbitrary”, just as the Cypherpunk Manifesto highlights that only information directly relevant to a given transaction needs to be disclosed. This helps us clarify things somewhat, because we can see that free speech has more to do with what information we select, while privacy has more to do with the context in which any information is revealed. You should inform your doctor about your hemorrhoids and your priest about your devious thoughts, but not vice versa, nor do such things apply to wider, public contexts.

In his Mathematical Theory of Communication Claude Shannon wrote that, “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.” We might say that privacy is not about message selection, but about how the points themselves are selected.

This is practical, in the sense that we need agreed upon protocols enacted at both points–like patient-doctor confidentiality, or the rules of confession, or the various types of key exchange necessary for encryption–for those points to become (and remain) valid selections. It is also philosophical, in that we must develop ways to discern in which contexts revealed information might create knowledge that leads to Reality: i.e. in which contexts a message selected (and therefore already interfered with) elsewhere might be reproduced here such that the state that message represents might be accurately perceived.

The most surprising thing that I have discovered in more than a decade thinking about privacy and trying to implement it in different ways is that being truly honest–about anything–requires revealing so much information that it naturally obscures the real value and meaning of that communication from anyone not available to truly receive.

Cast in Shannon’s terms: you must keep the channel open for so long and process so much information that it is simply too costly for most people. It requires significant, sustained motivation, which itself offers a kind of privacy premised not on obscurity, but on work.

Establishing private channels generally requires work to be enacted at both points. At the transmitter, it is the work required to be honest (even if that is just about how you create a key). At the receiver, it is the work required to receive with care. We must exchange the keys and encrypt the messages, or visit the doctor and describe our symptoms fully, or open the confessional window and ask for forgiveness.

In all such acts–indeed, in all communication–you are trusting another with the discovery of your authentic self, because authenticity emerges from the process of selective disclosure, not prior to it. Our reality is private–even from ourselves–until seen through the mirror of one another. The specific protocols (legal, technical, both, or other) by which you encrypt this simple fact are fascinating, but matter less than the fact itself: Reality (however you interpret that word) is a private matter.

This is not to trivialise such protocols, nor downplay the urgent need for them to protect against the dangers we face in our slice of space and time: tyranny, oppression, total surveillance states, narcissistic media perfectly formulated to sell into our particular habits and desires.

The question I am posing here is: “How can we act to preserve privacy?” Is it through a techno-legal arms race in which we develop alternatives to nation states premised on violence, and incorporeal companies premised on maximising shareholder value? Or is it through cultivating a culture which values the sincere openness Niffari is pointing at?

Of course, we need to be doing both. The point of this piece is to remind you that the cultural work is equally important and often overlooked. This is because it is not about a specific privacy-preserving protocol, but how to get at the root of privacy itself: how to perceive that which we keep private even from ourselves. Niffari’s great gift to us is exactly one such way of doing this: sincerity.

Sincerity is a theatrical term: it assumes an audience, before whom one plays a role so completely that they can only suspend disbelief for the duration of the performance. Can I perform my communication not for the sake of another, but for its own joy (without forgetting that there is always an audience); and can you interpret my communication so that the inevitable interference is constructive rather than destructive¹?

If so, then what is exchanged between the participants is private in a different and deeper sense, one which perhaps even touches the asymptote, because neither can name nor readily conceptualise it. It is not so much communicated as it is uncovered in each party without ever moving between the two at all.

Niffari tells us that such sincere exchange is, “That through which you disclose yourself.” There’s nothing to say about Reality, though, precisely because it cannot be communicated.

However, we can speak of knowledge about Reality, which is what Niffari calls “the hidden letter”. What is this hidden letter? My proposition is that it is “I”. I am both the letter which hides the truth, as well as that hidden truth itself.

If I know who it is that is really communicating, and with whom it is being shared, then the very natural result is trust that–even if what is communicated is interfered with by another–it is so specific to its context that it cannot be understood without the equivalent work done to uncover this hidden, hiding “I” who communicates. It is about the points from which it emanates and where it is received, more than it is about the specific content transmitted.

That said, openness does not necessarily mean communicating in the clear, or not acting to guard shared content in the same way as you would family, home, and honor. It just runs deeper: to an abiding availability to receive, coupled with an ability to transmit your natural state with as little self-interference as possible.

Total honesty–true sincerity–pushes us right to the edge of the practical problems associated with communication in space and time, and beyond. “Towards your countenance!” is the living recognition that every being you communicate with is an aspect of one, undivided Reality. It is always–at all times and in all places, across all times and all places–just you talking to your Self.

When these are the terms of your communication, then openness and privacy intersect. What you say is so surprising–it contains so much information–that no-one but those equally open to experiencing the wholeness of this singular life can interpret it meaningfully.

Now, self-disclosure is really possible, because you know that what you will encounter in the hearts of your friends–regardless of the particular message passed in that moment–is nothing other than your Self. Again, it is this most private realization which binds us all together.

The shape of the poem is worth reflecting on at this point. It presents as a dialogue between two, yet moves into a sincere, singular, introspective discovery: a disclosure only You can make. Once the sincere act moves you toward your Real Face, asking again what this deeply private self-disclosure is returns one, finally, to the heart of friends.

The cultural work is, following this same pattern, deeply individual and introspective and has to do with uncovering your own most private truth: this hidden, hiding I who is knowledge about Reality. The techno-legal work is collective and is about protecting the hearts of our friends, in the same way we would protect family, home, and honor, just bolstered by the realization that such sincere action is the same as protecting our own, newly uncovered heart.

Can we discern different kinds of receivers fully, as well as be cognisant of the media by which we communicate, while also remembering that irrespective of such choice (which determines the practical privacy of shared content), whom we are communicating with is always Thou? If this is the culture within which all privacy-preserving protocols are built and used, then self-disclosure “at scale” is the natural result.

Can we cultivate the sincerity which extends beyond the time and space of a single life; which can withstand the scrutiny of all generations? Can we communicate from this place, trusting that the results can only be revealed in those who do the same? To those who, in following the same, simple protocol–be honest, always–select themselves as points for this greater Self revelation to home in and radiate from.

If I admit, honestly, that I have no idea
what to hide and what to reveal…

Then I arrive here: transparent,
not in the sense of showing off,
but more subtly, responding in full
to all that each moment asks.

Now, what is made obvious
is not obvious
to anyone who does not care to make
a full investigation.

This is the great trick:
I am honour bound, silenced
by words which obscure
what I have no right to:

just another wayfarer
who has finally stopped hiding
and stepped into the revelation
of all I can never know.