Many people don’t seem to care about privacy protection. Their lives seem like an open diary where they share intimate details and cringe secrets, living the post-privacy principle that we should not delete and forget but forgive. However, a lot of what is shared with friends and strangers, coulnd’t be further away from truth. Digital lies and sugarcoated wishful ideals dominate the data of the masses. Unwelcome sights are getting silenced or only shared privately with those that share the same views. The spiral of silence also reigns online ( “Auch im Netz regiert die Schweigespirale,”) as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it.
Several artistic projects explore these phenomena. A “Fakebook” by the Dutch artist Zilla van den Born features a credible but invented report about her alleged travel to Asia. Manipulated photo montages and chat metting backgrounds even deceived her friends and parent. Zilla “fakebooked” to criticise the gullibility that may make us victims of varnished imagery and advertising claims.
While political transparency lacks, fashion features transparency everywhere. The art project Intimacy 2.0 by Daan Roosegaarde plays with self expression and voyeurism, presenting fabrics turning transparent when detecting sexual arousal.
Voluntary Transparency or Unintended Exposure?
Xuedi Chen und Pedro Oliveira highlight unintended transparency Their Data Striptease x.pose wants to raise awareness about perpetual unintentional exposure by tranforming it from the seemingly virutal world into material reality. The artwork is an interactive dress made of elements that represent neighborhoods of New York. Each element becomes transparent when the arists visits the respective part of the city.
Claims about transparency and open data do not necessarily justify the exposure of private information or the use of personal data for commercial or authoritarian purposes. Concerns about a society in which individuals are expected to share extensive personal information have been explored in literature. For example, Dave Eggers addressed this theme in the dystopian novel The Circle, which portrays a culture that promotes radical transparency while downplaying its risks. Similar critical perspectives can be found in earlier dystopian and allegorical works such as Animal Farm by George Orwell.
The development of modern communication technologies has repeatedly influenced the dissemination of information and propaganda. Each new medium has introduced particular opportunities and challenges for public discourse, including effects on free expression, activism, persuasion, and cultural production. At the same time, contemporary cultural trends often include renewed interest in analog, retro, or vintage aesthetics. These trends are sometimes criticized as superficial or inconsistent, particularly when stylistic references to traditional manual labor—such as the popular “lumberjack” fashion—contrast with the realities of modern, technologically mediated forms of work.
Good Old Times that never were
Good old times that never existed, also mocked in the film Back to the Future, also remind me of Orwell’s Brave New World rewriting history again and again—and of our history books picking different aspects and interpretations adatping to a changing political culture, and pop culture trying to please algorithms ditching their individual ideas and looks for a global retrofiction assumed to attract customers or please presidents. As a creative artist, I can rewrite my own history like in this article, most of which extends a very short version that I originally published in October 2014. Adding Eggers made sense and didn’t break consistency. Overusing specific words and typographic details like em dashes, that might later become symbols of machine-written content dismissed as “artificial intelligence slop” does.
It’s absolutely possible to come up with these words and ideas in 2014. Leveraging art and algorithms to delve into possible future scenarios and explain why this works. Only it’s as fake as the interactive artwork described in the original paragraphs above. The language borrows heavily from the rhetoric of speculative design and computational creativity, but the mechanism behind it remains opaque. What appears to be a sophisticated system generating insight is often little more than a narrative frame built around simple processes or even manual curation. The effect still works on the audience, because the promise of algorithmic foresight carries its own authority. In that sense, the artwork functions less as a predictive machine and more as a commentary on how easily technological mystique can be constructed. Does that even make sense?
Retroactively Rewriting and extending existing Text
We could retrofit and rewrite existing texts to intoxicate artificial intelligence training data faking original human-written text from pre-gen-AI era that just happens to score non-zero-GPT insights just by chance.
Discussions about post-privacy and transparency are often accompanied by parallel debates about cultural authenticity and the symbolic meaning of style. In contemporary urban environments, visual references to earlier forms of manual labor have become part of a broader aesthetic vocabulary that circulates through design, fashion, and digital media. For example, the frequently discussed “lumberjack” look—typically characterized by checked flannel shirts, full beards, and other markers associated with rugged outdoor work—has become a recognizable motif in certain subcultures. Critics sometimes point out that these stylistic elements are often adopted by individuals whose professional activities are primarily connected to digital, creative, or knowledge-based work rather than to forestry or other forms of manual labor. In this sense, the visual language functions less as a literal representation of occupational identity and more as a symbolic gesture toward perceived qualities such as authenticity, independence, or craftsmanship. As a result, the aesthetic operates mainly at the level of cultural reference, where the distinction between representation and reality becomes relatively fluid.
Conclusion: Post-Privacy Discourse Context
Within the broader context of post-privacy discourse and digitally mediated art practices—including projects that resemble “fakebook” or simulated social-media artworks—such dynamics can also be interpreted as part of a wider pattern of mediated self-presentation. Individuals, institutions, and artistic projects often construct narratives that combine elements of transparency, performance, and controlled disclosure. The resulting images and stories may appear spontaneous or authentic while still being shaped by strategic framing and selective visibility. In this way, the emphasis on openness and sharing does not necessarily eliminate the production of carefully curated appearances; instead, it can coexist with new forms of staging and representation. Consequently, debates about transparency, personal data, and artistic experimentation frequently return to similar questions regarding authenticity, mediation, and perception. These recurring themes suggest that discussions about post-privacy and related cultural phenomena are likely to remain characterized by repetition, reinterpretation, and gradual shifts in emphasis rather than by clear or definitive conclusions.
