Twenty-first International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Contracts disrupt solitude, self-isolation, and folks’ right to be left alone. I have watched peers run from the realm of privacy–a space where people make and implemented life plans–to a realm where there is none. This paper takes a stab at answering the question “why” and, in so doing, reclaiming bits of what we’ve lost. Nowadays, people (too many of them) look like empty vessels; beautiful to look at but monstrous down deep. Some gaze down upon the world with a jaundice eye, and treat civil society’s residents with contempt. They are property for hire–props at times, tools, and actors–capable of doing awful things. Ayn Rand wrote about such characters in a book entitled, “Fountainhead.” What she saw then is no less true today. Our world is in flux, drifting from a Cartesian way of doing things to a digital world view. And the folks, previously mentioned, have migrated to this new world and established camps (e.g., Facebook, Google, Apple, Hauwei, Disney, and Universal Entertainment). These entities, and those who run them, have undermined a person’s sense of self, self determination, and privacy. This paper reviews what we’ve done to corral them (the Illinois, California, and Canadian Privacy Acts), and highlights what can be done to hackers with the National Stolen Properties Act, Economic Espionage Act, and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act. Though the paper changes nothing in the physical world, it adds to the font of knowledge about how to cope with problems in the cyber age