"I see you I see you, hiding behind the chair." That was actually the name of a play I wrote long ago. It ended up being titled I SEE YOU. It was picked up by CBC for radio broadcast when they were scouting Stratford for some plays in development in an early workshop. This is not about that. This is about the last item on that doomsday list of things that are going to disappear completely in our lifetime. Most of them are already on their way out. This one is a big one: privacy. I just had my credit card compromised and took steps immediately, of course. It's a nuisance, though. I have to go to the bank today to get my new card and then I have to contact everyone I can think of who is using my old card. You see, as fast as we lose our privacy, we beg to have our identity re-instated so we can go on functioning. That's why I thought of "I see you". There's safety in being "out there." When i first started writing email I decided that every old person, every old person who lives alone, should have a computer and write email every day. It's the modern equivalent of Mrs. McGillicuddy's green blind - you know, in the English village where everyone knows everyone and if Mrs. M. doesn't raise her blind in the morning, they know something is wrong and go to see how she is. We live today, as Marshall McLuhan predicted, in a global village, and email is our green blind. Of course, now there are more sophisticated methods of keeping track of us. I woke this morning out of a thriller REM in which I was being tracked to Ulan Bator. I can spell it but I have to look it up to see where it is. But the tracking device that had been installed in me knew where I was before I knew myself. Eerie. And that's what they're worried about, whoever they are. I wish we had the French pronoun "on". Sorry, I don't know how to write italics online. It's very stiff in English to say "one". One wishes one could. I'm still thinking about privacy, and it's tricky. On the one hand, we want to be protected and secure, on the other hand, we want to be alone, I looked up some synonyms in the computer dictionary. Try these: seclusion, solitude, isolation, freedom from disturbance, freedom from interference. We all pay a lot, if we can afford it, for seclusion. Seclusion sounds high-class and it's pricey. But very few people really enjoy solitude; it's the worst punishment for prisoners, being horribly over-used now. Isolation from one's fellow humans is hard, even when voluntary. But freedom from disturbance, that's desirable and sought after. And freedom from interference, that's what gets your back up, and that, so they say, is what is disappearing, and you resent it. You don't want anyone to see what's going on behind the chair. There's more to this than meets the eye. Anon, anon.