How American privacy died The internet is just a scapegoat

In 2001, as Lance Loud lay dying in a hospice bed, he made one final request: turn the cameras back on. The same filmmakers that had made his family infamous in 1973 were summoned, once more, to capture his final days. Even at the end, Lance couldn’t resist the spotlight that had exposed and defined the Louds for nearly three decades.

It was a fitting finale for America’s first reality TV family, and a preview of our current predicament. Long before Facebook collected our data or TikTok monetised our confessions, the Louds were at the vanguard of an industry that would ultimately spawn Big Brother, the Kardashians, and a whole raft of reality TV shows obsessed with domestic spectacle.

But, more importantly, the Louds revealed a cultural transformation already underway — one where we, the public, would willingly and enthusiastically invade our own privacy, turning intimate life into public performance.

On 11 January 1973, millions of viewers gathered at 9pm: to witness a household unravelling in real time. That evening, PBS began broadcasting An American Family, a 12-hour documentary series with a difference.

The Loud family seemed ideal subjects for the experiment. William C. Loud, 51, and his wife Pat, 47, lived with their five children on a mountain drive in Santa Barbara, California. Their lifestyle embodied the American Dream that family sitcoms like The Brady Bunch had idealised: affluent, attractive, seemingly stable. Producer Craig Gilbert had chosen them from hundreds of volunteers precisely because they appeared to represent the ideal.

But Gilbert’s revolutionary vision was to disrupt the model. An American Family would get beneath the veneer and offer “a real view of middle-class life”. Unlike traditional documentaries, with scripts and a presenter controlling the story, the cameras would simply roll and capture whatever happened.

Gilbert’s 300 hours of raw footage, filmed over seven months, revealed the dirty laundry behind the facade. In one episode, Pat demanded her philandering husband leave; they went on to divorce. Their eldest son Lance, 20, was living a hedonistic lifestyle in New York’s Chelsea district, becoming the first openly gay person portrayed in a family context on American television.

The media responded swiftly and brutally. Newsweek‘s cover featured a group shot of the family with the strap line “Broken Family”. Inside, the magazine branded them “affluent zombies” whose “shopping carts overflow, but their minds are empty.” The New York Times dissected each member with surgical precision. It called Lance an “evil flower”, “camping and queening about like a pathetic court jester,” and described him as “a Goyaesque emotional dwarf.” It condemned Delilah, just 16, for never grieving “for the migrant workers, the lettuce pickers, the war dead,” and for lacking an interest in “philosophy or poetry” or any “adolescent idealism.”

The Louds had unwittingly become harbingers of a far broader social transformation. Private life — that bourgeois creation of separate spheres, domestic sanctity, and clear boundaries between public and personal — had taken centuries to establish. The idea of privacy as “the right to be let alone” was 100 years old, immortalised in a famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article. Yet by the Seventies, this carefully constructed edifice was crumbling. The collapse of the public-private divide that would later characterise our digital age had already begun, before Mark Zuckerberg was even born.

Instead of retreating from the limelight that had so wounded them, the Louds embraced it entirely. They were among the first to become famous simply for being themselves, and the experience changed them forever. Pat Loud wrote an autobiography, prefiguring the “warts and all” memoir boom of the Nineties; Bill modelled in his bathrobe for Esquire. Delilah appeared as a “bachelorette” on The Dating Game, and all five children performed as a rock band on The Dick Cavett Show. Lance posed naked for Screw magazine.

“Television ate my family”, Lance proclaimed in the aftermath, and certainly the cameras never really turned off. When he was dying from an AIDS-related disease, filmmakers Susan and Alan Raymond dropped everything to capture his last two months in Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family. Lance wanted to be filmed one last time to show the bonds of affection that survived in his family. His dying wish was to prove to the American people that the Louds were not broken.

Pat Loud always stood by the family’s decision to take part. She pushed for greater openness in everyday life: the therapeutic mantra of the moment. “We opened the doors in a lot of houses and blew out a lot of dust,” she said. “If families are going to make it, that’s how. Not with secrets, or little slots to fit into, or a lot of propaganda from parents.”

She was articulating what had become the dominant cultural orthodoxy: that secrecy was pathological, that privacy enabled dysfunction, and that psychological health demanded full disclosure. Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man, published the same year the documentary aired, satirised the spirit of the age. Its antihero, Howard Kirk, a radical sociology lecturer, sits with his lover Myra and his wife Barbara, with whom he has an open marriage. “It is called The Defeat of Privacy,” Kirk tells them of his new book. “It’s about the fact that there are no more private selves, no more private corners in society, no more private properties, no more private acts.”

These ideas went back decades. In 1950, sociologist David Riesman had prophetically announced from the pages of Time magazine that the “character” of Americans was fundamentally changing, a thesis that dominated cocktail party conversations throughout the decade.

In his bestselling follow up The Lonely Crowd, Riesman revealed how foundational sources of meaning were crumbling. Traditional authorities — church, family, and established social hierarchies — were giving way to mass education and the emerging media landscape of radio and television. Simultaneously, the economy was shifting from agriculture and industry toward services and sales, demanding fewer risk-taking entrepreneurs and more grey-suited conformists who could work and play well with others.

Riesman predicted that these forces were creating a move from “inner-directed” to “other-directed” personalities. Rather than drawing guidance from traditional authorities or cultivating rich inner lives, Americans were developing a social radar, constantly attuned to peer expectations and seeking approval from those around them. As Riesman observed: “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed.”

Riesman, then, had anticipated the “narcissistic” self, immortalised in Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, one that would become increasingly comfortable with the self-invasion of privacy and indeed actively require it: all in search of an approving audience. The ancient maxim “know yourself” became “recognise me.”

Riesman’s study was also formative for the American sociologist Todd Gitlin, one-time leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Teaching his Berkeley students in the Eighties, who themselves were surrounded by confessional talk-show hosts like Phil Donahue and Oprah, Gitlin found that his students struggled to understand the distinction between private and public lives. The idea of being inwardly focused made no intuitive sense to them. These students had been born into a world that was fundamentally other-directed at every level.

But Gitlin himself had helped create this world. Throughout the Sixties, the SDS, which grew from 30,000 recorded supporters to an estimated 100,000 members across over 300 chapters, played a crucial part in the turn towards the narcissistic self: by politicising authenticity. SDS became a core component of the counterculture movements that dominated student activism, helping to reshape how an entire generation understood the relationship between personal experience and political action.

“The time has come for a reassertion of the personal,” announced Tom Hayden in the infamous “Port Huron Statement” of 1962, the SDS’s founding manifesto. Students once believed in American values, it said, but that belief was now shattered, and they were looking “uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” The new goal would be finding meaning in a life that is “personally authentic”, an agenda that marked a highly individualistic turn for a Left politics with roots in class solidarity.

Indeed, the New Left turned away from class struggle and drew on existentialist currents to advocate for politics rooted in individual experience and personal growth. As Gitlin recalled in his memoir, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, the decade was fuelled by a passion to “bring political commitment into private life, and make private values count in public.” The aim was to overcome the “treacherous” liberal schism between public postures and private evasions. This shift was influenced by popularised psychoanalytic theories of unconscious repression, developed by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the century. Later interpretations of his work, particularly by the German-born social critic Herbert Marcuse, recast psychoanalysis as a manual for liberation.

But it was a particular strain of feminists who put the boot into private life far more forcefully than any tech giant ever could. Organisations like New York Radical Women and Radical Mothers rejected the feminism of Betty Friedan. Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) had awakened millions of women to “the problem that has no name” — the stifling boredom and unfulfillment of suburban domesticity — and launched the modern women’s movement. But while Friedan sought equality through legislation and workplace reform, believing women could balance careers with traditional roles like marriage and motherhood, radical feminists wanted to change things from the inside out.

An early rule of the New York Radical Women was that members couldn’t generalise about oppression unless they first shared testimony from their own lives; political positions had to be forged in personal experience. Gatherings often began by going around the room listening to women’s day-to-day problems. These “consciousness-raising groups” spread like wildfire. In 1973, at their peak, 100,000 American women belonged to them. Their aim was to analyse society from personal experience. “Feelings are Facts” rallied one woman at a so-called abortion “speakout” in New York.

This thinking crystallised in Carol Hanisch’s influential 1970 essay “The Personal is Political”, a phrase that would shape how entire generations understood the boundary between public and private life. For centuries, the liberal tradition had maintained a clear distinction: public life was the realm of politics, economics, and civic engagement, while private life remained a sanctuary, free from public interference. But “the personal is political” obliterated this distinction.

Kate Millett, also immortalised in 1970 as Time’s “Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation”, turned her fire on the private domain. Women’s oppression couldn’t be addressed solely through public changes, she argued; it stemmed from private relations and even the language that culture reinforced. The struggle had to move away from the narrow world of chairmen and parties and expand to include “power-structured” relationships.

In the end, Millett was rejected by the movement she helped found, as it collapsed into factionalism. Yet the die had been cast: and indeed the social trends embodied in Louds have only grown in speed and scale over the intervening decades. From the late Nineties, for instance, The Real World and Survivor, later mirrored by Naked Attraction and Love Island, have dominated TV screens and then our laptops. Intimate confession and recognition of the “true” self is now a mainstay of contemporary discourse. Being “false”, or worse a hypocrite, is a deadly modern sin. Social media platforms would later accelerate and monetise these trends, of course, but they surely didn’t invent them.

All the while, our public life has incorporated things that were once reserved for the private sphere — crying, confessing to crimes, follies, and misdemeanours — while the civil discourse of politics and formal manners have fallen away. Think of Queen Elizabeth II being criticised for her lack of emotion when Princess Diana died, or Meghan and Harry broadcasting their private woes to the world. Even substantive policy debates about literally life-and-death matters like assisted suicide or abortion have become entirely about feelings: caring, being kind, or expressing anger. Personal experience trumps evidence. Cool reasoning has no place.

For their part, the private lives of public figures are scrutinised 24 hours a day. The public person, whether an artist, professional, or politician, cannot be separated from the private, and the private is deemed what truly matters. This shift extends to political combat itself. The current modus operandi, from the exposure of Trump’s locker room bragging to the recent Labour casualty Paul Ovenden, who lost his job when someone leaked old WhatsApp messages, sees the exposure of private conversations as a weapon to take down political opponents.

Today, there is little distinction between the public and private world. Intimacy floods the public realm while light shines on the private. Instead, we have embraced a narrow, impoverished conception of privacy, always a protean concept, not as protection from authority and public scrutiny, and as a sanctuary for the inner self and a shelter for intimacy — but merely as data protection.

Through it all, we blame the convenient scapegoat of the moment: the internet. But this gets the timeline wrong. By the time social media arrived, we were already living in a post-private world. The digital revolution simply gave us more efficient tools to do what we were already doing: performing our identities, seeking validation through revelation, and treating intimacy as a public commodity.

This matters, because if we misdiagnose the problem, we’ll never find the cure. All the digital detoxing and platform regulation in the world won’t restore what was lost long before the internet was ever invented. Far better, then, to face up to how we voluntarily dismantled the very idea that some things should remain hidden, that mystery and restraint might be virtues, and that not everything must be shared.

The business models of technology giants like Google and Facebook clearly violate people’s privacy, as does state surveillance. But we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that technology alone has undermined the moral status of privacy and private life. The cameras that Lance Loud invited into his hospice room were not smartphones or CCTV cameras. They were the logical endpoint of a cultural revolution that began decades earlier. And we let them in ourselves.

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