Mass privacy is the freedom to act without being watched and thus, in a sense, to be who we really are — not who we want others to think we are.

“Wu continues the thought: “At stake, then, in the allocation of one’s attention is something akin to how one’s life is lived.” Wu draws a bright circle around practices and promises of the attention merchants, and the bargains that have been struck, asking as baldly as perhaps has ever been asked, “Is this worth it?”” “It seems as though every other day a new article on unplugging or screen-fasts or the risks of hyperconnectivity goes viral, preaching (ironically) against the very platform that delivers it to those valuable eyeballs.”

“But there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our ‘hobbies,’ if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.”