[Reflection] #32: Privacy Becomes a Luxury Good
Covid is further accelerating the isolation of the ultra-wealthy. Here is the translation of a text I found on Instagram and found very interesting:
It echoes the evolution of the luxury consumer I shared with you last time.
The richer you are, the more you can say goodbye to shared infrastructure, shared spaces, shared risks, and shared reality.
Today, isolation has become a luxury good: a continuum running down the social ladder, each level buying a little more separation from common spaces.
At the very top, there is geographic escape in the literal sense. Private islands, estates in New Zealand (now the preferred apocalyptic refuge of tech billionaires), etc. The appeal lies in total control: private security, no uninvited visitors, no public access, no encounters with anyone who isn’t an employee or a peer.
Then comes the second level: privatized neighborhoods and vertical isolation. Gated communities have existed for decades, but recent versions are more… comprehensive. Think of those ultra-luxury buildings where private elevators lead directly to your apartment. Or the rise of “porte-cochère” architectures, designed so you can enter your home by car without ever being seen from the street.
Third level: privatized services and parallel infrastructure. Concierge medicine means never waiting in a waiting room. Private aviation means bypassing security checks and airport crowds. Private clubs, and so on. Private schools follow the same logic: it’s not just about educational quality, but about controlling the social environment.
Lower down is the subscriptionlayer, a soft form of exit. This is where it intersects with daily life. Grocery delivery allows you to avoid sharing a supermarket. White-collar remote work means no longer taking public transit. The pandemic accelerated this movement dramatically, and much of it has become permanent.
What ties all these levels together is that wealth buys the freedom to not be seen, tracked, reached, or touched by people or systems beyond your control.
For the ultra-wealthy, this translates into:
- Physical privacy: walls, moats, security personnel.
- Data privacy: they don’t use mainstream apps; they have family offices and assistants who filter information.
- Attention privacy: they don’t have to expose their lives publicly to ensure their economic survival.
- Legal privacy: trusts, shell companies, offshore structures that blur lines of ownership.
- Temporal privacy: not queueing, not being stuck in traffic jams, not depending on others’ schedules.
For everyone else, the erosion of privacy is the price of entry into social life. You use the “free” app because you can’t afford to do without it. You accept the job that comes with workplace surveillance software. You live in a home where the heating is controlled remotely by your landlord.
What does this imply, though, on a structural level?
- The wealthiest have less and less interest in public systems working well. If you never take public transit, don’t use public parks, schools, or health systems, you have little reason to want to fund or improve them.
- A feedback loop is being set up with the loneliness economy. The more wealthy people desert shared spaces, the more these places deteriorate or become covered in surveillance devices, which pushes even more people toward private solutions when they can afford them, which further damages the commons.
- Privacy becomes a positional good. What is purchased is not just confidentiality itself, but confidentiality relative to others. The value of your gated community lies in the fact that others don’t have access to it.
- This reshapes the political economy. Those living in these parallel structures are often insulated from the consequences of public decisions that affect the rest of the population.
The question for 2026: how much would you be willing to pay for true privacy? So that your movements aren’t tracked, your conversations dissected, your purchases profiled, your face recognized? And what does it mean that most of us can’t afford it, while those who designed these surveillance systems, who profit from our data, have built vast fortresses to protect their own privacy?
