Trapwire, NEC networks, smartphones as tracking devices, drones, wiretapping, spycams…our Cowardly New World seems to know no boundaries where privacy is concerned. This morning, my students and I were discussing spying as a motif in Hamlet, and extended the conversation to make more connections as it became apparent that the students attributed no negative connotation to the word “spying.” None of them found Polonius’s hiring a spy to watch his son at college, or indeed any of the other intrusive spy scenarios, at all disconcerting.

 The gist of their remarks can be boiled down to one shocking question that they asked: “If you have nothing to hide, why does privacy matter?” It was at this point that I wanted to tear out my hair, to shrink into the floor, or to take an abrupt flight out the window. These are teenagers who check into social networks at every opportunity, skype and facetime with great abandon, tweet and vine like a camp of chattering bonobos, and devour, digest, and forget more information in a day than teens of my generation accessed in a year. They also make willing, gullible marks for invasive advertising, easy armies for propaganda makers, and unhealthy, reliable consumers of garbage. The proud public displays of nearly all bodily functions by today’s youth borders on barbaric. Having grown up with the government as nanny and provider, many teens have been brainwashed into believing that Big Brother knows what is best for them, and as long as they are well fed and jacked into wi-fi, they see no reason to be skeptical of the motives of those who crunch all of that data and produce the pablum that fills their brains. Having seen no true abuse of power close at hand, and sheltered from real information in the blizzard of sound bytes and 6-second vids, the generation that will lead what is left of the United States into the middle 21st century might not know Eric Snowden, but will be able to describe Tosh.0’s latest video breakdown in great detail. They don’t know how to weigh the value of the information at hand, detect biases, or question the motives behind the message. Their academic vocabulary has declined over the past decade so much that scholarly works are simply inaccessible to the vast majority. The new soma, an amalgam of reality TV, video games, Ritalin and social media, keep today’s youth vacuously content and undemanding. Why would anyone use their consumer habits, movements, and purchasing records against them? Maybe mandatory mall shopping should replace English classes.