Life & Wisdom Quote by Larry Niven

Niven’s line lands like a shrug that doubles as an indictment: not “privacy is dead,” but “privacy was a passing fad,” as if the very notion were a brief style craze, like hats or courtesy. The wit is in the tense. “Was” quietly relocates privacy to the museum, and “passing” implies the disappearance isn’t a tragedy so much as a predictable swing of culture and technology. He’s not just forecasting surveillance; he’s mocking our belief that privacy was ever a stable baseline.

The subtext is technological Darwinism. In science fiction, the future isn’t built by ideals, it’s built by incentives: convenience beats principle, connection beats discretion, and institutions reliably exploit whatever data people casually shed. By framing privacy as a fad, Niven suggests it flourished only under particular material conditions: smaller networks, slower information, fewer sensors, fewer intermediaries. Once communication becomes cheap, storage becomes infinite, and sharing becomes frictionless, secrecy stops being the default and becomes a luxury good.

There’s also a sly reversal of nostalgia. We tend to treat privacy as a moral right being stolen; Niven treats it as a temporary social arrangement we mistook for nature. That cynicism does real work: it forces the reader to confront how willingly privacy is traded away, not just how aggressively it’s taken. The line anticipates a world where being watched isn’t a scandal, it’s infrastructure - and where the truly radical act is not demanding privacy back, but redesigning systems so exposure isn’t automatically weaponized.