Life & Wisdom Quote by David Brin

Brin’s line lands like a neat little moral boomerang: the loudest champions of “my privacy” are often the same people who want a floodlight trained on everyone else. It works because it refuses the comforting fiction that privacy debates are primarily about principles. They’re about position. Who’s exposed, who’s protected, and who gets to decide.

The intent is less to scold hypocrisy than to map a reliable human pattern: we treat privacy as a personal entitlement and accountability as a social weapon. That asymmetry explains why public arguments about surveillance, data collection, policing, and journalism feel permanently rigged. We don’t start from a shared rule; we start from self-interest dressed up as ethics. Brin’s phrasing (“always demand”) is deliberately absolute, not because it’s literally true, but because it names the gravitational pull in these disputes. Exceptions exist; incentives still dominate.

The subtext is pointedly political. “Privacy” is invoked to shield the powerful when scrutiny threatens them, while “accountability” is invoked to discipline the powerless when control is convenient. Flip the roles and the rhetoric flips with them. That’s why scandals so often produce calls for transparency in the abstract and privacy in the specific.

Context matters: Brin comes out of science fiction and futurism, writing through late-20th-century anxieties about databases, cameras, and networked life, then watching those anxieties become mundane. The quote anticipates today’s culture of selective exposure: we curate our own opacity while demanding receipts, body cams, leaks, and doxxing-grade detail from everyone else. It’s a compact diagnosis of why trust keeps eroding: accountability without reciprocity becomes domination, and privacy without limits becomes impunity.