The Truman Show takes place in a fictional seaside town where every aspect of the main character Truman Burbank’s life is closely surveilled. Unbeknownst to Truman, he is the main character in a show about his life, the plot to which is scripted by a team of producers.
What he learns in school, the media he consumes, where he can travel and who he marries are all determined by people he will never meet, who live beyond the confines of Truman’s world. Quite literally, Seahaven is enclosed in a constructed bubble, complete with painted clear blue skies and an artificial ocean.
Seahaven, though fictional, is not unlike America in 2024. Our bubble may be invisible, but we too are living surveilled lives. Life is not dictated by producers, though, but by judges. Understanding how they come to have such power involves taking a deeper dive into the document that grounds their decisions.
First and foremost, the Constitution is vague. In a thorough story covering the history of the Supreme Court’s privacy rulings, Ian Millhiser explains for Vox that the Constitution contains a number of unenumerated rights that are not explicitly articulated anywhere else in the document. Essentially, what exactly makes up one’s right to privacy is unclear.
The Court said little more on privacy after Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) which produced the Court’s earliest articulation of what became “the unenumerated right to privacy.” Individuals had the right to marry and raise children with whomever they wanted, and they had the right to raise and educate those children how they saw fit, with some exceptions.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Court began to expand the idea of privacy, articulating the right to make medical decisions without government interference. In 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut cemented the right to married couples’ ability to access birth control. As Millhiser writes: “The idea that anyone had a right to sexual autonomy of any kind — even something as seemingly noncontroversial as a married couple using birth control — was reasonably novel in the 1960s.” Griswold was also one of the Court’s first articulations of “the idea that some aspects of our lives are walled off from government regulation specifically because they are private.”
Roe v. Wade (1973) famously expanded this definition of privacy to include “activities relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, and child rearing and education.”
This history crescendos today in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson, otherwise known as the overturn of Roe v. Wade. In a system in which one of these supposed rights to bodily autonomy and, ultimately, privacy can be overturned, there’s no saying what the future holds for the rights secured by Meyer, Griswold and other monumental cases.
Rights once thought to be unshakable can be dismantled by a conservative court that mixes rights with privileges, changing what we as Americans can and cannot do with no regard for the existing law of the land. In a world where privileges and rights are seemingly interchangeable, privacy and the rights it encompasses become privileges reserved for the few.
Potentially reversing the right to access contraceptives or have a same-sex marriage reinforces the privileges of wealthy, cisgendered and heterosexual men most of all. Given that the right to privacy as established by Meyer could be interpreted by the current Supreme Court to not include gender-affirming care, it would not be presumptuous to think that trans healthcare for minors could be the next freedom to be targeted at a federal level.
With such a vague, flexible interpretation of privacy, religious groups could also make the case that allowing trans minors in school to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity would violate the privacy of their cisgender peers.
Once again, reinstating rights as privileges only reestablishes existing privileges. It’s important to ask: Who benefits from these changes? Who is made to feel safe, with their rights protected, and who is made to feel like an outsider, with their rights easily stripped away?
Added to this is the fact that tech companies and social media corporations practice constant surveillance. As AP reported on April 1, Google has been ordered to purge billions of files containing the personal data of its users, including data collected in “Incognito” mode. Though Alphabet, Google’s parent company, claimed that the collected data was not used in any kind of personalization for its users, lawyers estimated the settlements at $4.75 billion to $7.8 billion, which is based on the potential ad revenue from said data.
In a country that treats the rights of its citizens as privileges — and in a culture that normalizes the free use of citizens’ private data — does privacy still exist?
Abortion and contraceptive bans ensure that pregnant people will give birth, effectively putting their health in danger while also dictating the direction of the rest of their life. Revoking the right to marriage equality dictates who you can and cannot marry while limiting trans healthcare access limits the ways in which one expresses their gender. Constant meticulous surveillance of even our “hidden” wants, needs and searches influences what ads, news and version of reality we see.
Sound familiar?
The producers of our lives, Supreme Court judges, are crafting a future in which only outliers with abundant resources can access what we once considered immovable rights. Limiting abortion access, for example, does not stop people from getting abortions — but it does make safe and affordable abortions harder to attain. If money is no issue, the limits placed on abortion are no issue.
Though the same cannot be said for the rights to marriage, I’d again argue that the people building this future will not have to worry about the implications of existing outside of wealth, whiteness or cisheterosexuality. All of this is exacerbated by the possibility of another Trump term; eliminating the long-held rights of minority and low-income groups in the name of preserving American tradition or whatever era it was that made America so “great” is setting us back.
We are increasingly losing the agency we have over our own lives, expressions and decisions. Reproductive rights may not be the only rights to go, given how nebulous the idea of privacy is in America to begin with.
We are not the writers, but unknowing actors, confined to the bubble that is American politics. Our rights can be revoked without our say, should they no longer fit a conservative agenda. Even from within the bubble, it’s hard to believe that this isn’t fiction.