Lake Polan

Lake Polan’s scholarship examines the changing meaning and practice of privacy in America under conditions of increasing technology-based intervention and stewardship.

His dissertation examines how American software engineers and computer scientists, in implementing privacy-preserving technologies in consumer internet technologies, channel and transform a foundational concept of American law and culture. In the dissertation, he draws together existing theorizations of publics, the attentional economy, infrastructure, and surveillance, while detailing privacy's growing entanglement with the logics, sensibilities, and value systems of Silicon Valley and the national security state