On Solitude, Surveillance, And The Luxury To Be Let Alone

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I owe you a newsletter. Actually, I owe you two.

I was supposed to show up every alternate week with my weird, wonderful corners of the internet. Instead, I have been gone. Nearly a month. The honest version: I did not want to look at my screen anymore.

Some of that time was worthwhile. I went to Sri Lanka, met some of the sharpest people I've encountered in a long time — people documenting, litigating, building — all oriented around one idea: that a just world is an actual goal and not merely a caption on a politician's Twitter bio. In Delhi, I moderated a session at Medianama's event on IT rules, and sat with YouTube creators explaining how their reporting gets censored, channels taken down without notice or appeal.

The other weeks are harder to explain. I've been reporting on AI tools that undress women. It means hours of looking at images I don't want to see, speaking to people whose motivations range from opportunistic to deeply unsettling. A kind of ugliness that doesn't leave when you close the tab.

Somewhere between the hopeful and the horrific, something in my brain just stalled. And I kept coming back to the same question: what do you do when even thinking feels like labour?

There's a particular exhaustion that comes with chasing a story. You scroll for hours trying to find a lede that feels alive. You call people who don't pick up. You message people who leave you on read. You follow threads that dissolve into nothing.

The last election cycle made it considerably worse. Misinformation dressed as humour, AI-generated content cosplaying as satire, a relentless demand for your attention that returned almost nothing. Journalists I know described it as wading. You call someone. No comment. You call someone else. Same thing, fractionally more warmth. You stare at your notes. You make another call. You develop a Pavlovian dread of your own phone.

This is the part of the job that nobody romanticises, which is funny because the romanticisation of this job is one of the things quietly grinding people down. The scoop. The idea that it's all adrenaline and airport terminals and truth-speaking-to-power. It is sometimes those things. It is also, frequently, sitting alone at 11 pm re-reading a document you've already read eleven times, waiting for it to finally tell you something new. You read it a twelfth time.

At some point, everything becomes noise. And when everything is noise, silence stops being a preference and starts being survival.

There’s a phrase that keeps resurfacing in law and philosophy. Two American lawyers — Warren and Brandeis — wrote a Harvard Law Review article arguing for what they called "the right to be let alone." They were writing about surveillance. About the state watching. About what it does to a person — to their thinking, their interiority — to know that someone is always looking.

It sounds almost indulgent when you first hear it, like something reserved for people with the luxury to opt out. But the more I sit with it, the more it feels like infrastructure, something foundational we’ve quietly eroded. Because what does it mean to not be let alone anymore?

I keep returning to this now. Not to build a legal argument  (I'm tired, this is the feeling edition), but because I think we have badly underestimated what constant visibility actually costs.

It means your time is always potentially claimable. Your attention is always up for grabs. Your mind is never entirely yours. There’s always a notification waiting, an algorithm nudging, a platform watching. Even in your most private moments, there’s an ambient awareness that you are, in some way, observable. Datafied. Interpreted.

That awareness accumulates. It just sticks to you, like the blocked nose you forget you have until you realise what breathing normal feels like again.

A 2024 CSIS report connects Warren-Brandeis directly to how commercial surveillance and AI-driven data collection have eaten up the last truly private spaces — mental rooms where you could think without being watched, without that thought being monetised and returned to you as a targeted ad for something you mentioned once, in passing, to your mother.

 In India, the Supreme Court is currently hearing a challenge to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act that would make reporting on public officials a potential data violation. The right to be left alone, it turns out, is a luxury. One the state reserves for itself.

But I'm not here to make that argument today. 

But, really, then what does it look like to try and reclaim the right to be left alone, even temporarily, in your own life?

To me, it looks like a window. Something to stare out of while doing nothing of measurable value. Watching the street. Watching the light shift. Watching the same configuration of cloud over the same building you have looked at every day for three years and somehow still find worth looking at.

This is what I'm defending today, from my couch, without much energy: the right to be temporarily unavailable. The right to recover without performing recovery. The right to need a full day before you can be a person again and to have that understood as reasonable rather than difficult.

It is, I think, the precondition for everything else. The story. The newsletter. The ability to sit with something hard long enough to actually understand it.

I needed a month. The ceiling and window were very forthcoming.

I'll be back in two weeks. Maybe.

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