How Airbnb kills our ideas of privacy

Freud naturally had much to say about the home and the idea of homeliness. The German word for homely is heimlich, and Freud, with the help of others such as the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, emphasized a glitch in its various definitions. Heimlich means homely in the English sense of something or somewhere friendly, welcoming and convivial, emanating warmth and safety. However, the same word can also evoke notions of concealment, secrecy and even conspiracy. An obsolete German term for a privy councillor—a keeper of secrets—is Der heimliche Rat. This darker shade of homeliness arises from an image of the home as a private, secluded space of unknowable thoughts and deeds. Freud’s interest lay in the fact that the word unheimlich is also used to convey something that is concealed and therefore potentially malevolent. He concludes: “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.” The English word for unheimlich is “uncanny,” which in its Freudian sense, among other things, refers to strangely familiar experiences or, perhaps more horrifyingly, a sense of estrangement in what should be a familiar, homely situation. The upshot for Freud is that, like the Beast’s palace, all homes are unhomely: cosy, talkative candlelight throws deep shadows, and for all the merry teatimes there are people withholding things from each other, unable to express the most meaningful parts of themselves.

Airbnb has set up shop in this uncanny valley. The guarded and enclosed aspect of homeliness diminishes with Airbnb’s mandating of the inside-out house, the home whose rooms one can browse online, but even this transparency entails a certain uncanniness. As Freud remarks, “Everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.” I ought not to have known about that steeped urine!