There’s a comic book called The Private Eye, which began in 2013 and published its final instalment in March this year, and lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It’s set in the near future after an apocalyptic event, the Flood, but this flood is not natural – it’s the leaking of everything on the internet. Every email, every chat transcript, every medical record, every employee file, every configuration of your Myspace Top 8 favourite friends selection, every person on Twitter that you’ve muted because they are annoying.

In this pen-and-ink world, the consequences of the breach have been terrible. The internet is now illegal, brutal new laws are enforced with violence and everybody wears a mask to conceal their identity. As Brian K Vaughan, the writer, told artist Marcos Martin when he pitched the idea to him, it’s “a story about privacy, and whether our generation’s ongoing campaign against it will be good or bad for society. I don’t know the answer to that yet, so I want to make a comic to find out.”

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With each passing tech catastrophe, this fictional flood seems more and more like an inevitable chapter in the real human story. Perhaps the most gruesome extraction of personal anonymity yet came with the hacking of Ashley Madison this week. The adultery site’s brash tagline reads: “Life is short. Have an affair.” The millions of users who gave the site their credit card details are now wondering if an embrace of carpe diem will expose their infidelities and detonate their lives. The reaction has been largely unsympathetic – less outrage at the invasion of privacy and more a general sense that its users have behaved badly and are getting what they deserve, which is to be exposed and embarrassed. I wonder how many people have preemptively admitted to affairs, just to avoid any potential outing.

Recently, TV presenter Dr Christian Jessen appeared in the tabloids after he and his partner had been caught sending explicit messages to a third person on Grindr. The resulting story felt curiously old-fashioned; that it was somehow assumed to be our business, that it was worthy of reporting in the first place. The celebrity’s response chimed with that sense. Ten years ago, you might have imagined a grand gesture of apology or a plea for forgiveness. But there was no mea culpa; he simply admitted he had been stupid. “It was just horny talk, really,” he said, and explained that he would have to talk to his bosses.

His refusal to be ashamed made me consider whether we are coming closer to a post-embarrassment world. Our lives have been creeping into the public domain for years, and with every new smartphone sold our inhibitions crumble further, taking with them the idea of what it means to be embarrassed in the first place. In time, as each generation subscribes to an ever-widening marker of what is deemed to be appropriate, I wonder if there will be any shame left to hack into. People seem more willing to talk about it all, from which party they voted for to what they are paid, to who they slept with and how and when. Because why would that be off-limits when every other aspect of life, from breakfast to your opinion on Question Time’s panel to the print on your new pyjamas, is documented and shared to excess?

Whether it is reasonable to expect privacy online isn’t the question now, because after Ashley Madison surely nobody believes that privacy is an option any more. There is a doomsday-ish sense that it is all only a matter of time until everything is out there, just as it is in The Private Eye.

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Naturally that would be embarrassing. That visit to your GP for the thing you’ve never told anyone about, not even your mum. The unflattering photos of that time you got accidentally hammered at the Christmas party that you untagged before begging Rob in HR to delete them. All those emails bitching about friends that you both meant and did not really mean, it was just a bad day and there was a misunderstanding, and it just felt better to take out your frustration on somebody you knew, who you thought had let you down, though they hadn’t, really, and it didn’t matter, after all. Failed relationships dissected and defused with anger and spite. All of it in the open, just waiting for the wrong person to sift through the digital slime and chance upon their name.

As I read each instalment of The Private Eye, I was on board with its doomy vision of a world ruined by secrets exposed, in which human beings must literally never show their faces again. But now that its premise appears to be coming true, more gradually and not so dramatically, I am less convinced of the direction its prophetic powers took. Even if the special power of shame is diminished, such exposure still has a magical force: it would be mortifying and ruinous if it happened to one of us, or a handful of us, or the 33 million Ashley Madison users who were at least considering the idea of having an affair. But if it happened to all of us, to humanity en masse, then there would not be enough space for our collective cringing. If we were all embarrassed, all at the same time, then perhaps the relief would turn it into a shrug.