The Transparent Society

by David Brin

  To gain perspective, consider what fraction of the readers of this book may have ever lived a whole month worrying their children might starve. What portion have recently seen a dead body in the course of normal community life? Experienced hand-to-hand combat on a battlefield? Trod the smoldering ruins of a sacked town? Witnessed firsthand an overlord exerting capricious power of life and death over underlings? Oh, surely a few readers have (this is still a dangerous world). But in almost any prior society, any average person would have answered each of these questions with a shrug, “Of course I have, and often.”

  (At one level this is just a tautology. Other cultures lacked reliable contraception, yet despite high birthrates their numbers never reached today’s billions. Our vast—and possibly world-threatening—population decisively testifies to a reduced death rate.)

  Despite such statistical reassurance, we wring our hands, unsatisfied. Our standards keep rising—as they should! We want peace and long lives. Any danger should come by our own choice—on a ski slope perhaps, or free-falling at the end of a bungee rope. Even a small chance of being mugged is unacceptable to people who count on being hale and hearty at ninety. Still, despite this inflation of perception, ordinary citizens know we are safer than other generations.

  An intriguing result of declining fear is a society where tolerance has become one of the paramount stated virtues. Our culture’s definition of “citizen” has expanded for generations—first from aristocrats to all white male landed farmers, then to all white males, then to all adult males, then to all adults ... and so on. Children, once considered chattel property, have acquired a nearly full suite of rights. This agenda of expansion is taken very seriously, especially by groups just experiencing inclusion, or whose improving economic status has not kept pace with their increased liberties and expectations. Impatience with difficult stages in the process can lead to dramatic or violent episodes of social criticism. Even people who agree on the fundamental desirability of tolerance frequently deride each other over differences in preferred technique for achieving the same end (for example, whether affirmative action programs redress old injuries or serve to perpetuate racialism as an unfair means of judging people).

  Today, large segments of the population push inclusiveness further still, calling it “murder” to slay a dolphin, or an ape, or members of a threatened species—even species that our hard-pressed ancestors considered vital food sources.

  Please understand that I am not talking only about the subcultural phenomenon called “political correctness.” Whether or not some people take this process to extremes, or even become caricatures of hypertolerance, is quite beside the point. No ideological wing owns this phenomenon, though many political partisans would have us think they do.

  So involved are we in the ongoing struggle over details that scarcely anyone bothers to note how this entire agenda contrasts with the paranoia that was typical of our forebears. But in fact, our otherness-obsession is culturally extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented. While most Hollywood films treat authority figures as objects of (at best) contempt, the other lesson pushed by popular media appears to be the desirability of diversity. From television sitcoms to earnest news programs, the constant message is that different cultures enhance the overall richness of a complex world society. Those watching nature shows soon learn that Earth’s ecological balance relies on continued genetic diversity. Each lost species is portrayed as harming the planet’s overall health and, inevitably, our own.

  A low ambient fear level fosters not only empathy but enlargement of our time sense. When the near future seems less hazardous, we feel free to cast our thoughts further ahead, contemplating not just immediate needs but also those that our grandchildren, and even their grandchildren, might face. Peter Schwartz, president of the Global Business Network, put it this way.

  More and more people, whether or not they think they are in control of their lives, feel as if their actions have consequences. They feel more entwined with the global community. They thus are learning to look at the future of the world, and at each other. People who engage in this process become less dangerous; they begin to take everyone’s interest at heart.

  What does all of this have to do with a transparent society?

  Without doubt, the new media-saturated world will have some traits that increase citizens’ exposure and acceptance of different cultures. Other features of the twenty-first century Net may foster fear and the creation of intolerant new tribes. I will talk about how both trends relate to transparency in later chapters. But for now, let’s focus on a particular type of tolerance. Not of foreigners or outsiders, but of unorthodox individuals and groups within our own society.

  The unusual and idiosyncratic. The eccentrics among us.

  Romantic images of the past may lead some to imagine that oddballs and exceptional people were respected in antiquity, but this was seldom true. Wealthy aristocrats could sometimes afford bizarre interests or affectations. But for the most part, sameness was a paramount civic virtue. We look back admiringly on individuals like Michelangelo and Galileo, whose ideas triumphed despite suspicion and oppression by their peers. But they were geniuses, recognized even in their own times, and nonetheless faced dire troubles for their uniqueness. How many of their eccentric contemporaries were squelched by poverty, inquisitions, or the stifling oppression of distrustful neighbors?

  Listening to modern artists and writers, you might think conformity is just as prevalent in the final years of the twentieth century. Aggrieved individuals decry the leveling influence of mass media and bland “white bread” culture without seeming to notice the irony that nonconformists are among the most admired and best-paid members of contemporary society! Instead of being repressed for their defiance, they are often rewarded in direct proportion to the degree that they startle, divert, or outrage. In other words, they are entertainers. Heroes of an exceptional age, whose propaganda mills tell young people it is romantic and admirable to “be different,” and to “believe in yourself, no matter what others say.”

  I know this well, having found my own well-paid niche in this economy of eccentricity. I was raised to seek out unusual thoughts and points of view. To search always for amazing notions others may have overlooked, and to depict them in entertaining ways. I’m doing it right now.

  And yet, in a society that mass-produces would-be social critics and individualists as if from an assembly line, it can be humbling to realize just how normal this endeavor is. There is nothing especially unusual about such a quest. It is what I was trained to do.

  So, in all probability, were you.

  Out of millions brought up under this “dogma of otherness,” some applied their unleashed creativity in the world of new media. Is it just coincidence that the silicon revolution burgeoned near the birthplace of “flower power”? Or that some who rode with Ken Kesey in the Electric Koolaid Schoolbus later established pioneering outposts on the cybernetic frontier? Almost no one foresaw the personal computer. Certainly not the big shots at IBM or Burroughs. But society acquired the PC and other wonders because a cohort of young minds were indoctrinated to seek novelty where standard organizations never looked.

  Would another culture put up with the likes of Stewart Brand, always poking at stagnant structures, from state government to the stuffy profession of architecture? Would Steve Jobs or Andrew Grove be billionaires in an economy based on inherited advantage? Where else might happy magicians like Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly be more influential than establishment priests or scientists? Would important power brokers hang on the words of Esther Dyson, Sherry Turkle, and Dorothy Denning if this culture did not value original minds? Listening to such remarkable individuals, one can tell they know how lucky they are. Few other cultures would reward oddball iconoclasts whose sole common attribute is a hatred of clichés.

  They are dedicated to preserving and enhancing the social features that enable eccentrics like them to exist. Especially freedom.

  In
other words, out of pure self-interest, they are just like millions of their fellow citizens—fiercely devoted to liberty. Defenders of an individual’s right to be unique.

  If you are reading this book, you probably agree. With freedom, tolerance, and progress our consensus goals, we may differ only over how to preserve and enhance them.

  Ah, but there’s the rub!

  In future chapters we shall see what noisy battles erupt around that question of how.

  Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

  “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

  LEWIS CARROLI., ALICE IN WONDERLAND

  A CENTURY OF AFICIONADOS

  If eccentricity is to be a factor in preserving an open society, it can’t be limited to the rich, the talented, or any other elite. The new attitudes must encompass millions.

  Despite some cherished stereotypes, not all of our neighbors are “couch potatoes” glued to their television remote controls. Millions are active in their communities, in scouting or volunteer work, or in their kids’ schools and sports teams. Moreover, each weekend multitudes spend enough time and money on personal avocations to match a small country’s gross domestic product. Activities range from garage crafts like carpentry, to intensive gardening, to collecting, to restoring that old Chevy Impala. According to one survey, the number of senior Americans participating in athletic sports has gone up by 73 percent in the last decade alone. A 1997 CNN poll showed that 40% of Americans pursued some outdoor activiy. Sport fishermen spend $38 billion annually. Photographic-sightseers shell out an additional $26 billion.

  Some pastimes stretch the meaning of the word hobby. When Ted Turner wanted to do a film about the Battle of Gettysburg, he put out a call to Civil War reenactment clubs, inviting seven thousand members to bring their own muskets, equipment, and expertise—already organized in companies and fanatical about historical verisimilitude—in order to create a vivid rendition of Pickett’s Charge. Other amateurs in “anachronism societies” adeptly resurrect medieval arts, so that mail-order catalogues now offer everything from gargoyles to whole suits of armor. Spinning wheels and weaving looms have seen a resurgence, despite (or perhaps because of) the continuing cheap availability of mass-produced textiles. And thanks to individual riding enthusiasts, there are more horses—and blacksmith services—in the United States today than in the era of the cowboy.

  Folk dance groups, costume aficionados, and cooking clubs concentrate on any ethnicity you can name. And every year science fiction fans hold over a hundred conventions across the world—gatherings that range from erudite discussions of technology and literature all the way to fully attired plenary sessions of the Klingon Language Institute.

  According to an American executive of the American Association of Association Executives, America alone has more than 140,000 national, regional, and local organizations, from sober professional societies to others created for pure satire. Some names prompt ironic smiles, like the Society of Loners, or the Association in Opposition to Human-Animal Hybridization. Others, like the earnest but awkwardly named Marine Mammal Stranding Center, involve hundreds of eager volunteers who will race to help save creatures that their ancestors would gleefully have butchered on the shore.

  The Internet has expanded this trend many times over. Now an accountant who happens to be the only person in Duluth with a zeal for Japanese No theater can swiftly find others who share her interest, across half a dozen continents. In fact, any list of Usenet groups reveals a dizzying array of modern preoccupations, each roiling in its corner of cyberspace, involving anywhere from a dozen to tens of thousands of participants. (Sections devoted to fans of rock groups account for more traffic and memory capacity than the whole Internet of just a decade ago.) New Age sects, already flourishing like dandelions, have taken to the Web like a well-manured meadow.

  What impulses drive this trend? Theories have been presented, ranging from dour to optimistic. Perhaps millions are so alienated from the modern world that they seek refuge in small “tribes” whose rituals, though ornate, are somehow comforting and offer a sense of belonging. Becoming expert in some small area of arcane lore may redress the feeling of being lost amid the dazzling complexities of modern science. That is one view—and it surely explains some aficionados, who dive into “hobbies” to escape the pressures of life.

  But then there are others, each, in the words of Walt Whitman, “singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,” whose passion for excitement and self-driven expertise seems like anything but withdrawal from a challenging modern world. Technical advances in scores of fields are now driven by enthusiasts. Take parachuting, where amateurs keep coming up with half-mad innovations like base-jumping, skyboarding, and formation dives in which complex cluster patterns are created by as many as two hundred highly skilled maniacs at a time. Or the daring breakthroughs in flight led by people like Paul MacReady and Burt Rutan. Or the sixty fanatics who set forth from the Canary Islands last summer, aiming to race across 2,700 miles of open ocean in rowboats, a “tradition” in which, despite high-tech designs, one in nine past participants never reached shore again.

  The effect is especially visible in science, where part-time naturalists have collected valuable data for decades, according to Shawn Carlson, head of the Society for Amateur Scientists. For example, despite having high-tech satellites, weather agencies rely more than ever on timely reports from widely scattered volunteer stations, both ashore and at sea. When it came to maintaining stocks of rare plant types, in case some new disease might strike a major food crop, experts had been swamped until the laborious task was partly assumed by private gardeners with a fetish for growing rare or exotic varieties.

  In June 1997 an event took place with important implications we’ll explore in this book. An ad hoc association linked over ten thousand personal computers and workstations across North America to crack the Data Encryption Standard (DES). Three years earlier, a similar effort assailed the RSA-129 encryption code, succeeding “about a trillion years ahead of schedule,” according to one surprised observer. Encryption experts make excuses in retrospect, but this pair of surprise breakthroughs has two implications: (1) consortiums of amateurs may be formidable, and (2) we should be wary when “experts” blithely assure us that their favorite encryption system is foolproof.

  Astronomers like Caltech’s Elinor Helin, who catalogs drifting asteroids and comets, have long been helped by cadres of amateur sky watchers privately scanning the heavens. Once, these seekers had to painstakingly memorize constellations in order to find new objects. But today some robot backyard telescopes open at dusk, check the weather, and then start hunting automatically, sifting CCD images for telltale glimmers that could make their owners briefly famous. Other aficionados transform satellite dishes into radio observatories, participating in a worldwide network for amateur SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent life. These last examples are noteworthy because they use the same technologies we spoke of in chapter 1, applying sophisticated surveillance tools for unusual ends. And whatever techniques or devices the rich can afford now, the rest of us may have soon after. In a few years, the sky will be watched as never before by armies of individuals pursuing their own private, passionate interests, sharing expertise over fiber-optic cables with like-minded enthusiasts, challenging the professionals on their own turf.

  A few decades from now there will be ten billion people on the planet, and computers as sophisticated as today’s mainframes will be cheaper than transistor radios. If this combination does not lead to war and chaos, then it will surely result in a world where countless men and women swarm the dataways in search of something special to do—some pursuit outside the normal range, to make each one feel just a little bit extraordinary. Through the Internet, we m
ay be seeing the start of a great exploration aimed outward in every conceivable direction of interest or curiosity. An expedition to the limits of what we are, and what we might become.

  Some very smart people might disagree with this appraisal. For instance, while Pulitzer Prize—winning historian Daniel Boorstin has spoken admiringly about the spirit of amateurism (whose Latin root is amare, “to love”) he perceives this spirit declining in a world of narrow professionals and bureaucrats. He has addressed this theme as an invited speaker at symposiums and informal gatherings of enthusiastic eclectics from around the world, the sort who flock to resort hotels and university conference centers in order to share interdisciplinary insights and cross-fertilization of ideas. As the popularity and accessibility of such gatherings grow, they create spinoffs, increasing the number of venues where eager renaissance men and women can temporarily put aside their specialties, trade diverse new ideas, and collectively bemoan the decline of liberated open-mindedness. In other words, the world can be ironic.3

  Assuming that I am right, and the pessimists are mistaken,

  almost nothing of recognized value that is now known about

  the human past or present will ever again be lost.

  From oral folktales, to ritual dances of recondite cults, to subvariant musical themes, or conspiracy-oriented interpretations of history—however obscure or crackpot a topic or activity might be, our culture will stash it away, protect it, cherish it. This great preservation won’t be accomplished by some haughty ministry of culture, but with strangely chaotic efficiency by countless private individuals probing each dimly lit corner of human knowledge, seeking some small niche where even a “nobody” might become a world-class expert. A big fish in a small pond.