The Transparent Society

by David Brin

  When expressed that way, it sounds like an equable exchange of favors. Constructive criticism can feel that way, when gracious adults do it in a spirit of mutual helpfulness. So it is with well-motivated teams, when their goals are clear, when the members trust each other, and when there is a shared passion for success, as in times of war. Mutual criticism doesn’t hurt as much when people have no time to spare for ego.

  At another level, I am talking about the adversarial process, in which two or more opponents attack each other’s evidence and arguments, probing for weaknesses, forcing the other side to account for every discrepancy. We are all familiar with this system in countless noisy, unruly forms. When attorneys get involved, their prim attention to every dotted i and crossed t can become fractious and wearisome to a degree that seems to defy all common sense. So if it appears that my argument supports the necessity of lawyers, please accept that I say it with reluctant awareness that things would be worse without them. Indeed, the adversarial process can be wasteful, disgusting, even puerile in the behavior that it provokes from antagonistic rivals, evoking reproval, disdain, and even dirty tricks.

  Unfortunately, no one has come up with a better system to effectively promote accountability. Just as competition generates wealth in a fair market, opposition over policy appears to have resulted in a society that is, on the whole, better run and fairer than most other mass cultures. Faced with the penchant of humans to suppress criticism, it seems that the adversarial solution is the best cantankerous Homo sapiens can come up with for the time being.

  That doesn’t mean the system cannot be improved! In a transparent society, there may be ways to make adversarial accountability more efficient, more civil, more mature—and especially more adept at discovering mistakes before they do great harm.

  The Internet already aids countless social and political factions, from environmentalists to neo-Nazis. Through e-mail and discussion groups, they can organize with unprecedented agility, rallying supporters in hours. Both pro- and anti-abortion forces monitor each others’ open forums, seeking clues to their foes’ next strategic moves. Through colorful Web pages, both gun control advocates and the National Rifle Association (NRA) refine their messages with slick imagery. The EFF shares its cherished cyberspace with the Christian Coalition, even as they battle each other over whether to purge the Internet of disapproved content.

  You might expect that I approve of all this rambunctious activity, since it heightens the effectiveness of rival groups, hastening the pace of political opposition. In fact, the trend frightens the hell out of me.

  You see, an adversarial system works best if both sides of an issue assail each other’s positions in a fair and open manner, and if one result is some coalescence of public opinion about the right thing to do. Not compromise, exactly, but something more like consensus.

  Correspondent Mark Poster suggests that the Net’s current incarnation offers only some of the ingredients needed to achieve this. “Traditionally, a person’s identity forced some stability and accountability, and allowed trust to develop. Since the Internet allows people to redefine and shift identify, dissent is encouraged.” This, Poster contends, allows people to talk as equals. And yet, rational argument rarely prevails. Achieving consensus is nearly impossible.

  In fact, by encouraging factions to fly off in a myriad centrifugal directions, growing ever fiercer in their radicalism and purity of vision, the Net’s present version does little to advance the pragmatic goal of error avoidance and problem solving. When each side uses the Internet to form massively effective pep rallies, the result doesn’t help refine their arguments or eliminate flaws in their proposals. Rather, it takes us down an old road, toward the quasi-religious fervor of the Nuremberg rallies in 1936, when in-group solidarity was also reinforced by new technologies—radio and loudspeakers.

  There are countless other historical examples, occasions when purified information flows led to catastrophic results. Before the U.S. Civil War, nearly every newspaper in the Southern states depicted abolitionism as the equivalent of devil worship. Other than a few isolated venues, such as the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates, there were seldom ways to read or hear the position of the other side. Similar disparities existed in the North. Might U.S. history have changed if honest argument had been part of the volatile political climate before 1861?

  Clearly, something more is needed. Something tomorrow’s Internet might easily provide.

  Picture an arena where adversaries can no longer scream past each other, but must actively answer each other’s accusations, criticisms, and complaints. A place where one group’s vision, or model of the world, can be tested, dented by criticism, and possibly improved under the watchful gaze of an interested public.

  Until recently, this role was performed (albeit shallowly) by the press, whose code of professionalism dictated that news articles should present fair capsule summaries of any issue. For all the flaws and lapses we have seen during the last half century, journalists fulfilled this function pretty well overall. But lately, things seem to be wearing thin. Are decayed professional standards responsible for this, as James Fallows and some others contend? Or have the increasing complexity of modern life and countless alternative competing outlets led to a decline in the effectiveness of newspapers and television at midwifing national or international consensus? Nick Arnett, author of Net and Anti-Net, blames “television-style rhetoric that insists on creating two sides to every issue, demanding that citizens choose one or the other” on a take it or leave it basis. (See chapter 7, “The Devil’s Dichotomies.”)

  A long-range answer to these problems may be found in the twenty-first century’s tool kit. If the Internet has proved helpful to advocacy groups bent on marshaling their forces, there might also be hope for it to act as a forum for bringing factions together for argument, comparison, negotiation, and even accord.

  In the European Middle Ages, there was a tradition of holding occasional disputations, sometimes between Catholic and Jewish theologians. Although these events were seldom fair, and often had been rigged in advance, they nevertheless shed a little light in a dark era. Since then, the art of debate has gone through many changes; for instance, we’ve come to expect that presidential candidates will have face-to-face encounters, and we complain when candidates for other offices won’t agree to do the same. Yet the art of direct and open confrontation seems only to have been refined in the one place where decent folk loathe ever finding themselves: the courtroom. For the most part, we live awash in opinions, savoring caricatures of our opponents, and seldom use the truth-telling power of adversarial accountability to cut through the stubborn clichés.

  Now, some philanthropist might endow a series of televised debates concerning major issues of the day. Abortion, say, or gun control, or the war against drugs. Speakers would be chosen not for passionate radicalism but for their ability to paraphrase accurately their opponents’ positions, showing that they listen at least well enough to comprehend the other side’s deeply felt concerns. Each party would then pose questions, with the answers judged by an expert panel for specificity, not polemical appeal.

  That would be an improvement. In fact, a few related efforts have taken place. In Europe, “citizens’ juries” have attracted some attention. In the United States, there have been widely televised “town meetings” of thirty or more respected sages, journalists, and intellectuals who mull over an issue together, guided by a roving moderator with a microphone. John Gardner’s National Civic League brings urban opponents together to negotiate past entrenched positions. But these attempts have all suffered from the same old problems: limited time, rambling discourse, and comments left hanging in the air that never get the follow-up attention they deserve. Similar drawbacks dog Internet-based discussions, such as Hotwired’s “Brain Tennis” program and Slate’s “Committee of Enquiry.”

  The Internet can do much better. In fact, it seems well suited to promote a new style of debating, by establishing disputa
tion arenas for truly extended and meticulous appraisal of a topic, moderated by volunteers whose own passionate avocation is for neutral intellectual rigor. The more interesting the arguments, the more attention each arena would receive, and the less the chance that adversaries could afford to turn down invitations to take part.

  How to prevent artful evasions, of the sort we see so often in political debates? Superficial and brief, they reward charismatic prevarication more than argument, while evidence plays almost no role at all.

  This is where the true beauty of the Internet comes in. For one of its greatest virtues may be its potential for relentlessness. A tenacity that, when applied by gifted experts, would enable each side doggedly to pursue its opponents until they finally relent and give a real answer (while offering the same treatment in return). Unlike debates in the world outside, there would be no two-hour time limits. Extended confrontations might last for weeks or months, shepherded by proctors whose picky personalities (we all know the type) won’t let go of a logical inconsistency on this side of frozen hell.

  In fact, the most important enforcement tool in any such arena will be credibility. If people in the world at large were ever to gain confidence in such a system of well-mediated confrontations, the events might acquire the kind of moral force that men used to invest in duels of honor, incurring shame upon those who do not show up or fight by the rules.

  Moreover, the Net can also provide many of the implements of science, analytical projection software and statistical tools drawing on vast databases, enabling advocates to create detailed models of their proposals—and their opponents‘—for presentation in the arena. This will be crucial because, as University of California at San Diego Professor Phil Agre has pointed out, much of the “data” being bandied about on the Net these days is of incredibly poor quality, often lacking provenance or any trace of error bars, sensitivity, dependency, or semantics. These problems can only be solved the way they are handled in science, by unleashing people with the personalities of bull terriers—critics who could be counted on to pull apart every flaw until they are forced to admit (with reluctance) that they can’t find any more. Discrepancies might be minimized if arena managers developed standard kits of modeling subroutines, improving them under strict scrutiny, so that both sides in the debate must compare apples with apples, not oranges.

  It may all sound rather dry. But if, as polls show, large numbers of people actually enjoy watching the dry charts and graphs of U.S. Senate Budget Committee hearings every year on C-Span, then there will surely be an audience when more passionate participants display vivid graphics and feisty style in the debate arenas of tomorrow. The important point to remember is that this process will not need majority participation in order to work, only the involvement of enough nitpickers from all political persuasions. The rest of us will thrill over the fireworks in plenary sessions, when the distilled results are presented.

  Early versions will inevitably seem self-serving and tendentious. (No mere gimmick, however clever or nobly intended, can change human nature overnight!) But if the popularity of games like Sim City is indicative, over time disputation arenas might become fashionable attractions among the demographic segment that loves to watch a good fight.

  In any event, let me pause now and venture one firm forecast for the predictions registry: We will see arena experiments tried, before this century is out. With so much riding on our decisions in the years ahead, what is there to lose?

  WHAT’S IN IT FOR US?

  Under the dogma of otherness, we’ve been brought up to be fiercely loyal to free speech. But free speech owes us something in return. In the long run, it should be about more than just unleashing everyone to scream at the top of their lungs (though screaming deserves protection, too). Ideally, out of all the yelling and ferment, there should also arise good ideas. Opinions and vehement posturing ought to drift toward argument and analysis. Although self-righteousness is effective at causing inflamed adherents to secrete powerful, druglike endorphins in their brains, motivating them to pounce on perceived errors like good T-cells, persuasion is a more mature and useful goal for any advocacy group.

  Not only to feel right but to be right, and persuade others to agree.

  So far, the new media have served mostly to enhance centrifugal forces in society, tearing us further apart and encouraging an age of heightened radicalism. But new techniques wait in the wings, techniques for “guarding the guardians,” encouraging the best kinds of T-cell hackers, and bringing fierce advocates together for honest debate. Methods that society will use for its own pragmatic benefit to solve problems that face our new commons, a territory to be shared by all denizens for their private and mutual benefit.

  This commons won’t be ideal. At best, it will be intriguing, rambunctious, sassy, noisy, and sometimes rather noisome as well. Human nature will see to that.

  But it will be ours.

  ALL THE WORLD IS A (DIGITAL) MARKETPLACE

  “Numbers can be a better form of cash than paper,” said David Chaum of the DigiCash Corporation, who defined ecash as “the digital equivalent of cash. You can withdraw digital coins from your Internet bank account and store them on your hard disk. Whenever you want to make a payment, you use these coins. The payment is fast and anonymous, and the payer can always prove that he made a certain payment.”

  Former Citibank chairman Walter Wriston shares the same vision but moves the electronic locus to something more portable. “The revolution that’s waiting in the woods is smart cards,” Wriston said in late 1996, referring to chip-bearing cards that would contain a person’s account information and handle secure transactions for its owner instantly, any time he or she wants to buy something, from a yacht to a stick of gum. Few visions of the information age are as widely held as the one presented by Chaum and Wriston, which extrapolates present-day trends into a near future when all the dollars, marks, yen—as well as some proposed new monetary units that you would mint yourself—flow through the world economy as pure and incorruptible electronic bits.

  From the beginning of this book, I have tacitly accepted this popular wisdom—that one form of secrecy and encryption will be essential for the dynamic world economy to come. And yet, even in this area where everybody seems to be in agreement, we may be rushing ahead without adequately pondering all the dangers, or considering a possible alternative—a transparency alternative.

  Conventional monetary systems certainly have problems! For one thing, they are slow, entailing the costly and cumbersome exchange of crumpled bills, or hastily scrawled checks, or smudged credit card slips. All this inefficient paper-shuffling puts common folk at a major disadvantage, since the rich can already move their money about with supple, electronic ease. Anyway, don’t most of our funds already exist as mere digits in the computer files of our local bank?

  Moreover, the old ways seem to attract predators, fostering countless varieties of crime—from bad checks to fraud, currency forgery, and stolen credit cards—creating a huge burden of hidden costs to society. Enthusiasts for the electronic economy vow that new techniques will offer a more secure system, with rapid authentication of every transaction. One promised effect would be to allow a downsizing of law enforcement, when we can finally dispense with battalions of armed authority figures assigned to guard mountains of cash or to hunt down counterfeiters and floaters of bad checks. It all sounds perfectly delightful. A clean, efficient, and better tomorrow.

  In fairness, however, one might recall that similar promises were made over a decade ago, when many of the same enthusiasts predicted that word processors and spreadsheets would soon lead to a “paperless office” environment. After all, why should anyone print on sheets of pressed and bleached pulp when onscreen documents are more vivid and can be copied indefinitely, at zero cost? Alas, while the new text and information technologies are helpful, they have also resulted in vastly more paper versions pouring from laser printers and copying machines, slaying greater numbers of trees than e
ver before. The lesson? Unintended consequences are always lurking, preparing to pounce on those who grow too smug in their predictions.

  Still, who knows? We might be in an awkward transition phase. The paperless office may yet come to pass. Nevertheless, a warning is in order: Beware transition phases. They can sting.

  Today innumerable digital seers and pundits proclaim that paperless commerce will banish the flaws of old-fashioned checks and cash, offering individuals and corporations perfect security from both thieves and tax authorities, perhaps even leading to the demise of oppressive national governments. (See “A Withering Away,” after chapter 9.) But so far, this has proved difficult to put into general practice. Early means of Internet-based payment have been explored by pioneers such as First Virtual, Cybercash, and Open Market, whose systems were still anchored to a user-supplied credit card number as the basis for ultimate payment. A consortium headed by VISA, MasterCard, IBM, and Microsoft has lately been attempting to bring purchase transactions to the next level with a system called SET, for Secure Electronic Transaction, to allow safe transmission of credit card information over the Net. But even these efforts are still a far cry from Chaum’s vision of ecash, which would be true electronic money, independent of the centralized accounting systems of VISA and its ilk. For a brave new world of digital currency and instantaneous, globe-girdling electronic transactions to come about, several important innovations must prove reliable.