The Transparent Society

by David Brin

  Might a “glass houses” effect preserve us against the worst abuses? Could it be that our main hope for tolerance will be found in the imperfections that we all carry around? In the fact that each of us has flaws and shortcomings that need empathy or forgiveness from others? What if self-righteousness were ranked right up there as one of those potentially harmful tendencies, measured as a proclivity to injure others by stereotyping them too harshly or too quickly? What if kids were routinely taught to recognize this potentiality in themselves, and to compensate for the impulse with a little self-control? Might that cancel out the potential for abuse?

  If so, this extraordinarily searing kind of light may not do quite as much harm as envisioned in our worst fears. Especially if it teaches us to mix pragmatism with hope, pity, and a whole lot of humility.

  From physical gnat-sized spy cameras, to creepy software “agents” that might invade and rifle your files, to untraceable databases, to possible lie detectors and proclivities profiles, the future seems to offer a plethora of plausible ways for others to peer at you. Interestingly, almost none of the examples mentioned in this section would be hampered in the slightest by that utopian panacea, encryption. (Recall that encryption also fails to address most of the classic techniques used by old-fashioned tyrants.)

  Some people will inevitably suggest eliminating threats such as these by passing laws, assailing the knowing of certain things. But in yet another irony, those people will be reaching in supplication toward the one power center that they claim to fear most, government, pleading that we should grant the authorities whole new avenues of regulation and control. New bureaucracies to direct and confine how much or what types of knowledge people should have. Of course, the mighty will flout those laws, as surely as Napoleon made himself emperor. Information will be sought and paid for, even if the market is driven underground to create an economy of smuggled contraband, controlled by unscrupulous people.

  Before moving on, however, let me say that all is not lost! Perhaps some new technology, even more far-out than the ones I’ve just described, will come along to rescue us from ourselves, providing a way to shield you and me against being peered at, poked, analyzed, and parsed right down to our genetic code. This new gimmick may arrive in time to be our salvation.

  I wouldn’t count on it, though.

  A better answer may be found elsewhere. To paraphrase the futurist Peter Schwartz, if it is not possible to be confident in our tools, or our predictions, perhaps we should try having confidence in ourselves.

  Most people are cowed by the power of charge institutions, and resent at least some aspects of the surveillance society. The imposition of social control mechanisms, including the enforced use of intrusive identification, could stimulate an increased degree of conscious non-acceptance of authority. This could in turn bring on the collapse of ... the nation-state, and with it the disappearance of regional en forcement of law and order. The cyberpunk genre of science fiction works on the assumption that the social surveillance and control movement contains the seeds of its own self-destruction.

  ROGER CLARKE

  Science Explores: Technology Executes: Man Conforms

  SIGN ABOVE THE PORTALS OF THE 1933 CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR

  HOW THINGS MIGHT GO WRONG

  In addition to being called an “enemy of privacy,” I have also been labeled a “wild-eyed optimist” because I believe that cantankerous, self-deceiving human beings can learn to behave like creatively eccentric but cooperative citizens of a free and open society.

  I refuse to cop a plea to either of these accusations, especially to being a Pollyanna. After all, my entire premise is based on the fact that people are often rotten to each other, especially when they think they can get away with it. Admittedly, I consider accountability to be strong medicine, perhaps potent enough to accomplish what all the past exhorting philosophers never managed—getting most of us to act like decent grown-ups. But that, at best, represents a guarded type of optimism.

  If I’m not a starry-eyed idealist about human nature, perhaps a more accurate appraisal was made by one friend, a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose unswerving demand for privacy laws, encryption, and anonymity more closely fits the tenor of these times. “You’re a damned contrarian, Brin,” he accused. “If everyone was talking about openness, you’d be the one screaming for masks and secret codes. If everybody else said the world was okay, you’d shout the sky was falling. You’re just taking the other side because you know it’ll bug people.”

  Am I? It doesn’t feel that way. At least not at the surface, though I admit that my friend’s thumbnail psychoanalysis fits the profile of a modern T-cell, as described in chapter 5. If so, this ornery contrariness is exactly what society trained me (and millions of others) for, so it’s hardly my fault.

  Anyway, I may turn out to be right!

  On the other hand, I might not.

  A learned person once told me about her favorite sentence, one that she said comes closer to defining human maturity than any other. When spoken, either aloud or in the recesses of the heart, it can mark a person’s first steps toward wisdom.

  “I could be mistaken.”

  Well, then, in the name of maturity, let us swing away from optimism about a positive transparent society and explore some possible downsides. What if I’m completely off base about the likely consequences, as cameras and databases pervade our civilization in the years ahead?

  How might things go terribly wrong?

  In 1991, White House aide Vincent Foster drove to a Washington, D.C., park, pulled out a pistol, and took his own life. Despite endless investigations, rumors, and tirades by radio “hate jockeys,” nobody has come up with a credible reason for Foster’s action other than the one that seemed apparent at the time. Evidently, Foster was mortified over having given his friends the Clintons poor legal advice during the “Travelgate” affair. In a state of shame and despair, he reeled before the ensuing glare of klieg lights and reporters’ hammering questions, until finally concluding that he could take no more. At least, that seems to be what happened.

  One reason for the various wild conspiracy theories that followed Foster’s death was incredulity by many hard-nosed Beltway insiders that anyone would commit suicide over something so “trivial.” True, administration opponents tried to inflate the dismissal of a few members of the White House travel office into a major scandal, and the media cooperated for a while, sniffing after a spoor of blood. But polls showed that the public viewed the affair as picayune. It would have blown over, if not for the suicide.

  Those accustomed to the D.C. pressure cooker found it hard to conceive that remorse and embarrassment might roil a decent man’s gut over a matter most Washingtonians would take in stride, shrugging and moving on to the next gambit, the next crisis. But Foster wasn’t a Washingtonian. Though power and fame can lure almost any man, he hated the hot scowl of relentless scrutiny. Criticism hurt. When people were unfair, he did not see it as just another move in “the game” but as a personal blow. Perhaps it was all too much to bear.

  This story illustrates a crucial issue that may have been overlooked in previous chapters that concentrated on high-falutin‘ abstractions such as law, rights, privacy, and accountability. Even assuming that transparency will be a necessary pragmatic tool for securing freedom into the twenty-first century, the cost may be bitter if it also brings alienation and pain to the shy, the reserved, the reticent. Some people don’t care to have a harsh, cleansing glare shine on them, even if society puts a light-saber in their hands and says, “You’re free! You’re safe! Aim bright light right back at them!”

  Oh, transparency could have a downside, all right.

  ... some people foresee a “dystopian” future in which the top third of the population takes care of itself by hiring the middle third to protect it against the bottom third.

  STEVEN E. MILLER

  According to one dour vision, penned by Gary T. Marx, we may be heading
for a security society, composed of five interrelated subsocieties. • A dossier society. Computer records follow each individual as inescapably as a shadow. Bill Gates’s “documented life” mutates into an unfailing tally system tracking every mistake you ever made, offering a permanent, unforgiving list for all to see.

  • An actuarial or predictive society. Decisions are increasingly based on predictions of our future actions, through statistical analysis of the groups and categories you belong to. (See the discussion of proclivities profiling.)

  • An engineered society. Your choices are constrained by physical and social adaptations required for living in a deteriorating world.

  • A porous or transparent society. All the boundaries that used to protect privacy are weak or vanishing.

  • A self-monitored society. Auto-surveillance (self-scrutiny) becomes useful, necessary, and then a compulsive part of daily life.

  In this vision, we will be under constant observation, with everything going on immutable record, known to a myriad others. No more border between public and private. Control will be embedded in a universal network of dossiers, informers, and classification. In other words, we’ll see Orwell’s world, or that of Terry Gilliam’s dystopia, Brazil, brought to life with a vengeance. According to Gary Marx,

  Such a society is transparent and porous. Information leakage is rampant. Barriers and boundaries—distance, darkness, time, walls, windows, and even skin, which have been fundamental to our conceptions of privacy, liberty, and individuality—give way. Actions, as well as feelings, thoughts, pasts, and even futures, are increasingly visible. The line between the public and the private is weakened; observations seem constant; more and more information goes on a permanent record, whether we will this or not, and even whether we know about it or not.

  There are ironies in comparing Marx’s scenario with mine, besides the fact that both use the phrase “transparent society.” Note, for instance, that he also foresees the importance of something like “predictions registries.” Only in this case their function is not to provide a free market of accountability, as I envision, but rather to serve as tools of regulation and control.

  Professor Marx presents a familiar view of the future, seen in countless novels and movies, the one dark dread that most of us in the neo-West have been alerted against over and over again. Yet things could still happen this way, despite all the warnings. It depends on who gets to watch, who controls the flow of information, and how they act on that knowledge. In fact, I can extrapolate four different scenarios for how transparency might go wrong, starting with the most obvious version offered by Professor Marx.

  1. Surveillance Elites

  In the world we all fear most, the answer to that question, “Who watches and controls?” will be hierarchical power structures. Some form of oligarchic tyranny. (See box 3 in the Plausibility Matrix on page 272.) It hardly counts whether the elite is based on inherited wealth, personal connections, public office, ideological purity, fighting prowess, demagoguery or several other standard methods by which groups organized themselves to dominate others in the past. What matters is that this despotism will be like none other, because it will know all and see all.

  In 1990, Marx illustrated this chilling scenario by creating a composite corporation to serve as an example, combining a spectrum of already current surveillance techniques under one roof. Job applicants underwent extensive medical and psychological screening, including detailed background questions about their parents’ health. The company searched databases, credit, and police records. Employees were checked weekly by an automated health analysis of urine, blood pressure, etc. Workplace chiefs monitored more than two hundred criteria to assess productivity—including keystroke speed, errors, and time away from the job. Computer screens sent periodic productivity messages. In addition to audio and video surveillance, all telephone numbers dialed were recorded. In Marx’s composite scenario, “transparency of human behavior for the purposes of total control” became habitual, addictive. Unseen managers monitored people down to the smallest detail, recording and detecting all variances in a process called “accountability through visibility.”

  We needn’t go into the towering hypocrisy of managers refusing to let the same degree of all-penetrating scrutiny apply to them. That is simply what people in power will do, if they are allowed to get away with it—the very outcome that reciprocal transparency might prevent. Certainly, if left unchecked, this tendency could inexorably bring about Marx’s maximum security society. A world not of glass houses, but of one-way mirrors.

  In such a world, we would have just one hope—that eventually a generation of rulers might feel less frantic and driven than their fathers. Perhaps, eventually, these sons and daughters of the mighty will grow bored with watching and controlling everybody else. But this is only a slim reed to clutch if we ever find ourselves living in such an awful world. Anyway, I doubt this particular dismal future will come to pass, simply because we are already so wary of it from a relentless drumbeat in countless works of culture and fiction. Surely, the worst danger must lurk in other directions.

  2. Surveillance Obsession

  A second dark vision also fits Marx’s overall scenario of a maximum security society. In this rendition of tomorrow, privacy has vanished, as in example 1. We live harried, supervised lives. Only now those doing the watching are not an elite, but everybody.

  Remember city number two back in chapter I? That’s the metropolis where the people control the cameras. Everyone enjoys the same high level of access. As a result, citizens have more freedom. The police are supervised. Everyone is held accountable.

  But this vision could go desperately wrong if folks grow obsessed with watching.

  Here, my restaurant analogy has broken down. Instead of being deterred from staring, people become addicted to it. In their rising paranoia, the natives of city number two might get stuck in a viciously competitive cycle. Believing that any lapse in vigilance could cause them to lose out, they band together in groups of common interest, peering at their foes relentlessly, pursuing them across the cityscape and through corridors of cyberspace, suspecting that any shadow may conceal a conspiracy. And they, in turn, are just as vigorously pursued. Encryptions and illusions spread, along with tailored viruses sent to corrupt opponents’ precious data stores in a war of attrition that only accentuates the desperate race to see more with gnat drone cameras, which are countered by antignats, and so on. In such a society, you might officially have plenty of freedom, and yet be so frightened and lost that life as a sovereign individual becomes impossible.

  Utterly dependent on the protection of your “tribe,” you will conform to every social ritual and constraint the group demands of you. Recall from chapter 6 how Philip Agre and Christine Harbs described a similar scenario: “Shorn of the ability to enter into relationships of responsibility and trust, individuals will tend to gravitate towards a safe average, suppressing their individuality and creativity in favour of a thoroughgoing orientation to the demands of an omniscient observer.”

  In effect, such a world is ruled not by monarchs, nobility, or captains of industry, but by a new class of witch doctors, cyberpunk-style hackers whose sophisticated software hexes may offer just a little shelter against the endless swarm of eyes that fill an awful night. It is a world of accountability gone mad, reminiscent of Dr. Seuss’s children’s story about the land of Hawtch-Hawtch, where citizens were so frenetically busy keeping an eye on each other (“watching”) that “today all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on Watch-Watcher-Watchering-Watch.”

  Frankly, I can think of better ways our descendants might choose to spend their time.

  3. Surveillance Acceptance

  There is another possible “chilling” outcome to a world of universal surveillance, one that is very different from those we just looked at.

  Suppose the cameras do eventually pervade everywhere, creating a society where not a single nook or cranny is le
ft unobserved. And let us venture further that everyone has access to all the cameras (hence no overt yranny). Now, let’s add one more supposition.

  The first generation to be surrounded by lenses may feel nervous under the pervasive gaze.

  The next is mildly irked, though used to it.

  And later generations?

  Growing up with this situation, they take it completely for granted. From infancy, they have looked at a myriad strangers all over the globe, and have been looked at by just as many. Their fear levels are low, since nothing can happen to such children—either by accident or deliberate harm—without it being instantly known by those who love them. Watched over in this way, eight-year-olds feel free to wander both city and countryside, exploring as most children could not possibly be allowed to do nowadays.

  The author Damon Knight described such a world in his short story “I See You,” a fascinating tale about a future when all people own machines that can look through any wall. Defying the hackneyed plot of abuse by some dictator, Knight instead posited an era when everything has eerily changed. Lies and injustice have vanished, and privacy is considered a quaint, archaic concept, like phlogiston. In Knight’s spooky world there are no mysteries. Moreover, people find, at first to their surprise, that they do not miss them.