The Transparent Society

by David Brin

  97 ... Creative Incentive Coalition ... See David Angel and Eli Zelkha, “The Copyright Question: Making the Net Safe and Profitable for Copyrighted Content,” Internet World, January 1997. For more on the Creative Incentive Coalition, see http://www.cic.org. For more on the Digital Future Coalition, see http://www.ari.net.dfc.

  98 ... writers are reduced to the honorable penury ... Both Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, whose works were routinely pirated in the last century, supplemented their incomes by going on extensive speaking tours, taking gate receipts from fans who flocked to public readings. But this “solution” only helps the top rank; it does nothing for mid-list authors or other journeyman artists trying to get by. Incidentally the Three Stooges did much the same thing in the 1940s, making their fortunes not through movies, but at personal appearances. So perhaps there will be a living to be made by people like me in the future after all, moving agilely back and forth from the sublime to the ridiculous.

  99 ... “noncreative” in formation, such as telephone directories ... Recent court decisions seem to have preempted this area. Other jurists believe it is wide open for negotiation or modification by Congress. The issue is of real importance. Someone has to invest the time and money to consolidate, organize, and package such information, and there should be a legal construct that values and protects that labor. If copyright (and patent) law grants protection for a limited period of time as an incentive to disclosure of “creative” info-properties, then it seems fair also to offer incentives for open use of information that is not copyrightable.

  99 ... CoS attorneys ... forced the owner of the world’s most renowned “anonymizer” ... For one perspective on this event, see: http://www2.thecia.net/users/rnewman/scientology/anon/penet.html. See also Net. Wars by Wendy M. Grossman (New York Univ. Press, 1997).

  100 ... corporations force executives and other employees to sign noridisclosure ... In a related, disturbing development, the doctrine of “inevitable disclosure” is expanding the ability of employers to use laws on trade secrets to prevent ex-employees from going to work for competitors. This is precisely the tempting, but stupid, “fallacy of security” that the likes of Karl Popper, Edward Teller, Arthur Kantrowitz, and others have been fighting for years—a self-defeating program that prevents these companies from hiring valuable expertise from other companies, stifling the overall flux of useful innovations and skills, thus destroying the health of the entity it was meant to protect. (See later discussions of how the West barely avoided this trap in the Cold War.) An interesting case in this area is PepsiCo, Inc. v. Redmond, 54 F.3d 1262 (7th Cir. 1995). Or see Mark Halligan’s trade secrets home page at http://www.execpc.com/~mhallign/doctrine.html.

  102 ... propose ending the “fiction” of copyright ... See Lee Daniel Crocker, EXTROPIANS commentary: http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html. Robin Hanson of the University of California at Berkeley dealt with similar ideas as far back as 1987. See http://hanson.berkeley.edu/linktext.html and http://hanson.berkeley.edu/findcritics. html.

  102 ... Give it your best shot ... This is said with a smile ... and acknowledging that book reviews are already a simple implementation of “tag commentan.”

  104 ... look foolish trying to charge for songs played ... ASCAP and BMI do, in fact, try to charge for songs played by local bands, by imposing a facilities license on places that typically host weddings. Any restaurant with a banquet room or a piano player in the bar is fair game for random monitoring of frequency of songs played. Those statistics are used to apportion the nonitemized revenue among songs in the ASCAP catalog. At one point, ASCAP sought to establish the same site licensing system for nonprofit summer camps. Because those camps do charge for their programs, they fall technically under the “public performance for profit” section of the Copyright Act, but the resulting public uproar convinced ASCAP that its idea was a bad one. The ASCAP/BMI system may be instructive. It shows how suppliers of information could band together and set up a system for aggregating and apportioning revenues. In fact, both companies are said to be developing high-speed Web browsers to patrol the Net looking for music infringements. Well-funded content owners may be among the first to have truly sophisticated software agents doing their work of policing their own self-interest on the Net around the clock.

  108 ... one paramount source of danger ... Steven Levy, Newsweek technology columnist and author of Crypto, a book about the cryptography revolution, who has been following the “Clipper chip” controversy and its follow-ons, observed the persistence of single-direction ire in the controversy over encryption. “As the years go by, the subject gains more attention, almost all of it directed at attacking the government’s case....”

  109 ... governments that are well grounded in what works ... This passage from Dorothy Denning comes from personal correspondence with the author, as does the following comment by Barry Fulton, a project director for the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “I am struck that government as the Great Enemy doesn’t sufficiently distinguish among types of governments. I would want to make a sharp distinction between the government of an authoritarian state and that of a genuine democracy. There are clearly examples of deceit, malfeasance, and ignorance in the most benign of governments (ranging from the Tonkin Gulf resolution to Watergate, from forced sterilization in the Scandinavian countries to a safe haven for Nazi gold in Switzerland)—but there is no evidence among modern democracies of systematic, sustained campaigns against their citizens. Totalitarian governments, on the other hand, often sustain themselves at the expense of their citizens. That citizens in a democracy maintain their vigilance against the possible abuses of government is healthy; that government comes to be defined as the enemy is either evidence of the failure of government or mass paranoia.”

  109 ... define the terms ... Hal Finney is senior software engineer with Pretty Good Privacy, Inc., and was an original developer of the widely used Internet cryptography program PGP. He has been a central figure in the cypherpunks mailing list, developing cryptographic and anonymity software in conjunction with other cypherpunks.

  110 ... government is ideally a tool ... This point of view was charmingly expressed by a nineteenth-century jurist, who described constitutional law as a set of rules made “... by Peter when sober, to govern Peter when drunk.”

  112 ... civil service ... in imperial China ... Some people offer the vaunted Chinese civil service system as an example of enduring, merit-based social mobility. I agree it should be appreciated in the context of its time. But in truth, the tests drew candidates from a narrow pool of scholars in the mandarin social order. That still left the vast uneducated majority to fester below in a society whose Confucian ethos justified paternal despotism no less readily than Plato did.

  On another matter, it might have been preferable to choose a company other than Procter & Gamble, when I spoke of corporations (not) having the potential to take over the world. While it seems odd that the same company would manufacture both a line of disposable diapers for adults and a new fat substitute that promotes incontinence, this seems less worrisome than, say, the fact that General Dynamics Corporation, at any given moment, controls more warships, missiles, and war planes than all but a half dozen nations on earth. A thought-provoking concept—even if at present not quite worrisome.

  112 Examples include the takeover ... Each of these examples had its own unique aspects, recalling an expression sometimes used by scholars who study the past: “History never exactly repeats itself, but it sure does rhyme a lot.”

  112 ... prevent takeover by a true ruling class ... Thomas Jefferson, warning about the danger of self-entrenching aristocracies, prescribed a new revolution every twenty years. This is usually read as exaggeration or polemic. But a historian might argue that America has steered its narrow course between despotisms of left and right by sticking close to Jefferson’s formula, tweaking and adjusting the rules every generation or so. Some of these evolutions were violent, notably the Civil War. Early twentie
th-century Progressive movements, on the other hand, left an enduring legacy of antitrust and other reforms which could also be thought “revolutionary.” So might the populist revolt of Andrew Jackson, or, in a cultural sense, the Roaring Twenties. Consider the effects of one well-timed act of Congress, the GI Bill of Rights, which helped a million returning World War II veterans—sons of farmers and factory laborers—get university educations hitherto undreamt of. This piece of social engineering nearly demolished the functioning class system in America for more than a generation—at least for white people. For others, justice and opportunity had to wait twenty more years, for the civil rights movement and other medium-scale social fevers, which, largely nonviolently, inoculated the nation with more renewal and change. Whatever other effects these episodes had, from music and culture to law and leisure, and whatever faults they left unsolved for later, each made American culture more open and equal than before.

  CHAPTER 5

  117 ... who claim to have been abducted by UFOs ... Carl Sagan pointed out that in no known instance has a returning UFO traveller revealed a significant and verifiable new fact that science did not already know.

  A more general repudiation of this modern mythology can be found in an essay “What to Say to a UFO,” published in my collection, Otherness (New York: Bantam Books, 1994). In brief, I am not averse to discussing the possibility, or even the likelihood, of extra-terrestrial life “out there.” As a scientist I’ve written extensively about SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), and as a science fiction author I am well known for depicting interesting, plausible aliens. I am even willing to posit that Earth may have been visited in the past. Yet, most UFO “reports” seem to have a special quality that coats them in the same dreamlike aspect. The key element to note, shared by nearly all such tales, is the purported behavior of those little silver guys, (as related by witnesses and/or purported kidnapping victims). Not one report describes the sort of activity that would be engaged in by grownups. From twirling wheatfields to disemboweling cattle, or subjecting humans to rectal and neural probes, or simply buzzing Washington, D.C., in the dead of night, each “incident” instead depicts the same kind of behavior that other cultures once ascribed to fairy beings or e)ves—capricious, secretive and rather nasty. In fact, the “elf” analogy is deeply thought-provoking.

  I’m not asserting as an absolute fact that UFO aliens don’t exist. But if they do, they are the sort of noxiously unpleasant visitors who deserve to be snubbed.

  119 ... what benefits the individual leader nearly always prevails ... The example of peacock selection strategy illustrates one of the chief rules of evolution believed by most biologists: that it is individuals who are the grist of evolution. In fact, only a few scientists believe that groups or species experience direct Darwinism, and those few concede that it is a weak or secondary effect, compared to the dominant role of individual selection.

  120 Robert Wright, end of chapter 9, The Moral Animal (New York: Pantheon, 1994).

  123 Plato preached that much art ... See The Republic. Although his chief paternalistic concern was with the soul-purity of men governing the state, not with the masses, Plato favored universal censorship because there was no way to predict which men would pass the tests for membership in the council of rulers.

  123 ... legends have preached that knowledge can be dangerous ... For a scan of this notion through past literature, see Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Promethevs to Pornography. As for modern fables, it can be interesting to juxtapose what two motion pictures from the same franchise say about the toxicity of ideas. Throughout the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, viewers are shown a side-plot about a daring thirst for knowledge. Characters in that film boldly create an entire solar system, including a planet covered with new life forms. The story ends with them gazing proudly at their beautiful creation. But the sequel, written and directed by others, seemed obsessed with reversing this theme. Step by step, Search for Spock checked off every box of the “Frankenstein Syndrome,” preaching that humans who arrogate the powers of heaven will be punished, their false creations destroyed, and the individual responsible for this act of hubris killed by his own monster. In this illustration from popular culture we see how the two conflicting attitudes described in chapter 5 remain at war to this day.

  123 For more on the concept of memes see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. A more recent and detailed treatment provided by Aaron Lynch in Thought Contagion (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

  124 ... a solid moral grounding and some common sense ... Quote by Howard Rheingold, Whole Earth Review, Winter 1994, 95.

  125 ... flip side of living in tribes is living in the world ... in the kosmos ... Private communication to the author by Stefan Jones, Oracle Corporation computer scientist.

  125 ... some wise elite should hold sway over what others see ... Another idea liked by both intolerant rightists and intolerant leftists is the notion that humanity is meant to live in “tribes,” and that attempts to mix or melt cultural and ethnic boundaries are both futile and unfair. Certain leftists appreciate this notion because it offers another excuse to beat up on dead white imperialist males and replace the “melting pot” with a “salad bowl.” Certain rightists savor the way it absolves them from having to worry about human rights in foreign lands (“It’s just their way. What right do we have to intervene?”) and gives fresh legitimacy to the hoary old notion of racial separation. The important point to note is that such alliances cross old-fashioned political boundaries, almost at 90-degree angles. Their shared postulates can be stronger (and scarier) than any normal ideology.

  126 ... “thinking it is the same as doing it” ... A minor note: it has been said that if thoughts are morally the same as actions, few human males will be found in Heaven.

  126 ... an effort to extend government authority beyond the physical into the mental ... John Perry Barlow here refers to his “Declaration of Cyberspace Independence,” Wired, June 1996 (cited earlier).

  128 ... cite a popular book or film ... whose professed message is conformity ... One that comes to mind is The Nightmare Before Christmas, which seems to preach that someone born to one class or profession should not aspire to compete in another realm. Yet, the main character is so joyfully bold and irreverent that the film can hardly be called “conformist” in tone.

  129 Government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation ... In the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania—American Civil Liberties Union, Civil Action et al. v. Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States No. 96-963 before Sloviter, Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; Buckwalter and Dalzell, Judges, United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania June 11, 1996.

  131 Project Censor: The News That Didn’t Make the News...Contact Peter Philips, Sociology Department, Sonoma State University, 1801 East Cotati Avenue, Rohnert Park, CA 94928, or project.censored@sonoma.edu.

  132 ... they diagnose why some events may not be not covered ... Although they use the word “censorship” liberally. Project Censor activists explain that underreporting of news in the United States is less often due to deliberate intimidation than to sociological or structural factors. Examples include (1) a desire not to offend advertisers, (2) overreliance on official PR handouts for story content, and (3) ideological selfcensorship, that is, avoiding coverage of positions that lie too far from consensus points of view, either to the left or right.

  133 ... tenable that advertisers and politically connected publishers wield undue influence at various periodicals ... Of course there are attempts by corporate and government interests to meddle in the reporting of news. Given the nature of conceited alpha males, it would be surprising if bosses did not try to exercise feudal power over journalists, to suppress stories they dislike. The question is rather how frequent, successful, or corrosive of accountability such efforts are nowadays. In a passionate article in Newsweek (
21 July 1997, 53), Jonathan Alter recently proclaimed, “We can’t expect everyone in journalism to be a maryr. Even so, it’s important to complain loudly when editorial freedom is trampled on by corporations, just as we would if the government told us what to print.” A deeply moving appeal, which I support wholeheartedly. And yet, when it was time for Alter to give an example of heinous interference, he came up with just one, in which an editor friend received a tepid request from on high. His friend refused the intrusive demand and came away unharmed.

  Surely worse examples happen. At a local level, perhaps every day. On the other hand, if the only case Alter could cite had a happy and courageous ending, his plaint sounds like praising the present system with faint damns.

  And yet, there is a major “catch” in the argument that reporters can always move to greener pastures if they feel their freedom of inquiry is being squelched. In order for this to be true, the law must be fiercely protective of press freedom, a condition that has not yet ripened in many parts of the world, and is unevenly enforced in many parts of the neo-West. Another problem can be press monopolies. For instance, in Australia—a land noted for independent spirits—most cities are served by newspapers that are members of either the Murdoch or the Packer consortia. Under these conditions, a print journalist who wants a steady living might feel obliged to heed the advice of major clients and advertisers.

  134 ... not the way living organisms do it... Recall how the Internet arose out of concern over how best to defend the United States against foreign foes. Overly rigid central command systems were seen as fatally flawed. New concepts of dispersed responsibility led to packet-switching technology, and eventually the Internet’s magnificent chaos.

  134 Criticism might be viewed as a civilization’s equivalent of an immune system.... In fact, mutual criticism in society has the potential of being far more effective in correcting errors than the immune system of a living organism. As John Gilmore points out, “The immune system can’t improve on the body’s pre-existing design. But criticism can.” (Personal communication to the author.)