The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

by David Brin

  This excursion into human nature applies to our debate over a transparent society. As a culture, we face problems that rush toward us at great speed—from energy crises and new kinds of pollution to terrorism, cloning, and reliance on frail computer software. As lag times between cause and effect keep shrinking, our best efforts invariably bring about unintended consequences. Mistakes can wreak damage ranging from mere millions of dollars all the way to possible ecocide, effective destruction of the earth’s functioning biosphere.

  Amid this ferment, critics and complainers sometimes seem insufferable. Not all criticism is on target! History and life experience testify that most of the screeching, self-righteous, mutually contradictory stands taken by raucous advocacy groups eventually wind up being labeled drivel, or at best tendentious exaggeration. Yet ideally, that should not matter! In the free market of ideas, charge and countercharge should carom and collide under the gaze of a detached and bemused citizenry until some truth pops out.

  Take one anecdote: the Alaska Pipeline. Engineers working for ARCO now admit that flaws in their initial design might have wrought catastrophe, but attacks by implacable environmental organizations during public hearings forced them back to the drawing board until they could make a convincing case that all plausible failure modes were accounted for. The redesigned pipeline was eventually built and, said one engineer, “We have both oil and caribou.”

  Over the years, contemptuous cynics keep proclaiming that “the public” is shallow and incapable of taking a long view. But then what happened in the late 1970s, when chemist Sherwood Rowland expressed concern about an esoteric decline in the parts-per-million concentration of a trace corrosive gas in the ethereal zones a hundred thousand feet above the South Pole? The “hole” in the ozone barrier (protecting Earth against harmful ultraviolet radiation) at first struck reporters as far too abstruse for public consideration, until waves of average people expressed deep concern. Investigations were launched, scientists debated heatedly, and soon international agreements largely curbed the particular pollution at fault. An imperfect solution, but remarkable nonetheless.

  Are such examples of open debate, followed by constructive consensus, less frequent in the 1990s? Leaders of some advocacy groups do seem more interested in being right than in finding solutions. Courteous debate is out. Demonizing your opponent is in.

  This problem hasn’t gone unnoticed. A new movement is afoot. People and political parties are all talking about a return to civic virtues, calling for a resurrection of manners, preaching that we should learn to get along. In other words, we ought to “be nice to one another.”

  Have we come full circle, then? Are we back to admonishing people? Asking them to be good, for goodness’ sake? Kings and priests used to enforce civility at sword point. But short of calling in troops, will it really be effective to exhort activists—high on self-righteousness endorphins—to calm down, take turns talking, and maybe listen to the other guy for a change?

  Of course not!

  Exhortation, all by itself, is not the answer. It never was, no matter how often and poetically it’s been tried.

  Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Don’t assign to stupidity what might be due to ignorance.

  And try not to assume your opponent is the ignorant one—until you can show it isn’t you. M. N. PLANO

  VIRULENT IDEAS

  For about a week in early 1997, frenetic helicopters buzzed around my home. They were swarming toward an elite communiy beyond the next hill where three dozen people had just taken their own lives, attempting to follow their charismatic leader to the next astral plane aboard a cometary spacecraft. Pinned by television camera lights, residents of Rancho Santa Fe voiced dismay that their sanctuary had been invaded twice—first by a strange cult that lived for months unnoticed in their midst, and again by throngs of newsfolk, peering at their patrician enclave from both ground and air. This episode epitomized many trade-offs between secrecy and transparency, above all an age-old debate over the toxicity of ideas.

  Are ideas inherently dangerous?

  Perhaps more than any other question, this one is crucial to determining whether humans can or should maintain privacy—and indeed, whether we can or should remain individually free. It is an ancient quandary.

  One side maintains that people are innately frail, pliable, and prone to brainwashing. Unless carefully guided, humans all too easily adopt unwholesome beliefs and behaviors that could undermine everything a civilization holds dear. For example, Plato preached that much art, even certain passages in Homer, tended to have an evil influence upon the young and accordingly, in his ideal state, should be banned. Countless myths and legends have preached that knowledge can be dangerous or destructive, for example, Eve and the serpent, or Pandora and her box. The theme is repeated in many familiar works, from Paradise Lost, Faust, and Frankenstein all the way to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Most past societies preached tradition and fidelity to ancestral ways.

  When alien or unconventional concepts did arise among the masses, kings and priests often squelched such outbreaks ruthlessly. In some cases—as when the Roman Empire crushed Judea, or when the Tokugawa Shoguns suppressed Japanese Christians, or when the Chinese imperium smashed the rebellious Tai‘pings—defense of orthodoxy was justified as a matter of public hygiene, to protect society against infection by something virulent or poisonous. When Senator Joseph McCarthy led witch-hunts against fellow citizens who had even glancingly touched the contagion of communism, the ensuing hysteria was couched as a war of quarantine against a mortally communicable ideology.

  Such fears have not always been unfounded! History is rife with novel ideas that seemed to spread like pandemic fevers, sweeping older creeds aside and creating new priestly castes—who then devoted themselves to defending the next status quo. The sudden advance of Marxist oligarchies in Russia and China, though somewhat less ominous than McCarthy’s followers claimed at the time, was certainly frightening for contemporaries to behold. Other examples might include the way both Islam and Orthodox Christianity abruptly transformed themselves from persecuted sects to established state religions and then went about curbing predecessor faiths, as well as smashing any subsequent apostasy to come along.

  Various theories have been submitted to explain this pervasive pattern, which recurred on every inhabited continent. Is doctrinal purity a tool used by ruling classes to control and manipulate subject populations? Is it a useful way for nations to maintain cohesion against external influences? Recently some creative thinkers, inspired by microbiology, have suggested that we look beyond nations, tribes, or leaders to the ideas themselves. In his seminal work The Selfsh Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term memes to describe “self-replicating ideas.”

  In brief, Dawkins suggests that certain concepts may invade host organisms (human minds) in much the same way that viruses hijack the cells of a living body, reproducing avidly, and then causing those hosts to react prejudicially against competing memes. In other words, ideas may sometimes evolve traits that enhance their own reproductive success, independent of their hosts’ better interests. In human terms, this might explain why so many religions have “exclusionary rules,” dismissing other theologies as heresy and demanding that children be guarded against exposure to conflicting doctrines.

  It hardly matters whether “memes” have any basis in fact (at one time the concept of viruses was considered far-out) or if they just metaphorically depict the way many tribes doggedly clenched their core beliefs despite great hardship. Either way, we can recognize an ancient and recurring tendency for people to react paranoically toward foreign notions—a penchant to believe that gullible citizens must be protected, and their thoughts kept pure, lest they fall into evil ways.

  Is this pattern universal? If it were, little more need be said. We would be doomed by our basic temperaments to endless petty squabbles over picayune ideological differences, until the end of time. Fortunately, human nature i
sn’t that simple.

  In fact, there is another way in which people sometimes react to novel concepts—not with paranoia, but with delight.

  The technological shock to our moral systems means that we are going to have to teach our children that the locus of control must be in their heads and hearts—not in the laws or machines that make information so imperviously available. Before we let our kids on the Internet, they had better have a solid moral grounding and some common sense.

  HOWARD RHEINCOLD

  Maturity

  From Spinoza to Montaigne to Chief Sequoia, rare dissenters have argued that a confident, enlightened person cannot be harmed by mere words. According to their minority belief, children can be raised with critical reasoning skills so that, as they mature, they will be able to evaluate new ideas with a mix of curiosity and skepticism, culling what is wrong or harmful while incorporating the rest into an ever-expanding intellectual panorama.

  This attitude is quite opposite to the “frailty thesis.” One might call it the “maturity argument,” since it posits that we can learn from our mistakes (and those of our parents), growing wiser, in effect inoculating ourselves against the deleterious effects of bad ideas, while remaining open to good from any source. Goethe called this tätige skepsis, a skeptical but open-minded willingness to consider new or alternative views.

  “The flip side of living in tribes is living in the world—in the kosmos,” says computer scientist Stefan Jones, in another approach to the same idea.

  Cosmopolitanism is Maturity’s eccentric brother; the bohemian uncle who drops by with weird gifts for the kids and lots of strange stories. Aunt Frailty wants to throw away the shrunken heads and the brass lamp with naked people on it, and tries to put the kids to bed early before Cosmo has had a few and starts talking about his visit to the Yoshiwara and the time he ate dog. But Mother Maturity lets the kids listen from the stairs and secretly pulls the gifts out of the trash before collection day. Maturity certainly keeps a wary eye on Cosmo. On the other hand, she doesn’t want her kids to turn out to be dullards, like their cousins.

  In fact, the very notion of a liberal education is aimed at creating just the sort of thoughtful, curious, aware, and judicious person who can operate as a sovereign, independent-minded citizen of a free commonwealth—a model so successful that it is all too easy to forget how revolutionary it was, just a little while ago.

  These two views of the toxicity of ideas have been battling for a long time, though in most traditional cultures the contest was one-sided. Even in the neo-West, where the maturity thesis has gained belated prominence, large constituencies still hold to older views of human nature. A belief that information can be dangerous pervades all boundaries of class, ethnicity, or politics. While the “religious right” pushes to expurgate prurient or racy content from mass media in order to protect families and children, an equal devotion to censorship now burgeons from many radicals of the left, for example, academic feminists who impute a direct causal link between pornography and aberrant or abusive male sexual behavior. Whatever the relative merits of their arguments, it is fascinating to witness alliances between the likes of Andrea Dworkin and Jerry Falwell, each of them proclaiming the same fundamental belief: that some wise elite should hold sway over what others see and hear. Clearly, superficial political differences matter less than deeper, shared assumptions regarding human nature.

  Yet despite such vehement recidivist coalitions, we have clearly entered a new era. For the first time, a major society has based its legal code, education system, and mass media on the maturity thesis. In particular, the essential protections of the United States Bill of Rights are rooted in a belief that free individuals can be trusted to weigh contrasting arguments and reach conclusions that, if imperfect, will at least be right often enough to justify governance by universal franchise. Although the framers of the Constitution did insert elements meant to slow down the momentary passions that sometimes surge like fevers through a populace, their trust in mass sovereignty was nevertheless unprecedented in human annals. If anything, that belief has grown stronger with each passing generation.

  Closely related to the issue of toxicity is another long-running dispute— over whether evil manifests itself only in what people do, or in their thoughts as well. Some cultures, religions, and psychologies teach that “thinking it is the same as doing it.” Others say that the mind is where we do experiments, contemplating possibilities and outcomes in order to choose which ones we will then try to put into effect. It is our outward behavior that affects other people, and so becomes their legitimate concern. But the world within belongs to each of us.

  Fealty to the latter attitude is widespread among “netizens,” and was recently expressed by John Perry Barlow.

  Action is what the body does, over which physical authority may be exercised. In cyberspace, I might threaten to kill you, [but] in New York, I can slit your throat. This is why I said [to governments] in my declaration that “we must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies.” I’m not seeking to evade legal responsibility for our physical actions. But rendering the depiction of crimes criminal is an effort to extend government authority beyond the physical into the mental.

  At this point the reader might guess my bias in this ancient argument. With both heart and intellect, I avow that the free flow of ideas is vital to civilization. Moral and pragmatic factors support my belief (for example, the role of criticism as a vital antidote to error). Yet I admit that another reason underlies my fidelity to openness. I admire candor and despise censorship because I was raised that way.

  Here we reap a harvest of irony. For if a majority of modern citizens believe in the maturity thesis and are trying to raise their children to have open, autonomous minds, this has happened largely because we were taught these values by a relentless campaign of public instruction, conveyed through mass media.

  We mentioned this briefly in chapter 1. In novels, films, and popular music, it is nearly always the eccentric, the curious, or the unconventional who get favored treatment. Movies from Altered States, to Aladdin, to Thelma and Louise, have repeatedly conveyed the same message: Make up your own minds. Question authority.

  Be open to things that are new and strange.

  That’s the irony. If we citizens are becoming more independent and open-minded, the change came only after some of the most persistent propaganda in history! Propaganda that so romanticized individualism and idiosyncrasy that many citizens now base their self-worth on how different they are from everybody else.

  In other words, those of us who defend openness, claiming that people needn’t be coddled or steered, should honestly concede that we were guided toward this belief by one of the strangest and most intense sales campaigns ever seen. One whose roots are only now starting to be explored.

  The debate between frailty and maturity continues today in confrontations over public policy issues exemplified by the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Passed in 1996 by the Republican-dominated Congress and signed by President Clinton, this legislation established criminal penalties for distributing “indecent” material over the Internet in ways that might allow minors access. When the CDA was argued before the United States Supreme Court, one aspect in dispute was whether Internet-based services such as America Online should be viewed as “common carriers,” which are not responsible for content, or whether their role is more that of “publishers,” answerable if some client uses their channels to pander or commit libel.

  At that level, the arguments may seem picky and recondite. But the fundamental issue can be expressed more simply. As Newsweek correspondent Steven Levy put it,

  Here is the nub: in cyberspace, the most democratic of mediums, should priority be given to allowing adults to exercise their constitutional right to speech? Or, as the CDA dictates, should they have to curb their expression—even certain constitutionally protected speech with redeeming social va
lue like sex-education, highfalutin nude art, and George Carlin comedy routines—so that Net-surfing children will not be exposed to so-called patently offensive content?

  No two goals could seem more archetypal and worthy than protecting children and ensuring free speech. To find such values in apparent conflict reinforces the fact that we live in a complex and imperfect world. But now at least we can see the argument in a new light—as a classic face-off between the maturity and frailty models of human mental life. Typically, with passionate voices rising on both sides, the most extreme proponents of each philosophy denounce their rivals as evil harbingers of a looming dark age.

  PROPAGANDIZED TO REBEL?

  I have made the counterintuitive argument that we are “raised to rebel” before many audiences, and it nearly always provokes the same response.

  “How can you say the media are pro-individual?” Someone demands. “We’re told over and over again to conform!”

  To which I respond with a challenge. “I’ll bet you can’t cite a single popular book or film from the last decade whose professed message is conformity. Yet we could stay here all night listing famous novels, movies, and TV shows revolving around a single idea: that it is admirable to be independent-minded, eccentric, even defiant. Consider one of the most celebrated motion pictures of the last generation, Steven Spielberg’s E.T., whose chief moral is that modern children should hide an alien from their own freely elected tribal elders! Can you name any other people who taught their kids such lessons? That other is better than self? That rebellion can be more honorable than obedience? That independent thinking is admirable, even when mistaken, and that authority should always be held in deep suspicion?”