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

by David Brin

  The same truth applies when we find ourselves arguing about human rights with tyrannical nations. So far, it has proved rather futile to sermonize at dictators, preaching moral justifications for freedom of speech. As we’ll discuss later (chapter 10, “Global Transparency”), the rulers of modern China and other authoritarian regimes need only counter with protestations of cultural sovereignty, accusing the West of trying to impose its own social values on the world.

  Exhortation is a pallid and mostly unavailing approach to achieving change—a fact that applies even more to nations than it does to individuals. But suppose instead we take a different strategy toward such old-fashioned ruling cliques. What if we explain that we seek freedom for their subject peoples because it is vital for our own safety’s sake? Because a nation that lacks free speech and open criticism will inevitably make dire errors, misjudge threats or opportunities, and even launch adventures that it cannot possibly win. (The 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein was a prime example. Or go back and revisit similar blunders by Hitler and Stalin.) Although the more resilient, error-correcting cultures will almost certainly “win” such future clashes, the cost could be enormous, making vast pain our common lot on earth.

  How much better if such huge mistakes can be avoided in the first place! Toward that end, we will all be much safer if the citizens of every nation can stand erect and speak freely to their leaders.

  I am not the first to mention this fact—that the great strength of neo-Western civilization rests not on its ethereal ideals and justifications but upon its foundation of hard-as-stone pragmatism. Jean François Revel, author of Democracy Against Itself and Without Marx or Jesus, expressed it thus: “Democracy’s practical superiority derives from the fact that it is the only system which, through trial and error, can become aware of its mistakes and correct them. Totalitarianism cannot correct itself: it is forced to follow its logic until the final catastrophe.”

  The irony here is that our relative immunity against fallacy is in large part carried out via the adversarial tug and push of countless indignant, righteous, and often narrow-minded individuals, many of whom would be anything but tolerant or democratically inclined if by some magic or intrigue they ever achieved coercive power. The service they provide for the rest of us—the calm, relatively contented majority—cannot be overstated.

  And yet, one might be forgiven for nursing a favorite little daydream—that perhaps just once a month, say at noon on the thirtieth day, each of us might pause amid our irate protestations against what we see as wrong, take a deep breath, and recite the following sentence aloud:

  I am a member of a civilization.

  All our talk about immune systems and “social T-cells” resonates with the core topic of this book, transparency, for these metaphors illustrate two basic things about our fascinating new world,. 1. Openness and candor are essential for the survival of any civilization, especially a global throng of over six billion human beings.

  2. Many aspects of openness are already so deeply rooted in the system that nothing will ever tear them out. At least, not without surgery so brutal that it would take the annihilation of millions.

  The main question may be whether we can fine-tune this fractious, rambunctious system, so that useful criticism will not be drowned out beneath floods of screeching rudeness and the memic equivalents of cancer. Toward such a goal, endeavors like Sonoma State University’s Project Censor set a good example. We needn’t affirm their more extravagant charges of widespread corruption in mainstream news media in order to credit the project with worthy service, providing an annual list of topics meriting further investigation—a menu for hungry T-cells—and letting would-be heroes of openness pick and choose from an array of causes to which they can devote their untapped, fervent energies.

  The example of the NASA Cassini mission seems to illustrate the point. Within weeks after Project Censor published its list of underreported stories, a surge of interest focused on that space endeavor, from both media reporters and suddenly aroused advocacy groups. None of them seemed to notice purported “pressure” from NASA hierarchs to squelch the story. But by the time Cassini launched (without mishap), a thorough national discussion of the pros and cons had taken place.

  As if aware of this synergistic need for open debate, the United States Supreme Court in Januay 1998 unanimously stripped automakers, tobacco companies, and other firms of a method they were widely using to stifle “whistle-blowers” who release internal documents or testify about corporate misbehavior. According to this ruling, nondisclosure agreements in one state cannot be applied in ways that block important testimony in another, opening yet another crack in the walls that corporations have erected to keep secrets and stave off accountability. (Similar whistle-blower protections have applied to federal workers for many years.) In other words, information, the life blood of both commerce and justice, must be allowed to flow.

  Let me reiterate. It does not matter what fraction of T-cells are right in their worried search for errors to assail. In fact, as society improves, the percentage may decline! (Or else we may keep raising our standards, pouncing on errors that seemed too “minor” to notice in the past.)

  In the long run, efficiency is not urgent. What counts is that every important decision should get sniffed, argued over, and poked at from all sides before it can be put into effect, thus hopefully preventing yet another major tragedy of unintended consequences. The vital thing to note, as we conclude this chapter, is that the new-style social immune system thrives on passion, and even large doses of overwrought ego, but that hatefulness and self-righteousness are less beneficial. Viewed over the long run, they are often early signs of metastasis by a promising T-cell. Its transformation from potential savior into a virulent kind of predatory parasite.

  That’s probably all right. As long as we live in a relatively transparent society, other T-cells will often swarm in to neutralize the danger. (We will see this illustrated in the next chapter, in a story about struggles between two computer hackers.) And yet, it seems a pity for so much energy and angst to be wasted.

  Is it too much to hope that someday perhaps all the angry young men and women will finally see how valuable and integral they are to a society they claim to despise?

  Would we spend so much time, effort, and money training them to be rebels, if that were not the case?

  ESSENCES AND EXPERIMENTS

  People are flexible enough to make any theory look good for a while. What is impossible to be sure of, though, is how much the theory might have limited what people could have become.... The self-congratulatory fallacies of artificial intelligence are similiar to the ways in which communists fooled themselves into believing they had found the key to paradise, while actually they had only blinded themselves to their own humanity for a time.

  JARON LANIER

  Imagine an encounter between two of history’s greatest minds, each defending his own view of reality.

  PLATO: Our senses are defective; therefore, we cannot discover truth through experience. That chair, for instance. Despite all your gritty “experiments,” you will never determine what it is. Not perfectly.

  Therefore give up! Empiricism is useless. Seek the essence of truth through pure reason.

  GALILEO: You’re right. My eyesight is poor. My touch is flawed. I will never know with utter perfection what this chair is.

  Nevertheless, I can carve away untruths and wrong theories. I can demolish fancy “essences” and epicycles and disprove selfhypnotizing incantations. With good experiments—and the helpful criticism of my peers—I can find out what the chair is not.

  Neuroscientists have learned that a baby approaches birth with far more brain cells—and more links between those cells—than he or she will require. While learning important life tasks, the child does not add new synapses. Rather, she culls those that are unneeded.

  Instead of a nervous system that is a “blank slate,” we begin life with countless mutually contradic
tory possibilities already written. A majority must be eliminated for the remaining connections to do useful work. In other words, learning is as much about editing as about creating new ideas.

  But we already know this! Pause and let your own mind free-associate for a time. Freud elucidated how each of us carries a roiling storm of thoughts, some pertinent, and a great many others that seem to whirl in and out with no apparent meaning or correlation to the business at hand. Every waking moment, we perform semiconscious editing tasks, winnowing this tempest of associations down to a manageable roar. One secret of effective creativity is to do this just right, so that enough cunning images, nifty juxtapositions, and eerie correlations get through to inspire new ways of viewing old problems. Nevertheless, it is principally by culling innumerable useless notions that we arrive at a few that seem worth keeping, or even acting on.

  As it is in our brains and the whirling maelstroms of our thoughts, so it is with science. Karl Popper and others have shown that discovery is not about coming up with a grand, idealized theory and then “proving it true.” Instead, research tends to be a messy process. Each hypothesis breaks up into dozens of subtheories, each with different implications that can then be tested on the lab bench, or in the field. Half of a scientist’s job is to come up with experiments that might disprove a favorite theory and then honestly perform those experiments—or invite others to do so. This is called “falsification,” and it amounts to the ultimate act of honesty. A scientist says: Here is my cherished model of the world. And here is a list of

  potential experimental results that would prove it wrong! I chal-

  lenge anyone to check it out. If none of these results happen, that

  does not necessarily mean my model is right ... but it will grow

  unlikely that I’m wrong!

  Now read Plato—Phaedrus, or The Republic—or any other articulate promoter of a persuasive, idealized dogma, from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand. There is no similarity between their version of Truth (with a capital T, perfect and unassailable) and the tentatively true (always lowercase) models of science. This is especially pertinent when it comes to ideal models of human nature.

  In chapter 5, I presented some metaphors, wild and entertaining results of combining facts with correlated observations (for example, all that talk of “social T-cells”). I hope they lent some insight to phenomena such as the surge of pro-eccentricity propaganda and suspicion of authority. But that is a long way from contending that any of it is perfectly true! The most gruesome crimes in history were committed by parties and ideologies that professed to have genuine, unassailable pictures of how human beings function. For example, Hegel taught that nothing is real except the “whole” or “absolute” ... a perfect society that all of history will inevitably and tendentiously move toward. (His image of predestined perfection was the contemporary Prussian state of his own time. It was the duty of individuals to serve that state.) Fascists and Leninists extrapolated this idealism to justify the worst regimes of this century. Of course their simplistic pictures nearly always ignored the vast range of women and men who would never fit their neat philosophies.

  These exceptions angered Stalin, Hitler, and other tyrants, who did not like falsification. Not one bit. They treated all competing ideas, or even slight deviations from dogma, as “toxic.”

  That point is especially relevant to this book because so many arguments boil down to a continuing face-off between pragmatism and idealism. Admittedly, most of the idealists in the next few chapters are far from being tyrants. Indeed, most are devoted, in their own ways, to fighting vile accumulations of power, and to offering prescriptions for safeguarding liberty. There is nothing wrong with this. But when people start believing in the perfect reality of their metaphors, they take footsteps down the path of Plato and so many others. A path that has, in the long run, led to more harm than good.

  Recall the quotation from Jaron Lanier that began this section. Go back and replace “artificial intelligence” with “crypto-anarchy,” and Lanier might be describing the latest techno-transcendentalist fetish—a passionate belief that all will be well if only we pledge our faith and trust to encrypted chains of bits and bytes, managed by algorithms of chaste mathematical purity. We shall see that this latest techno-religion is no different from the others that preceded it. At best it is an exaggeration that ignores practical problems. At worst it is deeply dehumanizing.

  Plato was right about one thing. We can never learn what is flawless or unblemished with our senses alone. But the devastation wrought by idealists in the past shows how easily we can also lie to ourselves within our imaginative minds. Reason is an excellent tool for generating hypotheses. But it is in the world of hard, gritty practicality that honest folks test their favorite ideas, modify them under the helpful heat of criticism, carve away errors, and join others in developing systems that work.

  Systems that may even be somewhat true.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LESSONS IN ACCOUNTABILITY

  Conscience is the inner voice which warres us that someone may be looking.

  ATTRIBUTED TO H. L. MENCKEN

  Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

  PERICLES OF ATHENE

  For an open society to be flexible and error-resistant, it must deal with all kinds of messy or harsh problems that face people in daily life. And not just normal people, but those who are angry, alienated, or on the edge. Societies have always sought to reinforce those human traits they found worthwhile, and to diminish those deemed injurious. In a culture based on diversity and appreciation of eccentricity, there should be a lot of the former, and just a few of the latter. But we can still expect a need for law, and restraints applied upon those who would do harm.

  In this book, we emphasize accountability as a tried-and-true technique for minimizing disaster in a complex society, and mutual transparency as a useful means to ensure accountability. This chapter will deal with a few examples, some of them taken from the new electronic world of video cameras, multimedia, and computerized communications. But the principles apply almost anywhere.

  Later, chapters 7 and 8 will plunge into the cutting-edge debates over encryption, anonymity, and secrecy. We shall also continue the ongoing discussion of whether our governments will keep playing a role in helping us ensure a decent civilization, or whether a time has come to cast loose the bonds of our past and plunge into an uncertain future, when it will be everyone for themselves.

  A NEW “COMMONS”

  Back in the European Middle Ages, there existed in England tracts of common lands, fields no one owned that could be used by anyone in the neighboring community. Unwritten rules of sharing evolved, sometimes enforced by a feudal lord, but often mediated by consensus among the farmers and herdsmen themselves.

  Garrett Hardin’s influential study The Tragedy of the Commons describes what happened when the medieval order began breaking down. Rising population, improved farm technology, and accelerating commerce put pressure on communal lands. Individuals saw personal benefit in grazing their herds on the commons till every scrap of greenery was eaten. Water was diverted, trees felled, and lumber taken without the earlier foresttending practice of coppicing. In other words, the logic of unbridled competition began to prevail. If it wasn’t your land, your short-term incentive was to use up the common resource before others did.

  Lest any misconstrue, I am not preaching nostalgia for the Middle Ages, a time of ignorance, largely dominated by brutal feudal overlords. Nevertheless, the old commons is often cited as an example of innocent communal sharing that collapsed with the arrival of commercial resource exploitation.

  This has happened elsewhere. Events in Asia and the Americas were not too dissimilar. Even today, companies are known to pay pennies on the acre to lease federal lands in the western United States, exploiting the General Mining Act of 1872 to plunder a region’s minerals and then departing, often leaving spoilage in their w
ake. Similar complaints are raised about ranchers’ subsidized overgrazing of the public range. An international example is the way several dozen nations subsidize expensive fishing fleets, which are rapidly depleting overharvested ocean stocks.

  Can a parallel be made with today’s information superhighway? At first sight, the Internet seems to run on an ad hoc basis, almost like a “commons.” Some official groups, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), used to exert sway over the major infrastructure, for instance, the on-ramps and loading yards called network access points. But the NSF gave up control several years ago to concentrate on developing technologies for the next phase. In fact, most of the key decisions are now made by informal groups. For instance, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) mediates technology standards and seeks consensus among major users, while another licensed group governs the allocation of domain names, the closest thing to a formal bureaucracy that many users encounter on the Net. Although commercial services restrict their own sections of cyberspace to members and clients, the Internet itself has grown far too diverse, with too many alternative pathways, for anyone to claim real dominion. It operates as a collective virtual frontier, where all may roam pretty much as they please, so long as they have a port of entry.