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

by David Brin

  For one thing, your credibility would rise. (EmilyPost has checked your favorite bulletin boards, and finds your ratings aren’t high. Nobody is listening to you!) Moreover, courtesy can foster calm reason, useful debate, and even consensus. We suggest introducing an automatic delay into your mail system. Communications are so fast these days, people often blurt anything that comes to mind, forgetting the gift of tact. If you wish, you may use one of the public domain delay-and-reconsider programs included in EmilyPost, free of charge.

  On the other hand, should you insist on continuing as before, disseminating nastiness in all directions, we have equipped EmilyPost with other options you’ll soon find out about....

  This little vignette, taken from my novel Earth, was written back in 1987 as far-out speculation about computer networks five decades in the future. Little did I expect it would come true in a tenth of that time! Since then, I’ve been told that “courtesy worm” programs already roam the dataways—some even named after my fanciful EmilyPost—illustrating just one possible response to what many are calling a major electronic social disease.

  Then again, some people don’t like the idea of self-appointed “courtesy police.” When science fiction author and journalist Bruce Sterling read about EmilyPost, he penned the following amusing retaliatory missive to represent how certain parties on the Net will surely react.

  Dear Milksop Creep:

  We have hacked EmilyPost to insert the word “fullacrap-fatass” randomly into everything you write from now on.

  signed,

  Anonymous Darkside Hackers

  P.S. Vigilantism cuts both ways, jerk!

  Today’s Internet is plagued by countless individuals who seem intent on making nuisances of themselves, flying into abusive, self-righteous tirades known as “flames.” Electronic conversations seem especially prone to misinterpretation, suddenly and rapidly escalating hostility between participants, or else triggering episodes of sulking silence. When flame wars erupt, normally docile people can behave like mental patients suffering from coprolalia, a version of Tourette’s syndrome. Typing furiously, they send impulsive text messages blurting out the first vituperation that comes to mind, abandoning the editing process of common courtesy that civilization took millennia to acquire. (Hence the fad expression “Net-Tourette.”)

  Other assaults are less impulsive and more deliberately vicious. In a variant that recently led to arrests in California and Michigan, some sociopathic network users made a fervid avocation of tracing the e-mail addresses of famous people, no matter how well protected by pseudonyms, and harassing them in a manner reminiscent of the “stalking” of movie stars. In another example, a group calling itself alt.syntax.tactical, or AST, strove for some years to start out-of-control flame wars as part of an organized campaign. This clique sought renown by sending graphic messages about cat-killing to a group of feline lovers. To an erotic pictures group, its members posed as outraged Puritans demanding censorship; and in an Olympics newsgroup, a member masqueraded as a loutish caricature of an overly patriotic Canadian fan, in order to inspire hatred by American readers. An excerpt from their manifesto reveals smug rationalizations.

  What is important is that each individual brings into this their own brand of inspired mischief. In some ways it is innocent. In some ways it is completely destructive.... On most levels, it is entertainment; but there is an element here that allows individuals to become their own experts in propaganda, manipulating hundreds or even thousands of people to believe that what they are reading is real, when in fact it is absurd, incorrect, made up.

  We probed the roots of this phenomenon in chapter 5, seeing how easily culturally promoted individualism can turn into solipsism, especially when combined with self-righteousness and a frail ego. Alas, understanding a phenomenon does not make it go away, nor does it prevent sociopaths from doing capricious harm.

  Sometimes the aim goes beyond pranksterism, as when individuals created a Web page asserting that Earthlink, a fast-growing Internet provider, was connected with the Church of Scientology. (As we saw earlier, hostility toward the CoS, whether deserved or unjust, is rampant among Internet aficionados.) The effort to tie Earthlink’s chairman Sky Dayton with CoS hierarchs involved fine-tuning a slur page with all the same keywords as Earthlink’s official home page, so that anyone seeking information about his company through a simple search engine would also automatically call up the accusation. With similar tricks, a disgruntled former employee of K Mart started a vivid Web site titled “K Mart Sucks.” Then there is a story, reported in the New York Times, of someone creating a Web page with a URL address nearly identical to the 1996 “Pat Buchanan for President” site. Visitors found a screen similar in appearance to the genuine article—but featuring a swastika motif.

  Dirty tricks have a long history in politics, as in the rough-and-tumble of life in general. Are any of these examples essentially different from stunts pulled by Donald Segretti in 1972 on behalf of the Nixon campaign? Nowadays, at least in theory, the target of any such attacks can respond swiftly with rebuttals or outright refutations. In a perfect world, especially with “tag commentary” (see chapter 8), this would result in “an efficient information market.” One lawyer-activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests we may never again have to worry about libel, because in years to come the truth will supposedly chase down and slay any calumny or lie.

  But this view may be far too sanguine. Even if the Net becomes adept at openness and transparency, few readers will devote the energy to peruse each datum and weigh the evidence concerning every nasty rumor. Who has the time? In cyberspace, the most frequent data-handling mode is rapid skimming, as users race from spot to spot, sampling, forming quick impressions that often enter the unconscious and plant deep roots, then moving on. Inevitably, some damage is done. We tend to think that “where there’s smoke, there must be fire.” (See the discussion of “data smog” in chapter 9.) According to author Robert Wright, “On the Web, anyone can construct a ‘shadow identity,’ a slanderous characterization, that sticks to your cyberidentity like glue.” It can be done by an ex-husband, former lover, fired employee, and so on. You can instantly post rebuttals and countercharges, yet the smear may still affect people’s impressions.

  In truth, none of this should seem surprising. Esther Dyson, publisher of Release 1.0 newsletter, notes that the Internet “is suffering from the same pathologies that affect our daily lives: fraud, incivility, unwelcome advertising, harassment, and even virtual rape. While some netters believe [it] will change human culture, we believe that net culture so far has reflected a small segment of the population, and it will change more toward the mainstream as the mainstream joins the net.”

  In other words, things have come a long way from when the principal traffic consisted of prim, honorable exchanges of scientific ideas and data among a few thousand intellectuals. “It’s a real test of whether something this large can be managed on a cooperative or voluntary basis,” adds Roger Karraker, host of a First Amendment conference on the Well, a Sausalitobased online service. “It’s very clear one or two obnoxious individuals have the power to inconvenience hundreds of thousands of people. I don’t know where it will end.”

  Fortunately, destructive hacker-attacks and deliberate slander campaigns are relatively rare. Still, a list of other Net-civility breaches, compiled by Australian computer scientist and privacy scholar Roger Clarke, can look daunting. They include information overload, rumor and accidental misinformation, negligent or intentional defamation, plagiarism, inadequate care with data, trawling for personal information, harassment, mail bombing, obscenity, incitement, impersonation, surveillance, spamming, abuse of intellectual property rights, hacking, releasing software worms or viruses, breaching security, obscuration, and some kinds of anonymization.

  Despite this extensive catalog, ranging from accidental lapses of good manners all the way to serious crimes, most rancor on the Net falls into the mundane category of short-
tempered grouchiness, enough all by itself to make some pine for the good old days, when we wrote letters on paper and were thus compelled by time to moderate our responses. On the telephone, voice tones sometimes conciliate, compensating for rash words. But while e-mail is terrific for exchanging terse bullets of useful information, it seems almost designed to exaggerate misunderstandings because it contains no visual or aural cues, what linguist Peter Farb calls paralanguage, to soften or clarify. While hurriedly clearing a packed in box, one can easily leap to wrong conclusions about a correspondent’s intent, or see a smear that was not there, or give a message the worst possible interpretation, and then lash out as one never would in personal proximity.

  Some have called for modification of slander and libel laws, applying them fiercely to those who post malign or unsupported missives on the Net. But this is just another example of trying to solve problems by reducing information flow. After all, a flamer isn’t really different from the motorist who cut you off last week, nearly causing an accident, flipping an obscene gesture and laughing at your frustration, safe behind a mask of anonymity. Driven by rancorous behavior he witnessed in the Net’s early days, Stewart Brand, cofounder of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review magazine, realized there would be no peace as long as nastiness could find shelter behind false identities. Brand lobbied successfully to have anonymity strictly forbidden on the pioneering Internet service the Well.

  True, there are disadvantages to this rule, and I do feel there should remain places where anonymous postings are possible, especially for whistle-blowers reporting crimes. But anonymity just doesn’t foster the kind of mature behavior you want among your neighbors. Not on our network, at least.

  We already know how to scale in our minds the believability of any spoken gossip that we hear—by considering the reliability of the source. Going back to earlier examples, the chief difference between the anti—K Mart page and the Pat Buchanan smear was the ease of clarifying identities and motives. If the originator of some textual calumny turns out to be a business competitor or ex-spouse of the person under attack, even an inveterate skimmer may put it in context, or shrug it off.

  In the world outside the Internet, we give “news” told to us by a known snoop or scandalmonger less weight than what we see reported under the byline of a respected journalist. Likewise, Net citizens will learn to deal with flamers and purveyors of diatribe by using high-tech versions of the same technique. We will factor in data on the author’s reputation, either by having our computer automatically sift the “tag commentary” people have applied to that person’s work in the past, or else by joining a club or service that collates extensive credibility ratings (see chapter 8), or by having sieves and bozo filters routinely remove postings by those with abysmal scores before they appear on our monitors.

  People who sling mud will learn that they must either back up their accusations or else face ignominy. Like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, they will find themselves isolated. Ignored.

  Some view the Internet as a sort of anarchist’s paradise, a wild frontier town where you can saunter down Main Street, draw your pistol, and shoot anything in sight. But in fact we are human beings. Fancy electronics won’t change that. Not right away, at least. We like order in our lives, plus some degree of common sense and decency. Bringing these things about through a free market of credibility and earned reputation seems far more desirable than having them imposed by government regulations or stifling rules.

  In fact, civility just might make a comeback, after all. But not as something exhorted, or enforced from on high. Rather, it may return as a natural byproduct as we all learn to live in this new “commons,” a near-future society where wrath seldom becomes habitual, because people who lash out soon learn that it simply does not pay.

  Modern media is a mind control technique, so better be sure that you’re the one controlling your screen.

  TIMOTHY LEARY

  CHOICE ON THE INTERNET: BLOOD FLOW OR GANGRENE

  From its inception, the Internet was perceived in terms that might sound familiar to any immunologist—as a distributed array of randomly autonomous elements, capable of swiftly detecting errors and rerouting around obstructions. By analogy, the Net should be resistant to interference. But metaphors are useful only up to a point. A diligent effort at control might have effects that are just as serious as when a tourniquet is applied to a human limb, cutting off the blood supply to healthy tissue. Such efforts are already under way in some countries, as ruling parties seek to preserve their days in power. (See chapter 10, “Global Transparency.”)

  In fact, such malignant obstructions may happen without interference by corporate or government agencies. Lately, some observers have expressed the fear that we will see a myriad tiny tourniquets applied by private individuals, each of them determined to create their own version of reality, their own subjective world. For instance, some people will program their home computers/entertainment centers to sift the Web for only those news articles, shows, and magazines that agree with opinions they already have, or reduce all opponents to caricatures. We already see this trend in channels devoted to specific ethnic and religious groups, and in the cult followings of pundits like Rush Limbaugh.

  According to Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. “The ability of people with like minds to talk to each other [on the Internet] is wonderful. But if only people of like minds talk to each other, you get the kind of cognitive dissonance that is destructive to a democracy.” As individuals use such new tools to tailor privacy guardians and personalized data sieves, choosing which sympathetic voices will be allowed into their home and which dissenting ones will be blocked out, the result may be nearly perfect isolation in walled-off worlds of the mind. David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times posed the dilemma thus:

  What will happen to our already fragmented sense of community if everyone is reading different stories on different subjects, seeing different advertisements for different products and, in essence, communicating by e-mail and in online chat rooms only with people who share their own interests? These services deprive their readers of one of the newspaper’s great charms—serendipity, the chance to stumble across, and be riveted by, a story on a subject the reader had no idea would interest him.

  Back in 1987 I fictionally depicted a future variety of hacker whose aim was not to steal secrets, or preach a cause, but to crack countless barriers of self-imposed isolation and let surprise jolt the cozy, insulated realities people crafted for themselves. This would be a criminal act, since people have a right to choose their own worlds of discourse. Still, one can imagine a romantic mystique growing around such peculiar hackers, who aim to shake up the stodgy, like jesters of old.

  In a related kind of pathology, a time may come when simulated experiences burgeon in number and quality to such a degree that people start having trouble distinguishing them from reality. Such brilliantly crafted hallucinations may help vastly expand human experience, carrying prudent “travelers” to remote milieus, enlarging the horizons of those who retain volition and control. Or else, simulations may become irresistibly addictive. As the humorist Scott Adams explained, “Once anyone has a Holodeck, why would they ever leave?”

  Glenn F. Cartwright, professor of educational psychology at McGill University in Montreal, put it more darkly. “What happens to the normal mind when it loses contact with reality ... when we enter an alternate reality and cannot tell it from the real world ... [or] if we find we cannot, or do not want to, return to the real world?” Cartwright worries that such illusions might be foisted on unwilling or unsuspecting participants, “who might think they were experiencing mental illness.”

  Naturally, some in society will apply these technologies in service of one of the oldest and most innately human of all creative enterprises: lying.

  Alas, we can only mention a few of these possible yin and yang consequences of new media technology. Further details would stray too far from the main to
pic. But these few examples should be enough to help pose a basic question: will so-called connecting technologies wind up merely dividing us in the end, fragmenting citizens into acrimoniously bickering tribes, till they forget everything they have in common? All that binds them as fellow members of a great civilization?

  Could it be that those working on the Tower of Babel were thus cast into confusion? Cursed to speak countless indecipherable tongues by means of something as useful, connecting, and promising as the Net?

  Dissent on the Net does not lead to consensus: it creates a profusion of different views.... The conditions that encourage compromise, the hallmark of the democratic process, are lacking online.

  MARK POSTER

  ARENAS FOR FAIR DEBATE

  Putting aside the issue of civility for now, let’s go back to the much more important business of error correction through criticism.

  It isn’t only leaders who habitually evade appraisal or censure. Each of us, no matter how honest or humble, shares this trait. It takes courage to face our flaws. But even more than courage, it requires perspective. Immersed in our own personal assumptions and beliefs, we find it well-nigh impossible to question them with anything like true intellectual honesty. Descartes tried to do so, but all he wound up achieving with all his brilliance was to use circular logic and “prove” everything he had started out believing in the first place.