Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World

by David Brin

  “It’s only the beginning.” She smiled a small, slightly secretive smile. She touched me then, the first time she had ever touched me. It was a feather touch, a small thing to my back, but it was also electric. Not sexual. She had nothing like Ginger’s allure for me, but the touch mattered in some deep way, as if she’d touched inside me.

  Who would have thought it. A politician with a soul. Apparently there were others. And decent folks across this town and around the world. All that was really needed was for people to see, to really see the poor as fellow human beings.

  Ginger came up with the kids, both happy again now that they’d eaten and slept. “Can we go home soon?” Ginger asked.

  Windy looked very solemnly at Emil and Salate. “Would you like to camp here overnight? We have toothbrushes and blankets.”

  Ginger shook her head. “We should get home.”

  Wendy steepled her hands. “I’ll take you home if you want, but I’d really like it if you’d spend the night.”

  Salate looked up at Ginger with a shining face and asked, “Mom? Can we?”

  One of the long muscles in Ginger’s neck jumped and her jaw tightened. She was too polite to show her anger, though I was willing to bet she’d never get in a car with Windy again. “Thank you, we will.”

  By the time we got back to the tent, six more tents like it had joined it on the lawn, and there were other used tents going up as well. True to Windy’s word, there were blankets and pillows. Griff had moved off into the trees, but he came back when we did, and he and I sat outside all night taking turns sleeping and watching. Sometime before dawn, we were both awake and everyone else in the camp had finally quieted. “Windy told me there are thirty-five more drones,” I told Griff.

  “That’s good.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Of course. I’d be in jail without mine.”

  “There’s that.”

  “And Ginger’s kids are doing better.”

  We could only use a few of the ideas people had turned into stuff, but that’s because we had roofs over our head and we were kind of established.

  But we were still squatters. We could be kicked out any time. Maybe I should ask if we could do something to earn two of the tents. I was still thinking about that when I drifted off a little, although I’m not sure I got any real sleep that whole night.

  I did learn that Griff snored.

  * * *

  Windy took us out for breakfast to Pike Place Market where she bought us all pierogi.

  She had never spent so much time with us. More than a day now.

  Maybe we were about to graduate.

  I hoped we wouldn’t lose the drones. I would miss Shahid. He wasn’t with us now, but then I knew he had a life other than watching over me.

  Windy’s driver parked a block away and they had us get out, which was a puzzle until we saw the changes.

  A park had grown on our street. The empty lots where the two buildings had been torn down were green. There were trees and benches.

  Patricio watched us walk up, all smiles.

  Little silvery eggs as tall as a person rested by each bench.

  The kids raced toward the eggs, but Griff and I walked slowly.

  Windy looked so proud she could float away. “These are yours. They’re for all you’ve done.” She reached up and patted the top of one. “It’s solar powered, and it recycles water.”

  We must have all looked shocked.

  “You earned them already. And you’ll keep earning them, by testing them.”

  None of us said a thing.

  Griff backed up, and then he turned and walked away. At least his drone was still following him. I could find him later.

  Ginger leaned into one of the houses. Five of them would fit in her warehouse.

  I peered into the one closest to me. There was a bed and a desk, a tiny kitchen with one burner. A sink. Best of all, there was a bathroom.

  The water in the sink flowed.

  I hadn’t had a bathroom for at least five years.

  I turned around in time to see Windy waiting for Ginger just outside of the pod she’d claimed. Ginger turned, and startled. Windy folded her in her arms. Ginger startled and then she relaxed and slid her arms around Windy’s waist. She whispered, “Thank you.”

  I rattled the door. There was a lock.

  Ginger and the kids had a door they could lock. And outside, like a loyal dog, forever vigilant, their drone soaked up sunshine and whirred.

  Science fiction looks ahead.

  Will anyone listen?

  THE EYES HAVE IT

  STEPHEN W. POTTS

  It is June 2015. This week a congressional committee heard testimony on the regulation of drones or Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). Amazon executive Paul Misener urged Congress to avoid too-stringent regulation, since his company is ready to use the technology to deliver packages. On the other hand, privacy advocate Harley Geiger of the Center for Democracy and Technology warned that ubiquitous drones would be “a nightmare scenario for civil liberties.” What, after all, would protect privacy and personal property if drones could fly over anyone’s home at any time? How many feet overhead could be considered one’s private space?

  In this past week’s main news story, however, one Dylann Roof, the young suspect in the racial murder of nine people in an historic Charleston, South Carolina, church, was captured by police one day after the crime was committed. A security camera in the church had recorded a clear image of the twenty-one-year-old, and photos were immediately publicized on television and the Internet. A citizen over a hundred miles away in North Carolina identified him in her area and called police.

  Over the past year, police themselves have been under scrutiny, thanks to cell-phone cameras in civilian hands. As a result, the public at large witnessed the strangulation of Eric Garner in New York, the precipitous shooting of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, the limp body of Freddie Gray being hauled into a police wagon in Baltimore, and the killing of Walter Scott in Charleston, all of them unarmed black males. These dubious acts led to firings, resignations, criminal charges, Department of Justice action, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

  June began with the passage of the US Freedom Act, a successor to the US Patriot Act of 2001 passed in the wake of 9/11. The new law nominally restricts the powers of the federal government, specifically the National Security Agency, but civil libertarians complain that it didn’t go far enough. Critics like Glenn Greenwald have noted that no one would even know the extent of the government’s surveillance without the actions of fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, who nevertheless received no credit for Congress’s reconsideration.

  In 1998, five years after the emergence of the World Wide Web, David Brin speculated in his non-fiction book The Transparent Society that incipient technologies would change our relationship to privacy and transparency. Among other things, he foresaw the expansion of our interactive computing capabilities and thus opportunities for surveillance and sousveillance; he predicted that improving technology would make possible minuscule cameras that might go into anyone’s pocket and maybe even fly overhead. And he recommended that this apparent assault on privacy be welcomed—or at least adapted to—since it would give us the ability to watch the watchmen.

  First of all, a short history of privacy—and it is a short history. Modern notions of privacy date back only to the end of the Classic Enlightenment, barely two hundred years ago. For the ancient Greeks, for example, the private person was one who lived in his own little world or idios; thus, our modern word “idiot.” Aristotle asserted that the individual could not function separately from the polis, any more than a finger could function separately from the body. Before modern times privacy would have been an alien concept for most Europeans (not to mention those in the rest of the world), who shared single rooms with extended families and regularly used public toilets that were truly public, being out in the open. For most of human history, and still in mo
st nonurban areas today, most people have lived in places where all their neighbors knew their names and their personal business. In every sense, it took a village to be human.

  The thinkers of the Enlightenment, largely educated in the principles of Greece and Rome, likewise privileged the public citizen over the private. Even Adam Smith, often touted today for the concept of “self-interest,” saw it mainly as a means to improve the condition of the commons; everyone would be well served if self-interest was harnessed to lift all boats together. He would be horrified by today’s radicals who preach self-interest at the expense of the public good.

  Likewise, the classically educated Founders of the American Republic saw the commons as the chief beneficiary of the social contract; as men of the Enlightenment, they were also communitarians rather than rampant individualists. While the Declaration of Independence touts “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as “unalienable rights,” the Constitution is grounded in the notion of the social contract, explored earlier by thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. They and their successors debated the extent to which individuals needed to give up a certain degree of freedom for the sake of a more perfect society. Privacy per se, however, was not “unalienable.”

  The English founder of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, devised the “panopticon” as a method for controlling prisoners through the permanent threat of surveillance. He furthermore promoted a panopticon of the commons—called by some a “synopticon”—“in which every man exercises himself before the eyes of every other man,” taking for granted that acts supporting the general happiness would be rewarded and imitated. Thus, Bentham regarded transparency as a social benefit. According to Andrew McStay, “Transparency and surveillance (or more accurately, equiveillance) in this context is positive and accords with the Enlightenment doctrine of making all things present so to generate understanding, and make life better.”

  Bentham’s Victorian successor, John Stuart Mill, is credited with the modern liberal view of privacy, which emerged from his 1859 treatise On Liberty. For Mill, government and society should exercise the least control possible over the thoughts and lives of subjects and citizens; power over the individual “should only be exercised if a person negatively affects the interests of another” (McStay). In this manner society benefits from openness; only when views were freely discussed in public can the best ideas dominate. Privacy is valuable but not to the point of seclusion; the public good demands that the individual engage in “connections and relationships.” (McStay). Other writers, from the Enlightenment on, expressed the concern that too much “privacy would promote dissembling and hypocrisy, and allow ‘uncivilized’ behavior or lack of control” (O’Hara and Shadbolt).

  By the end of the nineteenth century, concerns were being widely expressed over such invasive new technologies as the telephone, the microphone, and Kodak photography, which could tap into private conversations and private moments. As a direct result, U. S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis published their 1890 treatise arguing for privacy as a basic legal right, going so far as to condemn even gossip, especially in print, as a social evil. Over the next half century, privacy sank deep roots into liberal humanist thought and legal philosophy. In 1948, privacy was accorded the status of an inalienable right by the United Nations, which enshrined it in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  Given this modern trend, it is not entirely a coincidence that 1948 was also the year in which George Orwell composed 1984. Orwell’s dystopia embodies the iconic panoptic nightmare: a world where the population is constantly brainwashed by patriotic messages through public address and film, where all knowledge, language and thought are incessantly policed by the state, and where the familiar mantra “Big Brother is watching” announces the ubiquity of the surveillance society. For Orwell, a veteran of the wartime BBC, the technologies of mass control were the midcentury media: radio, television, and the cinema.

  Fear of Big Brother has haunted most of the commentary over the surveillance potential of the twenty-first century, with its World Wide Web, cell-phone cameras, and drones. The debate has come up against a central paradox in post-Enlightenment thought: the apparent conflict between the virtues of privacy and openness. The discussion often boils down to the contradictory desire to defend one’s own privacy while demanding transparency from others. Generally it is treated as a zero-sum game—a tradeoff, for example, between security and freedom, both of them essential to a civilized society.

  Those addressing this problem in the new century have expressed some guarded optimism, at least as far as Big Brother is concerned. Although the War on Terror has stepped up official surveillance and secrecy on both sides of the Atlantic, governments have found it very difficult to keep secrets in our interconnected environment. Revelations from Wikileaks and Edward Snowden to the Panama Papers continue to trickle down, despite prospects of involuntary exile and long prison sentences. China tries to encourage the economic and social benefits of the Internet without the risk of uncensored democracy by employing what onlookers refer to as “the Great Firewall of China.” But this forces the People’s Republic to monitor activity incessantly in an online game of Whack-a-Mole. In the long run, McStay cautions against “dystopian narratives” in our “enhanced milieu of visibility,” because current technology “encompasses the breakdown of borders of traditional power-holders and citizens alike.” Patrick Tucker likewise sees the convenience and portability of technology as a benefit to the individual: “Big data” used to be “available only to large institutions,” but the “future of this resource is incredibly open to consumers, activists, and regular people.”

  Tucker does not ignore the short-term “threat of creeping technototalitarianism.” For example, we have already reached the point where law enforcement doesn’t need to use bugs, phone taps, or even GPS trackers to trace a target of interest, because “tollbooth, streetlight, and security cameras” as well as the GPS units in our phones and cars can identify anyone’s location with relative ease. O’Hara and Shadbolt, in their book The Spy in the Coffee Machine, point out the presence of cameras and other sensors in our laptops, phones, televisions, and—yes—coffee machines. We are entering a Philip K. Dick world where our ubiquitous appliances are aware of us. We have to raise our awareness in turn.

  The greatest challenge to privacy in our society, however, comes not from government but from commerce, specifically “the collection of information and data for shopping, telecommunication, and leisure purposes” (Weber; Fuchs et al.). A major feature of personal-computer use in the new century is the dominance of platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon. While Amazon is openly selling consumer goods, along with Google and Facebook it is also selling consumers—specifically our personal information: age, gender, and relationships; work, leisure activities, and travel habits; what we search for, what we buy, what we “like.” We condone this arrangement when we accept their terms of agreement, which explicitly promise a universe of “sharing.” Every click of the mouse produces data that these companies can sell to someone else. Consumers are thus also producers of value—what some technotheorists refer to as “prosumers.”

  Some critics see this relationship in Marxist terms: prosumers are inherently “alienated” from their work product, and—according to Mark Andrejevic—they have been “put to work marketing to themselves.” As such, this system “does not signify a democratization of the media toward a participatory or democratic system, but the total commodification” of the users. McStay seconds this notion by asserting that online “commodification leads to more commodification” as our desires and interests are sold back to us. But despite worries about cookies, target marketing, insistent advertising, and consumer/prosumer commodification, the evidence shows that most users are willing, if not happy, to trade their personal information for the convenience of the Internet. You don’t get freedom of access unless you grant freedom of access.

  In any case,
this debate is rapidly becoming moot: we increasingly live in the technocommons, and most of us feel the tradeoff between privacy and access is worth it. In fact, as the millennials reach their thirties, a generation is growing up in their wake that has never known a world without the Internet or camera phones. Privacy does not appear to be high on their list of concerns. This is the generation that created the “selfie,” a method for constantly monitoring their own whereabouts and sharing it, who created “sexting”—the transmission of nude or seminude self-portraits, some destined for the web. We have all seen young couples sitting across from one other at dining tables, spending their private moments texting on their phones, sending off Instagrams of themselves or their meals. Big Brother is watching? Time to update one’s Facebook page.

  In his 2014 Frontline documentary Generation Like, culture critic Douglas Rushkoff portrays this world of American teens who live a substantial portion of their lives on and through social media. Many are active “prosumers,” publicizing themselves, their tastes and their favorite activities via blogs, podcasts, and YouTube, sharing their “likes” in return for promotional T-shirts, shoes, and snack foods from companies delighted at this free advertising to target demographics. Far from seeming alienated by such commodification, they embrace it as a means of social validation. As Rushkoff demonstrates in one sequence, this generation does not know the meaning of “selling out.”

  On the other hand, for those still determined to defend their privacy against surveillance and salesmanship, there are ready methods for doing so. In his 2015 book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, Bruce Schneier offers numerous ways to be proactive. One can acquire the technical skills, or find someone with the technical skills, to employ encryption protocols, data blocking, or other PET (privacy-enhancing technology). This is a sophisticated but absolutely feasible possibility, up to a point. Of course simpler, less technical means exist.