by Jared Cohen
People who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners. With more data, everyone gains a better frame of reference. A Malawian witch doctor might find his community suddenly hostile if enough people find and believe information online that contradicts his authority. Young people in Yemen might confront their tribal elders over the traditional practice of child brides if they determine that the broad consensus of online voices is against it, and thus it reflects poorly upon them personally. Or followers of an Indian holy man might find a way to cross-reference his credentials on the Internet, abandoning him if it is revealed that he misled them. While many worry about the phenomenon of confirmation bias (when consciously or otherwise, people pay attention to sources of information that reinforce their existing worldview) as online sources of information proliferate, a recent Ohio State University study suggests that this effect is weaker than perceived, at least in the American political landscape. In fact, confirmation bias is as much about our responses to information passively received as it is about our tendency to proactively select information sources. So as millions of people come online we have reason to be optimistic about the social changes ahead.
Governments, too, will find it more difficult to maneuver as their citizens become more connected. Destroying documents, kidnapping, demolishing monuments—restrictive and repressive actions like these will lose much of their functional and symbolic power in the new digital age. Those documents would be recoverable, having been stored in the cloud, and the pressure that an active and globalized Internet community can produce when rallied against injustice will make governments think twice before snatching anyone or detaining him indefinitely. A Taliban-like government would still be able to destroy monuments like the Bamiyan Buddhas, but in the future those monuments will have been scanned with sophisticated technology that preserves every nook and cranny in virtual memory, allowing them to be rebuilt later by men or 3-D printers, or even projected as a hologram. Perhaps the UNESCO World Heritage Centre will add these practices to its restoration efforts. The structure of Syria’s oldest synagogue, for example, currently in a museum in Damascus, could be projected as a hologram or reconstructed using 3-D printing at its original site in Dura-Europos. What’s true now in most developed countries—the presence of an active civil society keen to fact-check and investigate its government—will be true almost everywhere, aided significantly by the prevalence of cheap and powerful handsets. And on a more basic level, citizens anywhere will be able to compare themselves and their way of life with the rest of the world. Practices widely considered barbaric or backward will seem even more so when seen in that context.
Identity will be the most valuable commodity for citizens in the future, and it will exist primarily online. Online experience will start with birth, or even earlier. Periods of people’s lives will be frozen in time, and easily surfaced for all to see. In response, companies will have to create new tools for control of information, such as lists that would enable people to manage who sees their data. The communication technologies we use today are invasive by design, collecting our photos, comments and friends into giant databases that are searchable and, in the absence of outside regulation, fair game for employers, university admissions personnel and town gossips. We are what we tweet.
Ideally, all people would have the self-awareness to closely manage their online identities and the virtual lives they lead, monitoring and shaping them from an early age so as not to limit their opportunities in life. Of course, this is impossible. For children and adolescents, the incentives to share will always outweigh the vague, distant risks of self-exposure, even with salient examples of the consequences in public view. By the time a man is in his forties, he will have accumulated and stored a comprehensive online narrative, all facts and fictions, every misstep and every triumph, spanning every phase of his life. Even the rumors will live forever.
In deeply conservative societies where social shame is weighed heavily, we could see a kind of “virtual honor killing”—dedicated efforts to ruin a person’s online identity either preemptively (by exposing perceived misdeeds or planting false information) or reactively (by linking his or her online identity to content detailing a crime, real or imagined). Ruined online reputations might not lead to physical violence by the perpetrator, but a young woman facing such accusations could find herself branded with a digital scarlet letter that, thanks to the unfortunate but hard-to-prevent reality of data permanence, she’d never be able to escape. And that public shame could lead one of her family members to kill her.
And what about the role of parents? Being a parent is hard enough, as anyone who has kids knows. While the online world has made it even tougher, it is not a hopeless endeavor. Parents will have the same responsibilities in the future, but they will need to be even more involved if they are going to make sure their children do not make mistakes online that could hurt their physical future. As children live significantly faster lives online than their physical maturity allows, most parents will realize that the most valuable way to help their child is to have the privacy-and-security talk even before the sex talk. The old-fashioned tactic of parents talking to their children will retain enormous value.
School systems will also adapt to play an important role. Parent-teacher associations will advocate for privacy and security classes to be taught alongside sex-education classes in their children’s schools. Such classes will teach students to optimize their privacy-and-security settings and train them to become well versed in the dos and don’ts of the virtual world. And teachers will frighten them with real-life stories of what happens if they don’t take control of their privacy and security at an early age.
Certainly some parents will try to game the system as well with more algorithmic solutions that may or may not have an effect. The process of naming a child offers one such example. As the functional value of online identity increases, parental supervision will play a critical role in the early stages of life, beginning with a child’s name. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the authors of the popular economics book Freakonomics, famously dissected how ethnically popular names (specifically, names common in African-American communities) can be an indicator of children’s chances for success in life. Looking ahead, parents will also consider how online search rankings will affect their child’s future. The truly strategic will go beyond reserving social-networking profiles and buying domain names (e.g., www.JohnDavidSmith.com), and instead select names that affect how easy or hard it will be to find their children online. Some parents will deliberately choose unique names or unusually spelled traditional names so that their children have an edge in search results, making them easy to locate and promotable online without much direct competition. Others will go the opposite route, choosing basic and popular names that allow their children to live in an online world with some degree of shelter from Internet indexes—just one more “Jane Jones” among thousands of similar entries.
We’ll also see a proliferation of businesses that cater to privacy and reputation concerns. This industry exists already, with companies like Reputation.com using a range of proactive and reactive tactics to remove or dilute unwanted content from the Internet.1 During the 2008 economic crash, it was reported that several Wall Street bankers hired online reputation companies to minimize their appearance online, paying up to $10,000 per month for the service. In the future, this industry will diversify as the demand explodes, with identity managers becoming as common as stockbrokers and financial planners. Active management of one’s online presence—say, by receiving quarterly reports from your identity manager tracking the changing shape of your online identity—will become the new normal for the prominent and those who aspire to be prominent.
A new realm of insurance will emerge, too. Companies will offer to insure your online identity against theft and hacking, fraudulent accusations, misuse or appropriation. For e
xample, parents may take out an insurance policy against reputational damage caused by what their children do online. Perhaps a teacher will take out an insurance policy that covers her against a student hacking into her Facebook account and changing details of her online profile to embarrass or defame her. We have identity-theft protection companies today; in the future, insurance companies will offer customers protection against very specific misuses. Any number of people could be attracted to such an insurance policy, from the genuinely in need to the generally paranoid.
Online identity will become such a powerful currency that we will even see the rise of a new black market where people can buy real or invented identities. Citizens and criminals alike will be attracted to such a network, since the false identity that could provide cover for a known drug smuggler could also shelter a political dissident. The identity will be manufactured or stolen, and it will come complete with backdated entries and IP (Internet protocol) activity logs, false friends and sales purchases, and other means of making it appear convincing. If a Mexican whistle-blower’s family needed to flee the violence of Ciudad Juárez and feared cartel retribution, a set of fake online identities would certainly help cover their tracks and provide them with a clean slate.
Naturally, this kind of escape route is a high-risk endeavor in the digital age: Embarking on a new life would require total disconnection from previous ties, because even the smallest gesture (like a search query for a relative) could give away a person’s position. Furthermore, anyone assuming a false identity would need to avoid all places with facial-recognition technology lest a scan of his or her face flag an earlier profile. And there would be no dark alleyways in this illicit market, either: All identities could be purchased over an encrypted connection between mutually anonymous parties, paid for with difficult-to-trace virtual currency. Brokers and buyers in this exchange would face risks similar to what black marketeers do today, including undercover agents and dishonest dealings (perhaps made all the more likely due to the anonymous nature of these virtual-world transactions).
Some people will cheer for the end of control that connectivity and data-rich environments engender. They are the people who believe that information wants to be free,2 and that greater transparency in all things will bring about a more just, safe and free world. For a time, WikiLeaks’ cofounder Julian Assange was the world’s most visible ambassador for this cause, but supporters of WikiLeaks and the values it champions come in all stripes, including right-wing libertarians, far-left liberals and apolitical technology enthusiasts. While they don’t always agree on tactics, to them, data permanence is a fail-safe for society. Despite some of the known negative consequences of this movement (threats to individual security, ruined reputations and diplomatic chaos), some free-information activists believe the absence of a delete button ultimately strengthens humanity’s progress toward greater equality, productivity and self-determination. We believe, however, that this is a dangerous model, especially given that there is always going to be someone with bad judgment who releases information that will get people killed. This is why governments have systems and valuable regulations in place that, while imperfect, should continue to govern who gets to make the decision about what is classified and what is not.
We spoke with Assange in June 2011, while he was under house arrest in the United Kingdom. Our above-mentioned position aside, we must account for what free-information activists may try to do in the future, and therefore, Assange is a useful starting point. We will not revisit the ongoing debates of today (about which there are already many books and articles), which focus largely on the Western reaction to WikiLeaks, the contents of the cables that have been leaked, how destructive the leaks were and what punishments should await those involved in such activities. Instead, our interest is in the future and what the next phase of free-information movements—beginning with, but not restricted to, the Assange types—may try to achieve or destroy. Over the course of the interview, Assange shared his two basic arguments on this subject, which are related: First, our human civilization is built upon our complete intellectual record; thus the record should be as large as possible to shape our own time and inform future generations. Second, because different actors will always try to destroy or otherwise cover up parts of that shared history out of self-interest, it should be the goal of everyone who seeks and values truth to get as much as possible into the record, to prevent deletions from it, and then to make this record as accessible and searchable as possible for people everywhere.
Assange’s is not a war on secrecy, per se—“There are all sorts of reasons why non-powerful organizations engage in secrecy,” he told us, “and in my view it’s legitimate; they need it because they’re powerless”—but instead it is a fight against the secrecy that shields actions not in the public’s interest. “Why are powerful organizations engaged in secrecy?” he asked rhetorically. The answer he offered is that the plans they have would be opposed if made public, so secrecy floats them to the implementation stage, at which point it’s too late to alter the course effectively. Organizations whose plans won’t incur public opposition don’t carry that burden, so they don’t need to be secretive, he added. As these two types of organizations battle, the one with genuine public support will eventually come out on top, Assange said. Releasing information, then, “is positive to those engaged in acts which the public supports and negative to those engaged in acts the public doesn’t support.”
As to the charge that those secretive organizations can simply take their operations off-line and avoid unwelcome disclosure, Assange is confident in his movement’s ability to prevent this. Not a possibility, he said; serious organizations will always leave a paper trail. By definition, he explained, “systematic injustice is going to have to involve a lot of people.” Not every participant will have full access to the plans, but each will have to know something in order to do his job. “If you take your information off paper, if you take it outside the electronic or physical paper trail, institutions decay,” he said. “That’s why all organizations have rigorous paper trails for the instructions from the leadership.” Paper trails ensure that instructions are carried out properly; therefore, as Assange said, “if they internally balkanize so that information can’t be leaked, there’s a tremendous cost to the organizational efficiency of doing that.” And inefficient organizations mean less powerful ones.
Openness, on the other hand, introduces new challenges for this movement of truth-seekers, from Assange’s perspective. “When things become more open, then they start to become more complex, because people start hiding what they’re doing—their bad behavior—through complexity,” he said. He pointed to bureaucratic doublespeak and the offshore financial sector as clear examples. These systems are technically open, he said, but in fact are impenetrable; they are hard to attack but even harder to use efficiently. Obfuscation at this level, where the complexity is legal but still covering something up, is a much more difficult problem to solve than straightforward censorship.
Unfortunately, people like Assange and organizations like WikiLeaks will be well placed to take advantage of some of the changes in the next decade. And even supporters of their work are faced with difficult questions about the methods and implications of online disclosures, particularly as we look beyond the case study of WikiLeaks and into the future. One of the most difficult is the question of discretionary power: Who gets to decide what information is suitable for release, and what must be redacted, even temporarily? Why is it Julian Assange, specifically, who gets to decide what information is relevant to the public interest? And what happens if the person who makes such decisions is willing to accept indisputable harm to innocents as a consequence of his disclosures? Most people would agree that some level of supervision is necessary for any whistle-blowing platforms to serve a positive role in society, but there is no guarantee that supervision will be there (a glance at the recklessness of hackers3 who publish others’ personal information online in bulk conf
irms this).
If there is a central body facilitating the release of information, someone or some group of people, with their own ideas and biases, must be making those decisions. So long as humans, and not computers, are running things in our world, we will face these questions of judgment, no matter how transparent or technically sound the platforms are.
Looking ahead, some people might assume that the growth of connectivity around the world will spur a proliferation of WikiLeaks-like platforms. With more users and more classified or confidential information online, the argument goes, dozens of smaller secret-publishing platforms will emerge to meet the increase in supply and demand. A compelling and frightening idea, but wrong. There are natural barriers to growth in the field of whistle-blowing websites, including exogenous factors that limit the number of platforms that can successfully coexist. Regardless of what one thinks of WikiLeaks, consider all the things it needed in order to become a known, global brand: more than one geopolitically relevant large-scale leak to grab international attention; a track record of leaks to show commitment to the cause, to generate public trust and to give incentives to other potential leakers by demonstrating WikiLeaks’ ability to protect them; a charismatic figurehead who could embody the organization and serve as its lightning rod, as Assange called himself; a constant upload of new leaks (often in bulk) to remain relevant in the public eye; and, not least, a broadly distributed and technically sophisticated digital platform for leakers, organization staff and the public to handle the leaked materials (while all remaining anonymous to one another) that could evade shutdown by authorities in multiple countries. It is very difficult to build such an intricate and responsive system, both technically and because the value of most components depends on the capabilities of others. (What good is a sophisticated platform without motivated leakers, or a set of valuable secrets without the system to discretely process and disseminate them?) The balance struck by WikiLeaks between public interest, private disclosure and technical protections took years to reach, so it is hard to imagine future upstarts, offshoots or rivals building an equivalent platform and brand much faster than they could—particularly now that authorities around the world are attuned to the threat such organizations pose.
