Futurismic

The city of Windsor in Ontario, Canada has apparently requested Google reshoot some of its Street View footage in order to remove a murder scene (complete with Do Not Cross police tape barriers and bloody bandages) from the public record, prompting Mike Masnick of TechDirt to wonder…

[... whether] towns and cities are going to start to “prepare” for Google Street View cars coming through and make sure that everyone is on their best behavior…

Seems pretty likely, doesn’t it? [image by sfmine79]

The threat of being seen without one’s “make-up” on has always been around. For instance, I can still remember the way every school I ever attended spent a week gussying the place up and drilling the students in advance of the government inspectors, which was probably one of my earliest cognitive dissonance awakenings – what was the point of inspections if they only occurred after a metaphorical wash’n'brush-up? Why not just, y’know, improve things generally rather than making a last-minute effort once a year*?

This feeds into the idealistic notion that ubiquitous transparency is a good thing, I suppose: if every city (or school, or whatever) knew it could be inspected (or Street View’d) at any time without warning, then perhaps they’d be more likely to fix problems at the root cause instead of sweeping the problems under the rug before the visitors arrive.

Of course, that’s a massive oversimplification of a very complex issue, but the Windsor story is a harbinger of institutional panics yet to come; much as technology could enable nation-states to turn themselves into panopticons, the spotlight can also be pointed in the other direction. The next few decades will be all about the struggle between individuals and corporate or geo-political entities to filter and control their realities as presented to the rest of the world… which is why I’m fairly convinced that augmented reality will be the multi-planar battlefield of manifold and fractal ideological struggles between citizens, states and corporations.

[ * The answer is very obvious now, of course, with the benefit of experience (and the cynicism toward institutions and bureaucracy that it engenders), but for a naive and nerdy seven year old, it was a baffling condundrum. Pity my poor parents attempting to explain these moral grey areas and fundamental societal flaws to a child with no better an instinctive or empathetic grasp of human nature than the Borg... ]

We’ve surely heard enough stories about how posting status updates on social networks can give away more information about you than you intended, so here’s the positive flipside of that: Rodney Bradford was a suspect in a Brooklyn mugging case, and it’s partly thanks to a Facebook status update made from his father’s apartment that the charges against him were dropped. [via TechDirt]

Of course, such alibis could be faked, if you had the time and intelligence to plan it all out and the help of a close-lipped accomplice… expect a lot more mystery and crime plots involving status updates, IP addresses and server timestamps to crop up in the next couple of years.

But perhaps this means that lifelogging is the ultimate way to protect yourself from accidentally being accused of something you didn’t do – if every second of your life is open to public scrutiny, you’re not going to commit a mugging and get away with it, after all.

But what happens when we’re all lifelogging, in some almost unimaginable combination of the participatory panopticon and David Brin’s transparent society? When every moment, when every minor indiscretion is a matter of public record, will we simply cease to sin? Or will we develop a kind of social blindness to the sort of unethical actions that we all take every now and again?

If you’d asked me to make a list of people I thought would be opposed to political transparency and “open government”, Lawrence Lessig would not have appeared in my top hundred. But here he is, writing at The New Republic, saying that while the intentions of government transparency movements are good, there may be serious negative repercussions [image by Kyle May]:

How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

(I don’t know that I have much faith left in mine to lose, frankly – by the time you Statesiders read this post, you’ll probably also be hearing a whole lot about the Trafigura/Guardian gagging order. I’ll not bother linking it; just look at the trending topics on Twitter. And as a commenter at MetaFilter pointed out: “Well, we’ve tried invisible corruption and back-room dealing for so long, why dismiss transparency without even really trying it?” But anyway, back to Lessig…)

There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has–in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption. Projects such as the one that the health care bill would launch–building a massive database of doctors who got money from private interests; or projects such as the ones (these are the really sexy innovations for the movement) to make it trivially easy to track every possible source of influence on a member of Congress, mapped against every single vote that the member has made. These projects assume that they are seeking an obvious good. No doubt they will have a profound effect. But will the effect of these projects–at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations–really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they righteously envisage?

[...]

The point is salience, and the assumptions of our political culture. At this time the judgment that Washington is all about money is so wide and so deep that among all the possible reasons to explain something puzzling, money is the first, and most likely the last, explanation that will be given. It sets the default against which anything different must fight. And this default, this unexamined assumption of causality, will only be reinforced by the naked transparency movement and its correlations. What we believe will be confirmed, again and again.

But will not this supposed salience of money–the faithful disciple of Brandeis asks–simply inspire more debate about whether in fact money buys results in Congress? Won’t more people enter to negate the default? Like a rash of flat-earth defenders, won’t the attention cause round-earth truth to spread? Again, we must keep our intuitions guided by the concrete. No doubt false claims will sometimes inspire more truth. But what about when the claims are neither true nor false? Or worse, when the claims actually require more than the 140 characters in a tweet?

If I’ve understood his position correctly, Lessig isn’t saying that transparency is a bad thing as such; he’s saying that the current political system cannot support it, or change quickly enough to do so without collapsing under the weight of scandal and scrutiny. He may have a point… but I find myself wondering if that’s not just one of a couple of inevitable outcomes, the other being a sort of global totalitarian lockdown. If so, I know which I’d choose.

Personally, I think enforcing transparency is a bigger issue than transparency itself. If one powerful force (party, country, company) goes transparent, eventually the “market” will force others to follow suit – transparency builds trust, and that’s something that’s hard to compete with on any terms other than its own. We need to encourage ground-up transparency rather than having it rolled out from the top downwards; if the regulation of power is left to those who already hold it, you’re going to run into snags of one sort or another pretty fast.

On a somewhat lighter note, though, I think a new sub-genre of fiction has just been born – who will be the first to write a near-future transparent-government-collapse technothriller? Whole lotta folk living in cabins with guns who’ll buy a copy of that, I’m thinking…

I’ve long been a cheerleader for the sort of informational transparency that our increasingly wired world seems to encourage, if not make inevitable. After all, surely a world where it’s harder for those in power or authority to lie to us behind our backs is an improvement on the status quo, right?

I still hold that view, but Russell Davies has a column at Wired UK where he suggests that an unwanted outcome of that transparency might be to erode the sorts of brash personality that create change and new ideas:

I realised the other day that this is what’s happened to me. Everything I produce, however private or NDA’d, is filtered through the voice in my head, whispering, “how would I feel if this got online?” Because a slip of the email or a misplaced YouSendIt and it could easily happen. And, mostly, that’s good; it keeps the bullshit to minimum-required levels. It’s a reality we’re all going to have to get used to. It’s sensible to assume that everything you think is private might one day be read.

And this won’t just be by accident – this will be about policy. Openness is next to godliness. Sunshine is regularly touted as the best disinfectant. It’s just that disinfectant kills good bugs as well as bad ones, and there are some healthy things that need to breed in the dark. Good, positive, non-evil ideas sometimes need to be whispered in private before they’re shouted in public. Pretentiousness is occasionally necessary among friends. And if we’re afraid to be slightly different people in private, we’ll end up with a world of well-trained Michael Owens; sincere, good-looking people with no dark side, no sins, no doubts. Media training has driven the personality out of sport – I wonder if constant, enforced openness will drive it out of everything else?

Call me cynical, but I’m not sure sport ever really had that much personality, beyond the more ornery characters having freer license to be unpleasant in public… but leaving that aside, I still suspect Davies is overstating the problem, here. Yes, sure, there are some situations where ideas have to be brewed up out of sight of the public eye for them to gel properly, and a certain level of confidentiality in personal friendships is necessary. But speaking from my own personal experience, being continually mindful of transparency has made me more considerate of the feelings of others – not to the point of changing my opinions or ideas outright, but certainly making me consider their wider ramifications and think harder about how I express them. [image by jm3]

What do you think – will ubiquitous transparency make us a species of dullards, as Davies suggests? And if it does, is that a reasonable sacrifice to make for a kinder world?

This week, transhumanist blogger George Dvorsky’s site Sentient Developments plays host to no less a science fiction luminary than David Brin as guest blogger. Says Dvorsky:

David will be writing about biological uplift, the Singularity, Active SETI (messages to extraterrestrial intelligences), and how a transparent society might work to help us mitigate catastrophic risks.

Topics that should be of some interest to Futurismic regulars, then; I file David Brin among the group of authors and thinkers with whom I don’t always agree, but who never fail to challenge my thinking.

Dvorsky has taken the time to provide a reading list around Brin’s first topic, namely biological uplift, and that first post is ready to read as I type. Here’s a snippet:

1. Can we replicate – in other creatures or in AI – the stunning way that Homo sapiens outstripped the needs of mere hunter-gathering, to reach levels of mentation that can take us to other planets and invent symphonies and possibly destroy the world? That was one hell of a leap! In Earth I speculated about half a dozen quirky things that might explain that vast overshoot in ability. In my next novel Existence I speculate on a dozen more.

In truth, we just don’t know. I frankly think it may be harder than it looks.

Go read. [Brin portrait from Wikimedia Commons]