Transparency: The battle is far from over

First... I have two political pieces on the hot new site American News X. One is about the most harmful pundit in America, silken-tongued George F. Will, who finally admits that something has gone wrong with a movement that will nominate fellows like Trump or Cruz. Nothing about the warning signs, of course, like a 20 year outright war on science, and every other knowledge profession in American life. Except fact-averse opinionated "commentators." Glory days for that profession!

My second piece on American News X appraises the diagnosis made by Dilbert creator Scott Adams that Americans are so stupid they will all fall for Donald Trump's emotional manipulations and make him president. Half-right, Scott. But fortunately just half.

Veering from the absurd to the sublime, here’s Thomas Jefferson explaining why information is a potential public good: 

 ‘He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space  ... and like the air in which we breathe ... incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.’ 

Yes... well... that's how reasonable citizens do it.  May we start remembering.

== Can we learn to look-back? ==

The Ethics of Intimate Surveillance: An insightful and informative article by John Danaher about how transparency is affecting intimacy, that cites both me and Steve Mann for our work on Sousveillance.  And yet, this article manages to evade the core question: Is it possible to create positive sum conditions, wherein individuals, relationships and society all gain the benefits of light, without many disadvantages?  

Or will we be stuck in zero-sum war-gaming of all against all? Alas, nearly every pundit who attempts to theorize in this field appears to implicitly assume the latter.  Or else the question never occurs to them.

The core point that Steve Mann and I have pushed is to consider the words Reciprocal Accountability.  It may be hopeless (utterly) to deny surveillance powers to the mighty. But their ability to harm us with what they know about us can be limited by sousveillance that keeps their palpable, consequential or real world actions accountable. 

Cell-phone cams have not improved citizen power by blinding the state. They have  improved citizen power by empowering us to look back - at least at power-minions on the street - doing far more good for civil liberties than marches or protests.

Likewise with lateral transparency or co-veillance. The worst and most harmful online behaviors tend to be those wherein the perpetrator can act anonymously. These behaviors moderate when trolls can be "followed home," or when the victims can tell their moms.

Do we then lose the virtues and advantages of anonymity online? The reflex is to assume so, but that is just silly and unimaginative.  One can envision services that rent you pseudonyms, temporary identities that will be used to protect core identity... unless you use the pseudonym to wreak harm on others, in which case back-tracking and accountability can apply. Preservation of reciprocal accountability does not have to mean living under a perpetual glare. If you assume that, it's a sure sign of zero-sum thinking.

This is where "intimacy" comes in. If we are human, we will want some space and leeway. We also want safety from harm and the ability to tell pushy neighbors "MYOB!" Or Mind Your Own Business.

The most difficult quandary I have faced in this issue is not how to stymie would be Big Brothers... for that, transparency and sousveillance are the only things that can possibly work. By comparison, "encryption" is a transcendentalist religion of stunning technological myopia and romanticism.  No, the question I have wrestled with is this: "Suppose transparency does eliminate Big Brothers. Won't we then face a completely legal and open oppression by majority rules? By 51% bullying 'little brothers'? Judgmental gossips and nosy busybodies enforcing conformity?"

It may surprise you -- given my authorship of The Transparent Society -- that I admit a decent future cannot be accomplished by transparency and coveillance, alone!  Transparency and accountability can protect you from most harms, yes even tyrants, but not the harm of nosy busybodies and prurient voyeurs who act within the bounds of law.  And we do not want the law to impede most vision.

This is where we need add one element.  A social element.  A general and rising consensus that people should leave each other alone, when no actual harm is afoot. 

A consensus that eccentricities and embarrassments (teenage photos posted back when you were rash and stupid) are not held against you, over time. That there is a sin worse than any quirk or stupid posting or awkward sex-selfie... the sin of gossipy bullying.

The good news? We are clearly heading in that direction. Every year, young people - and many older ones, too - make clear their intention to live in a society of forgiveness for harmless stupidities... while becoming less tolerant of harmful judgmentalists.

The bad news: this battle is far from won. It struggles uphill against ten thousand years of conformity pressures and zero-sum reflex.  And there are major nations on Earth, today, whose leaders want to leverage those ancient reflexes to enforce conformity and obedience. 

But those millennia are our greatest ally, in this revolution of light. We can look back on their darkness and say: "Not that. We tried that. It's no good."

== (non) Hollywood does transparency ==

* A new, Indie film takes on some ideas I’ve been pushing for quite some time… for example that the proliferation of cameras is unstoppable.  And that public agencies need to get citizen involvement and supervision, or the social contract will collapse.  “FOR ALL EYES ALWAYS” takes these concepts and blends them with “reality television” in interesting directions:

“In a time of widespread distrust of our government, the CIA creates a fully transparent reality tv show to win back the faith of the American public. Audiences go undercover on black ops missions around the globe and see real world effects from the narrative the showrunners create. As the first season unfolds, we wonder – how much is real and how much is propaganda? Our charismatic host “Swamp Fox” leads us down the rabbit hole the showrunners write for him, and it becomes impossible to distinguish fact from fiction as the lines blur between reality, television, and movies in an age when everything is on camera.”

Writer of the film, Rob Bralver comments: “The film takes place in a world in which there is no longer such a thing as secrets. Everyone, from the most secretive of government agencies to the smallest individual, lives transparently — whether deliberately or by being exposed. In such a world, how can we expect our intelligence professionals to operate effectively and influence events as they have in the past?”  Huh. Interesting. At least it seems so from the vivid web site.  I look forward to seeing the film, some time

== We are in the future - tidbits from next week ==

Trying out Virtual Reality at UCSD

* Longtime colleague Kevin Kelly takes us on a detailed tour of the varied (and many) endeavors in Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality that are looming at us from companies like Magic Leap, Occulus, Microsoft, Apple and many others.  Kevin’s fascinating account introduces the innovators who will change everything, as much as they were changed by the arrival of the computer monitor, then the laptop, the web browser and the cell-phone.-

* An interesting study of Wikipedia, whose perfect record of all transactions offers up a cornucopia of data for web anthropology/sociology.

* Using a little play-dough and dental mold, you can clone someone’s fingerprint and fool a modern phone. “As hacks go, it ranks just a little harder than steaming open a letter.” Other methods include 3D printing a fake from just an image.  Which brings home a point I made in The Transparent Society (1997). “unlike a passcode, you can’t change your fingerprint, so a single credential theft creates a lifetime vulnerability. What looks like a security upgrade turns out to be something much more complex.”

* An amazing, almost Kafa-esque story about how one company’s carelessness has created aggravation for scads of innocent people. A service that associates Internet IP addresses with real world locations has a default answer for those IPs it can’t figure out.  A default location in the geographic center of the US… or the center of any state in question.  And hence, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default US coordinate. “If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.” Which leads to one little farmhouse in Kansas and a world of trouble.  Others on the top default list have had police raids, death threats.  A Monty Python-level problem that can only be (and now is) solved by transparency.

Because of good investigative journalism, the company has scurried to fix the problem and shift the default locations to the very middle of large lakes.  And Nessie is getting perturbed by strange calls in the night.

* And now... SkySafe has developed technology that will allow institutional users to disable drones flying in areas that are off-limits, or those in accessible areas that may be flying dangerously. The technology leverages radio waves to override the instructions from a drone owner's remote control unit, thus taking control of the airborne device. And so it begins.  The arms race.

Finally. Some of us have tried hard to portray these future possibilities, going back to 1980s cyberpunks. Vernor Vinge took things to new levels of possibility and plausibility in Rainbows End… as I tried to do, in Existence. We are in for interesting times.

"The Circle?" - Watching the Watchers of the Watchers

I will get to the recent, anti-transparency best-seller - The Circle - in a moment.  But first --

People think that because I am "moderate" that means I am tepid.  I am a MILITANT moderate! I do not need to blind government... civil servants must do their jobs.  But I am fierce in demanding they be supervised.  Mostly by open transparency but at very least by auditors they cannot control. 

 Fortunately there is good news. I have called it the most important civil liberties matter in our lifetimes -- certainly in thirty years -- even though it was hardly covered by the press. In 2013 both the U.S. courts and the Obama Administration declared it to be "settled law" that a citizen has the right to record his or her interactions with police in public places.

No single matter could have been more important because it established the most basic right of "sousveillance" or looking-back at power, that The Transparent Society is all about. It is also fundamental to freedom, for in altercations with authority, what other recourse can a citizen turn to, than the Truth?

Kevin Kelly's Why You Should Embrace Surveillance, not Fight it, in WIRED, prescribed “transparent coveillance” as the best practical solution in a world where information sloshes and duplicates and flows. I’ve known Kevin for decades as one of the sharp guys who “got” the notions in The Transparent Society long before most did.

Also, in Smile, You're on Video Camera, Futurist Virginia Postrel offers an interesting little thought experiment about the future spread of cameras and omni-veillance in our lives. The upside potential is vast... providing we remain calmly reasonable about negotiating carve-outs and exceptions. 

And - above all - if we demand that the light spread "upward" - at least as much as downward.

== Manipulative polemics about transparency == 

In contrast, Dave Eggers's novel The Circle expresses dread toward the spreading encroachment, everywhere, of light, portraying a near future internet giant that manifests all of the best -- and all the very worst -- traits of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, combined. In so doing, he creates a vivid, strawman version of coveillance for his virtuous characters to rebel-against and knock down.  

Eggers does this effectively, first by portraying an all-controlling, information-voracious monopoly -- a hackle-raiser, all by itself -- a behemoth whose unctuous-preachy utopianism just has to conceal a deeply insidious agenda. The author of this best-seller also utilizes an expert array of well-delivered literary techniques -- for instance, by having both his omniscient narrator-voice and the story's smarmy-nosy oppressors lecture the reader -- ad tedious infinitum -- about the advantages  of reciprocal transparency. 

I respect skillful polemic and Eggers deploys cleverness to make his anti-transparency argument, knowing that  generations of Hollywood films have taught us... it's always villains who give long, rationalizing speeches.   And boy, do the pro-transparency villains in The Circle give speeches!

The novel is at its most-fun while skewering the cliches of Silicon Valley. Eggers portrays The Circle as the perfect place to work... in fact too perfect with free gourmet restaurants, 24 hour health spa, free (indeed mandatory) massages, and employees encouraged to begin living on-campus. As pep rallies gather momentum, you cannot help picking up the vibe of a cult -- even down to oblique references to the new Apple headquarters, a spaceship-like behemoth that will be shaped like -- a circle.  Eggers's loathing for all this is seldom expressed in criticism, but rather in grandiose, utopian paeans that pour not only from the cult's boosters, but also the unctuously supportive, omniscient narrator.

Indeed, it took me a while to realize where I had seen this method before -- mocking your foe by relentlessly delivering silly-exaggerated versions of the enemy point of view.  Then I realized. Of course. Stephen Colbert! Colbert's faux-conservative schtick is probably the most original, consistent and brilliant comedic innovation since Groucho Marx. Eggers does the same thing (alas without Colbert's humor or charm), delivering every possible argument for transparency, in extreme versions that are tuned to repel.

In the world of The Circle, cameras proliferate everywhere -- as I predicted in EARTH and in The Transparent Society -- only these do not become part of an ecology of human-style reciprocal-self-restraint. Rather, they unleash a tsunami of voyeurism and exhibitionism, encouraged -- even socially enforced -- by a corporate titan that is paternalistically "well-intentioned," but untethered from regulation or social or even market forces. (Circle employees are so busy 'zinging' and engaging in online interaction that they get very little actual work done.)

Alas, Eggers goes for the standard cliche...that his fellow citizens are fools who would actually buy into his all-controlling corporation's blatant zero-sum game. That, in order to get transparency's advantages, you must thereupon completely sell-out and surrender your humanity, or any core-safe-inner zone of personal space or privacy, or the right to eccentricity or even stark-but-beautiful loneliness. 

"Secrets are lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is Theft," reads the Circle's deliberately Orwellian mantra. Well, sure, borrow from the master! Indeed, Eggers intends to warn us off from what he deems to be transparency's pitiless glare. He aims for Orwell's achievement: the self preventing prophecy.

Alas for his scenario, in real life, average men and women would refuse the simplistic, zero-sum bargain offered by The Circle. Those citizens are, as we speak, adapting to a more transparent world by picking and choosing. By deciding which most-vital intimacies or solitary ways to keep within a protected curtilage, and which to trade for the benefits of reciprocal accountability. 

Like all transparency luddites, Eggers shrugs off his obligation to suggest plausible alternatives. Given that cameras get smaller, cheaper, more numerous, better and more mobile at a rate faster than Moore's Law -- (one pundit called it Brin's Corollary) -- what's your plan, then? To ban them? That will certainly guarantee Big Brother. 

The one alternative presented in the book -- unplugging and dropping out, Kaczynski-style -- seems likely to be a non-starter. Moreover, it goes very badly for one drop-out, in The Circle, poignantly reminding me of that hapless character, The Savage, in Brave New World. Did Eggers truly mean to make it so blatantly clear that hiding cannot possibly work?  In which case... what's your suggested alternative?

Perhaps the choices being made by today's teens (for example) are not to the liking of folks like Dave Eggers. Indeed, he is welcome to disagree. But is it fair to call citizens inactive in this evolution? As I portray in Existence, their activity can be assertive, not the sheeplike acquiescence that he depicts (contemptuously) in The Circle.

The possibility that light might be a weapon any person can use to enforce MYOB (Mind Your Own Business) or GOOMFYNBALMA (Get Out Of My Face You Nosy Bastard And Leave Me Alone) never occurs to Mr. Eggers, even though it is how we got freedom and privacy, in the first place. Nor the blatant fact that transparency and sousveillance are solutions to hierarchy and intimidation, not their friends

Indeed, the novel's plot revolves around a predictable premise, that The Circle's rulers do not abide by the bargain they have offered, that the new-lord information-oligarchs betray it, and their hypocrisy would for certain be brought down... by light! If only it truly did shine both ways.

It is the avoidance of reciprocality of transparency that underlies every bad aspect that Eggers rails against. The corporation frames and blackmails opponents and stifles its own defectors. One of those top defectors even avows, near the end, that the one solution to every problem raised in the book will be to inform the sheep out there what's really going on, and he asks the protagonist for help in doing this. 

But the protagonist -- a strawman exhibitionist who has spent 300 pages proclaiming devotion to fetishistic-openness -- suddenly refuses to share, deciding instead to help the oligarchs conceal their schemes.

Seriously.  The top failure mode revealed in the book consists of characters following Mr. Eggers's advice. 

(Side note: when you finish The Circle, ask: why didn't the defector guy -- a billionaire genius with instant access to all the world -- just blow the whistle, himself, instead of trusting a flakey and openly-avowed foe?) 

== The Circle... comes full circle ==

Consider those Hollywood memes.  I've asserted already that Eggers skillfully deploys several. Again, monopolies are dangerous. Villains give long lectures. And our neighbors would all fall for this simplistic plot because they (unlike me) are all sheep.  

Those are great old crowd-pleasers.

What Eggers never acknowledges is that generations of those same films (and novels and songs) also portray individualism and eccentricity and diversity as paramount virtues.  Wait... I take that back.  Eggers portrays all of those things under threat by an ominous Big Brother, even though he does not trust commonfolk to defend them. Okay. I get it. The Colbert thing again. He does not miss a beat.


To be clear, I share all of those values, except one. I refuse (despite Fox News and its pallid imitators on the left) to perceive my fellow citizens as herd beasts. I am betting they will negotiate an assertive course, one that brings individualism and eccentricity and MYOB into a world filled with light. Using light to catch and deter those who invade their inner privacy.

Will we see this active assertion start to take shape with the emergence of ELLO?  The new social network that - while somewhat bare bones - promises NOT to collect your data or sell it, and to have no advertising? Will fed-up millions vote with their feet? 

The Ello experiment will not make or break my arguments from The Transparent Society.  But in the extremum, any surge from Facebook to Ello would be a blow to those who portray our fellow citizens as cattle.

== A circle has no point ==

Again, when the entire plot revolves around a top-down conspiracy for power that would be solved by engaging a fully informed public's capacity for judgement and balance, and the author makes clear that upward-shining sousveillance light is the only conceivable answer, one has to ask: what was your point, again?

To be fair, there is a level at which Mr. Eggers does in The Circle what I always attempt to do -- present arguments for all sides (albeit in this case as grotesque caricatures) in a passionately important controversy over where all the technological and social trends might be taking us.  If I did not consider his contribution to the debate to be intelligent and interesting - though polemical-biased - I would not be driving sales his way, right now!  

Alas, though, intelligence and cleverness do not prevent the sins of blatant exaggeration, oversimplification, strawmanning, contempt for the masses and pressing the scales with a heavy, authorial thumb.

But you be the judge. It's what citizens will do, with balance and proportion, as we seek the positive sum, win-win for us all.

== Transparency Miscellany ==

Now it’s Home Depot reporting a massive hack-leak of customer information. A couple months ago it was Target and 110 million files. Before that? Open SSL, a critical security backbone. And before that? Shall I go on? Read this article about “Data Breach Fatigue” and how people are starting to shrug in resignation, rather than shout in outrage.

"We are in the trough of disillusionment," says Gartner security analyst Avivah Litan. "Over 1,000 retailers have been hit; it's not limited to Home Depot. There are 999 others that no one's talking about."

When will it sink in that Everything Leaks and that our best security measure will be to stop assuming there’s some solution out there, and instead adapt so that we will not be harmed — and can thrive — in a world where most information simply flows, like water. 

Believe it or not, we might be stronger and safer and even have more privacy, if we finally face that fact.

Revisiting 300

All right, so the sequel is out… and doing well.  The stylish combat film “300: Rise of an Empire” topped the box office last weekend with  $45.1 million, seven years after the original Miller-Snyder flick “300” became an international hit.  I haven't seen the new one yet, but two thoughts occur to me:

(1) This sequel covers precisely the parts of the story that I have pushed for, ever since the first "300" came out.

That original film, based on a comic book by Frank Miller, told egregious historical lies, cramming into the mouth of the Spartan general- Leonidas -- things that he would never have said.  For example dripping contempt for the Athenian shopkeepers and potters and fishermen who had destroyed an entire Persian army, just ten years before, at Marathon.

Spartans still stung with shame over having stayed out of that fight.  But to have Leonidas rant… while ignoring what was in plain view from his cliff-edge… an Athenian-led navy holding the vast Persian fleet at bay, guarding his flank… that omission in "300" slandered Leonidas and betrayed the audience.

Across six years, I've occasionally written about the travesty that the original "300" perpetrates, not only against factual history but against the very notion of democracy and citizenship and the power of volunteers defending their people, homes and nation. 

I suggested that any sequel focus on Themistocles and the Athenian fleet - and on the notions of volunteer citizenship that enabled them to keep succeeding where Startans failed -- with flashbacks to Marathon and then moving forward to the glorious victory at Salamis, that saved western civilization…

… which is apparently what this new flick does!  Though with lots of Millerian sneering cartoon-villains, when the real thing was dramatic enough.  Ah well.

(2) I'll go see it.  What the heck?  In hopes that, maybe, Mr. Snyder has decided to love the civilization that's been good to him, ignoring the incredible hatred of democracy and enlightenment that pervades nearly all of Frank Miller's works.

 == The Blackjack Generation? ==

Tuesday evening on The Daily Show, author Paul Taylor discussed the millennial generation and his book The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown.  In discussion with Jon Stewart, Prof. Taylor said that the clade following the millennials… encompassing those born after 2000… does not yet have a name.  Um, well… may I weigh in?

Way back in 1989, in my novel EARTH, I portrayed folks in the 2030s referring to this generation as "blackjacks"… because they were the first ones born in Century Twenty-One.

Blackjack? Twenty-one? Get it?  Cool, eh?  Oh… never mind…

== News flash:  The Justice Department is now conducting two inquiries: 

1) looking into whether the CIA illegally snooped on congressional investigators and 

2) another looking into whether those same congressional investigators broke the law by sneaking documents out of CIA HQ to protect them from erasure. The accusations include lying to Congress and to the Justice Department, and spying on congressional investigators to hide what the CIA was doing.

== Continuing panic over terror?  ==

So many misconceptions!  During the Obama Administration, the U.S. has suffered its fewest number of terror-related attacks per year of any substance, going back to the 1960s, yet somehow we manage to stay stoked in panic.  In fact, according to a briefing I got last week at the Pentagon, the curves are extremely clear.  International terrorism attacks peaked across the Reagan and Bush administrations at roughly 400 to 500 incidents per year. They plummeted starting around 1992 through a nadir in 2001, the very year of the 9/11 attacks. (Coincidentally, this steep decline encompassed the Clinton years, though the aging out of European radicals probably also played a role.) There was a bit of a rise under GW Bush, though not to pre-Clinton levels.  The decline continued under Obama…

….though the US figure does not apply to the whole world.  The missing jet from Malaysia is deeply worrisome, for example. There are Chechen-related events in Russia and so on.  This is not a call for complacency! Still, it is yet one more reason to choose to shake off our dismal funk and the pessimism foisted on us by cable news.  We still have time to start the "real 21st Century" in a mood of rising confidence.

Wish I could share the chart.  It's amazing.

== Some folks get-it ==

 A WIRED article by Kevin Kelly promotes sousveillance and reciprocal accountability by translating/combining them into the word "coveillance"… a term that may confuse the chemists out there… but that captures the heart of by two-decade argument -- that we can negotiate in our own best interests if we can see.

 "A transparent coveillance where everyone sees each other — a sense of entitlement can emerge: Every person has a human right to access, and benefit from, the data about themselves. The commercial giants running the networks have to spread the economic benefits of tracing people’s behavior to the people themselves, simply to keep going."

And… "Amplified coveillance will shift society to become even more social; more importantly it will change how we define ourselves as humans."  Interesting!

(Ah, but Kevin… do cite others along the way.)