Aiming for lateral accountability: Cameras will either help... or thwart... Big Brother

More and more we are seeing that the enemies of the Enlightenment Experiment Are not just opposing 'western decadence' or even the Rule of Law - though RoL hampers terribly the power and whim that topmost males have always deemed their birthright. 

No, the most fundamental thing that all tyrants, kings, owner-lords and priestly hierarchs have always dreaded was the possibility of accountability, applied upon them by those they rule.

Pericles spoke of this, at the onset of the age when the Athenian Democracy dazzled the world. Thomas Paine crystalized the notion, far more revolutionary than anything by Lenin or Robspierre or Mao. It is the core of every experiment in flat-fair-open-creative and free civilization.

== Is technology going to help... or end it? ==

“Massive camera hack exposes the growing reach and intimacy of American surveillance.” A breach of the camera start-up Verkada ‘should be a wake-up call to the dangers of self-surveillance,’ one expert said: ‘Our desire for some fake sense of security is its own security threat', reports The Washington Post.

I remain appalled that so many very smart people actually seem to think that each year's new tech levels - and menaces - will now freeze and stand still long enough for us to ban them. Cameras get smaller, faster, cheaper, better, more mobile and vastly more numerous far faster than Moore's Law (Brin's Corollary!) 

Consider the recent case of San Francisco's City Council banning facial recognition systems, when keeping them open to public criticism is exactly how we discovered and then corrected many problems like racial and gender bias in the programs.

Anyway Facial Recognition programs won't be resident in police departments for long, where some city council can ban them, but will be cheap apps in phones and AR glasses, available from a thousand directions. Result? Cops who are banned from using versions that are open to supervision will instead surreptitiously use dark web versions, because it might save their own lives.

We need to focus not on uselessly trying to ban tech that might be abused, but on eliminating the abuses. And that can only happen with more light, aimed at those with power.

Oh, the dangers are very real! These techs will certainly empower agents and masters of despotism, if you already have a despotism. And hence the lesson and priority is to prevent despotism altogether! Because these same techs could instead empower vibrant citizenship, if we see to it they are well-shared and that no elite gets to monopolize them.

Which they will, if we try simplistically and reflexively to ban them.

It's not that the ACLU and EFF and EU are wrong to fret! They are absolutely correct to point at problems and to worry that surveillance techs could empower Big Brothers and render citizen privacy extinct. It is their prescriptions that almost always are short-sighted and foolish.

Making a tech illegal will not stop elites form having and using it. 

Let me repeat that.

Making a tech illegal will not stop elites form having and using it. 

What it will do is make them arrange to do it secretly, where the methods won't be appraised and criticized publicly.

As Heinlein said, "the chief effect of a privacy law is to make the bugs smaller."

Need I keep mentioning that both Martin Luther King and Gandhi credited cameras with saving their own lives, as they marched and took on entrenched power?

Meanwhile the thing propelling Black Lives Matter is the proliferation of public access to cameras, spectacularly increasing the number of bad cops being fired. Being convicted took longer and activism helped change the reflexes of juries!But none of it would have happened without the cameras. All of it, BTW, predicted in EARTH (1990) and The Transparent Society (1997.)

== Again and again… HOW to get the internet’s good and repress the bad? ==

Some of these concepts are hard, so let's go over similar concepts from a slightly different angle.

Evan Anderson of the Strategic News Service recently wrote an incisive piece on how the Internet is suffering near lethal harm from swarms of nasty users.  “The Half-Percent: How A Few Awful Individuals Increasingly Threaten Our Future.”

For example “This March, in its The Disinformation Dozen, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in a sample of content posted 812,000 times on social media platforms, just 12 individual anti-vaxxer accounts on Facebook and Twitter were responsible for a full 65% of anti-vaccine content. The report also describes that many of these individuals are doing so simply to encourage skepticism because they have “snake oil” to sell, noting: ‘Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who do not have relevant medical expertise and have their own pockets to line, who are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of Covid and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines. According to our recent report, anti-vaccine activists on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter reach more than 59 million followers, making these the largest and most important social media platforms for anti-vaxxers. Our research has also found anti-vaxxers using social media platforms to target Black Americans, exploiting higher rates of vaccine hesitancy in that community to spread conspiracies and lies about the safety of Covid vaccines.’ These 12 individuals account for 73% of vaccine misinformation on Facebook, are personally featured in 17% of anti-vaxx content on Twitter, and regularly feature sales attempts for alternative products that they claim can cure Covid-19.

Okay then. How to deal with badguys and sociopaths and predators? As far back as legends go, sages have preached we should be honest and forthright and honorable to each other. These preachings - on every continent and in every language - had positive effects, but only on those who already valued honesty and honor and decency. 

The sort of folks whom the dishonorable always view as prey.

Some kings and priests sought to apply other methods. Laws, policing, punishments. These deterred bad actors to some large degree by applying accountability. In strong, efficient states, businesses could operate and families had some recourse from gangs of thugs... but only some. And there was no redress from the capricious whims of the King, or lords or priests.

A few nations tried the Periclean approach... supply citizens with the means to apply accountability upward. Always a difficult, fraught and incomplete effort, it nevertheless was the focus of Adam Smith and the U.S. Founders and each generation of Americans has done it slightly better, except this one, as a worldwide oligarchic putsch strives to end the very notion of the idea that Rule-of-Law can apply upward.

In order to weaken us, those oligarchs have subsidized and encouraged the nasty predators that this post was about.  The anonymity that original Internet zealots called liberating has become a curse, as the worst men use it to evade any form of accountability, online.  More and more, we hear calls to banish anonymity... while those worried about Big Brother see what's happened in China, where online anonymity is banned for purposes of state control. 

Elsewhere, I've explored how we were able to harness competitive processes in five great arenas: MARKETS, DEMOCRACY, SCIENCE, COURTS and SPORTS, and in all five, strenuous, unrelenting efforts repress the human tendency to cheat, by applying very different styles of fierce regulation and accountability. In my paper I discuss a method that might let this happen on the Web. 

(For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition." 

Okay, here's the key point. This doesn't have to be ZERO SUM! We should be able to get most of the good aspects of anonymity while eliminating most of the bad!  We could do this with a regularized process of formalized PSEUDONYMITY in which you can rent a vetted pseudonym from a fiduciary you already trust for other credentials (e.g. credit or savings)... your bank. (Banks are already well placed to get into this potentially profitable business.) 

If you do bad things under that pseudonym, the "ding" would follow you back and affect your credibility scores without having anyone actually know your name (unless the ding is a felony.)

I go into this elsewhere, too. The crux: the key to reducing the harm done by badguys is accountability. But giving top rulers tools for applying it downward is always dangerous to freedom. 

The answer - as you'd expect from me - is lateral accountability.  And we can do it in a positive sum way.

== Tech as Freedom’s Friend ==

In 2013 I touted maybe the most important step in American civil liberties since the 1960s Civil Rights Bills... when the Obama Administration and the courts ruled that citizens have a right to record the police. As I predicted in The Transparent Society, (especially p.130), cameras became far more of a 'great equalizer' that the six gun, though it took time and phases and a stretch of pain that hasn't ended with the Chauvin conviction. 

But while we rightfully laud heroes in this struggle, let's spare a nod for technology? The thing that will either empower Big Brother forever... or else ensure we'll have Big Brother NEVER.

That choice still lies in our hands.

Disputation - and disinformation

I'm in DC for NASA and other meetings. So let's offer up a trove of observations about privacy, transparency and freedom....

A new debate platform - Kialo - goes some way toward the sort of “Disputation Arenas” I’ve been talking about and urging for 20 years. Kialo enables you to visualize discussions as an interactive tree of pro and con arguments. At the top is the thesis, which is supported or weakened by pro and con arguments underneath. Each one of these arguments can branch into subsequent arguments that support or attack them in turn.  (I do offer some added and important layers.)

The greatest innovation of our enlightenment experiment wasn’t democracy, or freedom, or fair-competitive markets, though these are important. One thing is enabled by those things, and makes them enabled – reciprocal accountability.

Reciprocal accountability (RA) is what lets us criticize each others’ favorite delusions and errors, the synergy that led to all our recent successes... that kings, lords, owners and priests all reflexively punished for 6000 years.  RA can come via cooperation, or by negotiation, or via fair-open competitive argument.  By applying RA, we got our five great positive sum arenas for competitive creativity… democracy for policies and law, Science for zeroing in toward better models of the world, markets for creating ever better goods and services, justice courts for adversarially and openly iterating justice, and sports – 

-- the example that makes clear how necessary regulation is, to deter the otherwise inevitable cheating that always spoiled these arenas, in eras past. The kind of cheating that threatens to spoil everything today, as cooperation, negotiation, and fair-open competitive argument are all being directly and deliberately undermined in America and the West, by powers that want a return to those 60 centuries of feudal misrule.

Can we transform the Internet from a swamp of lies into a process by which RA works, as it has in the other five arenas, till now? For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition," now posted on my website.

== The poisons chilling reciprocal accountability ==

At the opposite extreme… "Substitute arguing services" offered in China

A number of online services in China offer professional arguers who will verbally or electronically assault other people for a fixed fee. According to Radii China, “20 RMB (3 USD) gets you the standard angry phone call or WeChat message; 40 RMB (6 USD) guarantees a full day of spam calls; and 100 RMB (15 USD) blows up your target’s phone with 999 hate calls.”

Also from the  Institute for the Future (IFTF) -- social and issue-focused groups are particularly susceptible to disinformation campaigns and were targeted with computational propaganda during the 2018 mid-term elections. It also shows why the targeting of these groups will continue, and potentially worsen, in 2020. The research, The Human Consequences of Computational Propaganda, led by IFTF’s Digital Intelligence Lab, provides recommendations for fighting back.

Do these new changes at Facebook “change everything?” - or even anything? Right after the 2016 election, I spoke to some of the folks at Facebook who were looking into the fake rumors crisis and offered what I deemed unconventional but simple suggestions that would utilize competitive processes to quickly denote falsehoods... not one of which was tried. There are simple, efficient things FB could do, to start making their system more self-correcting. They are not remotely interested in achieving that outcome, alas, so it will be up to us. (If their current ameliorations fail atrociously in 2020, you can be sure Facebook will be broken up.)

Beyond FB, no one - and I mean no one, to my knowledge - seems to grasp what's missing from the Internet ecosystem.  It is the one thing that enabled markets, democracy, science, courts and sports to function. It is right there, glaringly obvious.

For a look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see the lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition."  Now posted on my website.

== Face Recognition points the way to… Big Brother? Or else… ==

In October, Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport reportedly debuted China’s first system that allowed facial recognition for automated check-in, security clearance, and boarding. And since 2016, the Department of Homeland Security has been testing facial recognition at U.S. airports. Delta has an optional biometric system in Atlanta that uses facial recognition kiosks for check-in, baggage check, TSA identification, and boarding.

And if you howl in objection, exactly how do you foresee stopping this? Even if you pass fierce, European-style restrictions, all that Privacy Laws accomplish — according to Robert Heinlein — is to “make the spy bugs smaller.”  And smaller, faster, better, cheaper and more numerous they are getting, as predicted in Brin’s Corollary to Moore’s Law.

The reflex to solve these issues by shutting down information flows is impractical and impossible, and it runs diametrically opposite to the methods we used to get the very freedom and privacy we now fear losing. The only approach that ever worked - or can possibly work - is to start by asking

“which do I fear most?

What elites know about me?

Or what they can do to me?”

The former will never be constrained in any major way — name one time in the history of our species, when the mighty let themselves be blinded for long. But the latter — limiting what powerful men can DO to us — can and has been seriously accomplished during this enlightenment.

That is the difference between China’s implementation of these technologies and what we see in the West. And yes, it might end here tomorrow!  I am as frightened of Big Brother as you are. Probably more so. 

There is a narrow path out of this danger zone. And it does not start with futile howling “Don’t look at me!”

== On Data Privacy ==

Vint Cerf sent me a note saying the following passage reminded him of The Transparent Society:

“Worries about data privacy erupted in the spring of 1964 with the publication of “The Naked Society,” by Vance Packard, a journalist best known for his unsparing critique of modern advertising. “The Naked Society” made a comparable assessment of the marketing schemes of big corporations, noting their immense and profitable traffic in personal data about American consumers. But he trained most of his attention on the entity that was then the largest user of mainframe computing power: the United States government.”

My recent podcast on surveillance, transparency and the future of freedom is “The future of privacy policy: A Q&A with author David Brin,” Interviewed on the AEI site by James Pethoukis.

I began tracking this when I lived in Britain in the 1980s and they led the world introducing CCD cameras on the street. Now: “Thousands of San Diego street lights are equipped with sensors and cameras. Here's what they record.” 

== Wellsprings of freedom ==

A federal court ruled this December that secretly recording government officials, including police officers, is protected under the First Amendment, over-ruling a 50 year old Massachusetts law. And if you expect me to rejoice, well, sure, yeah. This is the most important civil liberties issue of our times. For it is on the street that citizens are most likely to encounter dangerous authority and need tools of accountability. Yet, I am willing to admit a need for some discussion re: the “secretly” part. Yes, in most cases. But there may be some room for compromise. Especially since it can happen that the bully is the one holding the camera. (A truth that was interpreted all-wrong in The Circle.) 

My other cavil is that the First Amendment is not the most crucial bulwark for this right to see-and-record. 

The real justification is the almost never mentioned Sixth… the sacred Sixth… that most concerns a citizen’s right to see, to access fair witnesses and to assertively get any evidence that might exculpate and prove innocence.  Why do none of the attorneys in these cases ever mention this vastly stronger argument?

Meanwhile. “Must Writers Be Moral? Their Contracts May Require It.” Seriously. We need to remember that extreme social justice warriors may be our current allies against a far-worse, worldwide mafia-oligarchic putsch… nevertheless the worst of these allies are just another kind of bully and no friends of the Enlightenment that gave us everything. Including social justice. We can agree about the direction - ever-increasing tolerance/diversity and accountability – while recognizing that sanctimony-driven bullies will be drawn to any height from which to thwart reason.

Crowd wisdom?  Someone out there explore this site claiming to be on internet censorship, and report back in comments?

== Not getting it… and getting it too much? ==

Anonymous browsing? This piece reveals how hidden your activity really is when using popular privacy tools. 

A reporter commissioned a 3D printed model of his own head to test the face unlocking systems on a range of phones — four Android models and an iPhone X: only the iPhone X defended against the attack. As far back as The Transparent Society (1998) I forecast that both the optimists and pessimists would be disappointed in face recognition and related technologies.

A disturbing article shows you how easy it is for companies to parse your activities, even when personal identifiers are stripped away, as promised by modern privacy policies. Your apps still report movements in a gross, non-ID way… and meta analysis can swiftly correlate to rebuild the fact that each movement was you.

Seriously, if your enraged or anxious reaction is to demand regulations to ban such correlations, who knows? You might succeed! And in your victorious smugness you will celebrate a potemkin triumph, an exercise in stunning delusion and futility.

I’ve said this since before The Transparent Society. We cannot base our security or safety or freedom on “policies” that aim — even with good intent! — to obscure our personal information.  

At risk - certainty - of repetition... there is a solution, when you recall that it matters far-less what elites *know* about you than what they can *do* to you. And there is a way to make them afraid of doing bad things. It is a proven way, demonstrated by 200 years of increasingly successful experiments, while “privacy via secrecy” has almost no track record of ever succeeding for long.

Want evidence?  Look at how hard the world’s elites, especially the rising oligarch-mafia, are striving to get information obscured behind veils and clouds. In such a world, they thrive. We don’t.

Eavesdropping, Surveillance and Looking Back

==From the Privacy Front==

Starting our potpourri of sci-tech-soc news: Kinect is watching you! People choose to post personal information on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. However, game platforms like Microsoft's Kinect, continuously observe your nonverbal behavior, capturing every move you make. Subtle facial movements and gestures may seem harmless to share with others, but the way you move is frequently even more revealing than what you say. Researchers have used the Kinect to gather data to diagnose symptoms of ADHD; advertising companies may acquire such data to fine tune commercials.

Look back to watch those who are watching you! Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox that allows you to see any third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. In real time, it visualizes the data as a spider-web of interactions between companies and other trackers. Mozilla is developing Collusion, with support form The Ford Foundation, to enable users to not only see who is tracking them across the Web, but also to turn that tracking off when they choose. You will be able to opt out of sharing your personal data with a global database.

We seem to be - very gradually - winning the most crucial civil liberties issue of our time.  “An Illinois court declared the state's controversial eavesdropping law unconstitutional--opening the recording of encounters with police.” This case is especially important because Illinois politicians made it a matter of explicitly aggressive anti citizen law. “Illinois' eavesdropping statute, one of the strictest in the nation, makes it a felony to record any conversation without the consent of all parties. It carries stiffer sentences — of up to 15 years in prison — if a police officer or court official is recorded without his or her knowledge”  Now, one can understand their reasoning.  Given that nearly all of the last 5 or so Illinois governors have gone to prison and most Illinois pols are deathly afraid of wiretaps, having citizens free to catch corruption terrifies them.  But they need to understand.  This will not stand.   

==Disputation Is Central==

I’ve long promoted the notion of “disputation arenas” or ritualized combat for ideas, as one major way the Web could finally pay off in vital, grand scale ways, doing for that realm what markets do for products and services and science does for truth. In fact, for a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see the lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society's Benefit."   Also available on Kindle.

This was a core concept in my “Eon Proposal” for several dozen ways to improve our problem-solving skills in times of crisis. Now it appears that Google is taking a step toward bringing disputation to life, with its Hangout Series:  “Versus…will give you the chance to question people who are close to the decisions being made on topical issues, on both sides of the debate. Real-time voting on the channel will also let the speakers know how their arguments are resonating with viewers."

The first debate will focus on the topic of the War on Drugs and will feature the opinions of a wide variety of celebrities, politicians and tycoons...  

==Hackers and Cyberpunks==

Even back in the 1990s, while writing The Transparent Society, I opined that most of today’s romantic “cypherpunks” or hackers - who proclaim themselves to be righteous, brave and sophisticated anarchists or revolutionaries against Big Brother - generally show astonishing naivete and ignorance over even the basics that underground movements understood, going back to anti-Nazi or anti-Soviet resistance, or the cat-and-mouse games versus Czarist secret police, or other legendary struggles going back to Sumer and Babylon. Of the twenty or so fundamental techniques used by oppressive regimes to staunch rebel movements, only three or four are thwarted at all by secret coding and other crypto techniques. Most of the hackers I’ve met seem to be completely unaware of the others, or the relevance of actual history... or else appear to be blithely reliant upon the fact that they don’t live under Big Brother at all. The fact that they can rely on news media, lawyers, and civilized law to protect their persons and families.

That is not to say we might’n’t someday need to resist a genuine Big Brother regime!  History shows that the odds are always against enlightenment, freedom-based societies. To some extent, the romantic Suspicion of Authority (SoA) expressed by cypher-hackers... and libertarians and liberal anti-corporatists... is deeply based and justified.  We are now experiencing an attempted oligarchic putsch like nothing seen since the 1890s. Indeed, I do not mind supremely skilled young geniuses honing useful cyber arts, prowling and poking a bit and becoming capable at skulking through the mazes of power... even if those methods are still less-than-crucial in a society that remains mostly lawful and accountable. Because it might cease to be so! We may need such skillful Neuromancer-types someday. And so, I am not offended by non-harmful “fooling around” with backdoors and cracking and such. Activities that really should be tolerated to some extent. (Indeed, they are! If no money or harm-doing was involved, those who are caught often thereupon face... job offers. (Shudder.))

But here’s the ultimate irony. Those who are best at this craft aren’t preening in public, nor pulling indignant-posturing stunts, attracting the attention of law-enforcement. Want recent evidence? See the latest example, as one of the most “legendary” of the latest round of extroverted hackers was caught fairly easily, then spent months ratting out his comrades.  These aren’t the adults in their movement.  The grownups are keeping low profiles, acting as citizens... while honing their craft quietly, against the day we all might desperately turn to them.

Moreover, just like us, they actually hope such a day will never come.

==Science Snippets==


Earthshine reveals how to analyze exoplanets. 

The biggest obstacle to studying distant planets? Separating their weak light from the blinding photon-torrents pouring out of their nearby suns. A possible method has been suggested to  - "capitalize on a notable difference between light that is reflected off a planet and light that is emitted by a star: the former is often polarized, whereas the latter is not. To demonstrate the enhanced amounts of information embedded in polarized light, Michael Sterzik, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile, looked for biosignatures in Earthshine — the sunlight that’s been reflected off of Earth to the dark portion of the Moon’s face and then back to our planet. “The state of polarization contains a lot of information that hasn’t been used very often,” Sterzik says. Once the planetary component is thus separated, it can be analyzed for spectral components like water, methane, or even chlorophyll.

Hm... actually, this sounds like reason to call up my old UCSD physics Masters Thesis.  While my doctorate provided the modern explanation for comets (covered in a dusty, insulating layer), the earlier work was an advance in the theoretical treatment of polarized light passing through inhomogeneous, unevenly absorbing media... in other words, planetary atmospheres.  

Under certain special circumstances, quantum systems can remain coherent over much greater timescales and distances than conventional quantum thinking expects. Moreover, it appears that that life exploits this process in a way that explains the recent observations from quantum biologists.

Quantum biology you ask? Whassat? The two most famous examples are in bird navigation, where the quantum zeno effect seems to help determine the direction of the Earth's magnetic field, and in photosynthesis, where the way energy passes across giant protein matrices seems to depend on long-lasting quantum coherence.

And now something nifty: a DIY gadget shines different colors of light on a surface depending on its temperature, helping to show where more insulation is needed in a room.  Just the beginning of citizen empowerment through sensortech!

==And Finally== 

Chuckle at this scientifically modified  pastiche of the Last Supper.

Today's "centrifugal" net is NOT an "arena" or commons.

There is a lot of fuss going on about Time Magazine's decision to put a mirror (framed by a computer screen) on its latest cover and announcing tat the 2006 Person of the Year is... "you." Which translates as Joe and Jane Public -- millions of us -- who are starting to flex our cyber-empowered wings and express ourselves as never before.

Yes, of course, I believe in all of that. I very early touted the citizen-empowering aspects of this new era, in preference over the solipsistic approach taken by cyberpunk tales, which kept portraying the electronic age as filled with bleating (though wired) sheep. If we are about to enter an era of "smart mobs" and rapidly coalescing, agile communities of ad hoc expertise, it will not be too soon. Both Vernor Vinge and I have relentlessly portrayed this possibility in fiction... as I did in nonfiction (e.g. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?)

Indeed, my own punditry on this matter goes back to 1985 and as recent as last Monday.

Here's a radio interview I gave on NPR this week, about the coming "Age of Amateurs." And a video interview on The Age of Amateurs, as well.

And yet, I have to tell you (in full blown contrarian mode) that sanguine paeans to the wired age - like those tooted this week by Time - are in many ways no better than the growling-snipings of cynics who dislike everything new. Both groups deeply oversimplify. And the enthusiasts are in some ways more harmful! Because they seem to think (and spread the notion) that all of the pieces for utopian cyber-democracy are already in place!

That the benefits of super-empowered citizenship are already before us, on the table, and the feast is ready to begin.

But the miracle of the Enlightenment has never been like that, and it never will be. We need to look, again and again, at the things that brought about our present day feast of expanded knowledge, freedom and wealth. These things did not arise simply out of human nature, or the sudden arrival of tools like printing.

They emerged from processes like democracy and science and law and commerce, that have been refined with countless fine-tuning regulations, in order to maximize benefits and minimize the unpleasant effects of nasty human habits, like mutual repression and cheating.

We need to remember that nearly all previous human societies actively repressed innovation, freedom and individuality, because these traits will always threaten those who are comfortably ensconced on top. Modernity and the Enlightenment did not just happen. If we want them to continue and thrive, we have to understand what earlier generations of passionate and practical people did, in order to get us here.

Some of you have read my extensive essay: Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society's Benefit - written for the American Bar Association - about the underlying common traits of markets, science, courts and democracy -- the "accountability arenas" that have empowered free individuals to compete and create without tumbling quickly into repression and outrage.... for the first time, ever. Alas, over the years since, I have found that people have trouble perceiving some of what the paper describes... or why today's internet just does not yet have what it takes to empower us with a "fifth arena."

Here is one of the key difficult concepts. I describe how markets, science, courts and democracy each have "centripetal vs centrifugal" social phases.

I see these opposite trends having much the same effect for accountability arenas that INHALING and EXHALING have in living mammals. You need both for the system to thrive.

In science, markets, courts and democracy, the CENTRIFUGAL PHASE is when each individual participant may disperse, find allies/collaborators, and safely organize with others under some degree of protection, in a zone where product can be refined and readied for competitive testing.

In science, this zone is your tenured professorship or lab etc: in markets the safe zone is the company/corporation: in courts it is attorney-client privilege and the power of coerced deposition; and democracy has parties.

That's the centrifugal phase and it took civilization thousands of years to realize how necessary it is, in order for these four arenas to function.

Note that this is the phase that exists now, copiously, in the nascent "fifth arena" of the internet!

ALL OF THE TRAITS THAT TIME MAGAZINE CELEBRATES IN ITS LATEST ISSUE HAVE TO DO WITH THIS PHASE. What could be more “centrfugal” than the creation of a zillion self-expressing blogs. Not one of which is subject to any process of accountability.

What the cybersphere does NOT have is anything even remotely resembling the CENTRIPETAL phase that also empowers the four older, more mature "arenas."

What is the centripetal phase? This is where in all of the disparate and dispersed participants in an arena are summoned together by a ritual CALL TO COMBAT. What ensues is a battle - competition - that has transformed ancient human bloody-mindedness into something much more like a game. One in which rules have been laid down to ensure that the outcome of competition correlates at least somewhat with quality of product, and much less with power or influence or other means of cheating.

In science the centripetal competition phase compels researchers to publish papers and present them for criticism. In markets the ritual battleground is retail sales - where customers compare goods and services. In democracy the role is filled by elections, and courts have trials. The STYLE of competition varies wildly among these arenas! So much that (I believe) nobody has ever thought to compare their commonalities as explicitly as I have.

(Take courts. Since the "product" is justice - and possibly life or death - courts cannot afford a high error rate, and hence the centripetal arena phase is costly, meticulous, whereas markets can afford huge inefficiencies in exchange for total fecundity and freedom to innovate.)

Indeed, all of this correlates with the Creative Process inside human minds, where the so-called Preconscious boils up a zillion proto-ideas that are then sifted and culled, till only the "good ones" even rise to consciousness... where the culling process continues. Centrifugal idea-generation, followed by competitive culling. Um... doesn't this ALSO describe the titanic creative process of Darwinian evolution?

You can see where I am going with this.

Presently, on the internet, THERE IS NO EQUIVALENT CENTRIPETAL PHASE that allows us to test ideas, opinions, arguments against each other, using competitive processes to cull wheat from the chaff.

Pearls are said to float upward in shit. But so MUCH of the ranting online today is BS, how can anyone hope for good ideas to actually coalesce and for bad ones to finally die, as they eventually deserve?

For decades I have been trying to come up with innovations that might introduce some competitive power to this new arena. Sometimes, it seems hopeless. As when the clueless editors at Time Magazine blithely announce that we are already in the promised age of empowered citizenship... when half -- fully half of the needed tools are absolutely missing.

Oh, our would-be masters want it this way. Those who would return us to a style of feudalism. They would let us wrangle and spume and EXPRESS ourselves, endlessly online...

...without ever finding ways to turn all of that self-expression into the relentless and joyfully innovative mass creation of a new kind product.

 A new kind of sapiency that is based upon a massively empowered us.

===  ==== ===

See: More articles on Creating the Future

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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