Surveillance & technology

I was planning to publish today the final section (Part III) of "Aficionado" - a stand alone novella that's part of EXISTENCE. Alas, my website host has flaked on me and I want folks to be able to follow up to the book's page. (Suggested hosting alternatives are welcome, in comments.)

So, let me fill in with a little timely riff on surveillance tech.

First, many of you have already seen some of my postings about artificial Intelligence.  Here's my Newsweek op-ed on the Chat-art-AI revolution. TONS more on the topic. 

But let's zoom into...

== Light is coming... ==

UK enacts ownership registry for property held by foreign companies and to identify their true owners. It will seek to ensure criminals cannot hide behind secretive chains of shell companies. Oh, this move toward transparency will have a myriad holes that need to be patched under future scandals. But it is a huge step toward what I’ve demanded since late in the last century.  

Even more important, it will help corner the US into doing likewise… that is, if the GOP shills for criminal oligarchy are defeated, somehow.

Moreover, and I did not know this part! If you can’t prove who owns it, because you set up too many shell companies, the state will hold the property for you for five years, so that the proper owners can come forward and claim their property. After that set time, the state will sell it and take the proceeds to cancel public debt, much of it incurred because of the huge social costs of unaccountable shell corps.

Wow. It looks more and more like my "Declare Ownership!" treaty proposal! Which - (I assert) - could do more to save the world from a terminally stoopid world oligarchy AND zero-out the crippling public debt held by most nations - than any other action, almost overnight. Without inconveniencing honest citizens (even rich ones) even a little bit.

== More on the power of light ==

Is this evidence for the power of transparency? 50 US embassies have air quality monitors and tweet out the readings publicly. Including the embarrassing truth in capital cities whose regimes don't want citizens to know.

Was it a useless gesture? “Cities that had a US embassy that set up one of these monitors and tweeted out air-quality data saw a decrease of PM2.5 particulates to the tune of 2 to 4 micrograms per cubic meter—compared to their air quality before getting the monitor and to other similar cities that do not have a monitor.”  

Moving on. An interesting article proposes that in an ultra-transparent world, we (humanity) could finally ban weapons of mass destruction, like nukes, because even average citizens could thereupon catch cheaters. 

In extremum, this is, of course one of only two solutions to the Ultimate WMD Problem: “what-if a technology is found that lets very small groups cheaply make world-wrecking weapons?”  

Indeed, this is often posed as a compelling possible explanation for the absence-of-any-aliens Fermi Paradox!  A theory that all techno civilizations wipe themselves out, when even teensy mad minorities can access the means to accomplish it.

Up to a threshold, universal citizen transparency would be one answer (though it requires some courage and wisdom that might be rare across the galaxies.) Alas, the only other solution is a total-surveillance despotism.  

Fortunately, that doesn’t seem imminent. And anyway, I doubt that the citizen equi-veillance prescription can be implemented in the near-future.

What can happen is for up-ratcheting sousveillance and empowered citizenship to render ever-increasing numbers of nasty plots moot. And yes, many of our current problems are happening because world elites see those days of transparent accountability approaching - as in the "Helvetian War" I depicted, in Earth. They are making desperate power grabs, while there’s still time.

Where I demur is when this author conflates a mostly transparent world of equi-veillance with an “end to all privacy.” 

Yes, that is a common leap of misunderstanding, and horribly wrongheaded, alack.

I have despaired over how difficult it has been to convey a simple truth… that preserving a substantial amount of privacy will be a SOCIAL decision. One that transparency can help, rather than doom.

== We'll have some privacy, even in a Transparent Society... if we actually want it ==

If the vast majority of citizens deem privacy to be a core desideratum -- that privacy-invasion by snoops, gossips, voyeurs and bullies is a nastiness that merits denouncing -- then those behaviors will be the ones first caught and denounced! 

Please, please try to wrap your mind around that assertion.

If we all can see well, and denounce bad behavior, the common fear is that this will lead instantly to denunciation of eccentrics and mob enforcement of social homogeneity. Indeed that IS the goal and effect in some nations' growing 'social credit' systems! 

(See an interesting (if somewhat suspect) survey of Chinese public attitudes toward the government run “social credit” surveillance system.)

But what about a society whose top values include “leave each other alone” and “mind your own business” (MYOB)? Isn't that what YOU would want? Yet you assume only a select few share that wish, I'll bet. Can you consider a possibility, though? That millions of your neighbors share that value system? 

Yes, that social value system of using transparency to protect each other’s personal space seems a reach beyond our current, immature and sanctimoniously denunciatory society. But the elements are already there, in most Hollywood films wherein suspicion of authority (SoA) and appreciation of diverse eccentricity are among the most-preached values!  I show that in Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.  

You can see that value system in the mirror... in your reaction, just now, wishing “if only my fellow citizens shared my valuing of tolerance and eccentricity and MYOB and SoA!” I agree! Only consider perhaps that goal is closer than you think.

(One of the top stupidities of books and films that warn against privacy loss (e.g. the execrable The Circle) is how they rely on that very value system already existing in their audience, while preaching it at them, while insulting those audience members by claiming that – except for a few hero protagonists - none of us sheep actually have that value. Think about it.) 

Consider what a world filled with light might be like, if we also completed our build toward that MYOB value system?  If the FIRST people judged to be behaving badly are those caught bullying and snooping and not leaving each other alone?

Indeed, then we might not only have no despots and no WMD-nukes. We might also have few voyeur, conformity-enforcing bullies… and a golden age of eccentric diversity.

Please, please... speak up in comments if you know another way to get that. 

== Other Tech news ==

Interested in “Futuristic Design”?  I am, of course! And I’ve consulted with a lot of groups looking for the Next Thing.  One of those consultations, a few years ago paid me to offer scenarios for Earth 2050, an attempt to portray planetary changes – especially social/economic/political -- a few decades from now. And as you’ll see, the effort was led by the Kaspersky company, based in Moscow and at the time a leader in computer security software. (Now? Not quite so trusted for varied reasons, some in the news. Still, this is a separate matter.)

As it happened, I gave them a lot more material than anyone else did, for what aimed to be a vivid zoom-in to various parts of the globe, in 2050… a time frame close to my own near future novels Earth and Existence. 

I do think you might enjoy some of the speculations, and/or find them thought provoking. Like a dive into the great Phosphate Crisis of 2050, making Morocco the richest country in the world. Anyway, it’s good to see at last something come of this project, and it aims to be ongoing.  Though the timing is thought-provoking in its own right.  And now some in the media are actually talking about it!

== and lagniappes ==

QAnon – The Game that Plays People. – Lee Stein.

Amazon – after firing 110,000 employees in time for the holidays – may also be firing … Alexa.

Perpetual drone surveillance… or at least during public events… combined with advanced vision systems… is proposed to deal with mass shooters.

Looking toward the future: My 2015 speech at COFES (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software) covered a range of topics, including the context for a society that actually welcomes and invests in new things and progress. 

Revisiting transparency, tracking, & resilience

Although Facebook's facial recognition software has identified and archived more than a billion user faces, its latest incarnation - Meta - has announced that it will stop automatically tagging people's faces in uploaded photos and videos, and will delete the data it has gathered - although users can continue to manually tag friends in their photos. Yet... Meta will continue working on facial recognition systems for future purposes, as in its upcoming smart glasses or augmented reality.

I reiterate: No amount of screaming will stop this tide from coming in. Your phone and doorbell and digital assistant will recognize faces and if you ban the tech, all it will do is give a monopoly on such systems to secret elites. Instead of trying futilely to ban technologies of light, we must focus on preventing the harms. And the way to do that is with light.

Another example? Surveilling students: Big Teacher is Watching: How AI Spyware took over schools: Especially in the wake of online learning during the pandemic quarantine, a web app called GoGuardian increasingly tracks what students do online, not just at school, but at home as well: "For kids that means their every keystroke, click and search is recorded and analyzed..." Educators can view students' web search histories, know if a kid is playing a video game, watching Netflix or Youtube - or especially viewing porn. Some programs also monitor for potential signs of emotional distress among the students. Many of these machine learning algorithms process nearly everything that students do online, even outside of school hours, and some of these companies sell student data.

And again, if you focus on accountability that might prevent harms, then you may do some good. Banning this simply won't happen.

The latest controversial weapon against theft: What happens when individuals use bluetooth tracking technology - such as Apple's AirTag - to track down stolen items, such as gaming systems, laptops, bicycles, scooters... and, especially cars? Such products are "testing the limits of how far people will go to get back their stolen property and what they consider justice."

== Increased powers of vision ==

See: “From Macy’s to Ace Hardware, facial recognition is already everywhere: Facial recognition is popping up at our favorite stores, but customers are largely unaware.” And whatever is loose in the commercial world, you can be sure elites of all kinds – bad and good – have got it.

The latest: a winged microchip the size of a grain of sand - swarms spread by the wind could be used to monitor the environment - or for civilian surveillance.

It's called Brin's Corrollary to Moore's Law: The cameras get smaller, faster, better, cheaper, more moble and vastly more numerous at a far greater pace than Moore's Law. This has huge implications, by the way, regarding so-called UFOs. But ever more (or moore) so, it means we all will be seen. But sousveillance could make a world where we catch any snoops and watchers and effectively shout "MYOB!"  (Mind your own business.)

And it goes on. Take this headline from The Guardian: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance. 

On and on, it’s always the same. Our paladins and pundit defenders of freedom and privacy point at event after event that appear to portend a loss of both… and they are utterly correct to fretfully worry about looming technologies of surveillance, which could genuinely lead to the control-by-telescreen that Orwell chillingly portrayed! Yes, technologies like those Snowden revealed, or the latest “Pegasus” Israeli spy program that allowed agencies around the world to listen in on iPhones, or Moscow promulgated ransomware, or ubiquitous, unmonitored state face-recognition, could very well be part of the path to that hellscape… 

...though I think the “social credit” systems established by some authoritarian regimes are even more insidious and dangerous, siccing neighbors upon neighbors. 

So why am I shrugging about this latest furor? Because it’s always the same thing: screams of outrage followed by calls for impractical and futile "solutions." Ever since around 1994, the same clade of worriers - from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the ACLU (join them both! Your dues will help!) are spot-on in reporting the latest travesty… 

...and maybe 5% right re: HOW to respond to it.... 

... and 95%+ just plain wrong, in demanding that technologies be 'outlawed' or that high level elites of law or government or wealth or criminality or despotism be somehow blinded. 

To those pointing at technologies and surveillance and shouting warnings, I say "yes! That could lead to Big Brother, so what's the plan?" To those who cry: "Ban it!" I always answer. “Um, how? Show me a moment in human history when elites have let themselves be blinded. Or when “Don’t look!” privacy laws did anything but (as Heinlein put it) Make the Spy Bugs Smaller.

Across 30 years denouncing and trying to ban technologies of vision - including face recognition - are there any such technologies that your shadow-seeking tactic ever stymied for long?

== A simple test ==

Again and again I have assigned the same experiment. Go to the nearest zoo's baboon enclosure. Climb inside with a pointed stick. Go right up to the biggest alpha baboon and stab out his eyes so he can't look at you!

 Here's a clue. He... won't... let... you. 

He will, on the other hand, grudgingly allow you to look back at him.

The same is true of all animals, let alone the alpha elites we hire to protect us. Any power of vision we try to deny them will instantly become the locus of paranoia and a desperate (and sometimes justified) felt need to bypass restrictions on their ability to see. All you are doing is driving any Good Guy elites into criminality. 

On the other hand, the last 250 years shows that we can seize and hold some powers of supervision and transparency and apply then to elites, the innovation responsible for all our current freedom and - yes - privacy.

Imperfectly? Then make that the focus of our activism! And yes, there are dozens of ways to do that in The Transparent Society.

I say this not out of complacency. I fear Big Brother more than almost any of you do! And that is why my prescriptions are less about raging futilely at the next example of elite spying and the next, and the next forever… 

... and more based upon things that have actually worked at creating this rare island of relative freedom and privacy across humanity’s dismal history.

The method that works - assertively stripping elites of their own shadows, instead of absurdly trying to hide in our own - should be obvious to our paladins… 

...but apparently it is so counter-intuitive that they never, ever grasp it, no matter how many times their screams of "Shadows! Give us shadows!" utterly fail. They always, always fail.

Yet, still, they reflexively rail against light (the only tool that ever preserved freedom), calling for bans on things that cannot be banned, succeeding only in clouding the vision of those elites who are on our side, while empowering those bent on re-establishing 6000 years of feudalism.

Finally.... 

A talk I gave for the Foresight Institute on transparency, reciprocal accountability and pyramidal vs diamond-shaped societies is well-summarized here.

And, here's an interesting article from Edge re: "reciprocity altruism" and prisoner's dilemma.

Explaining what should be obvious about ‘transparency' yet again

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== The Transparency thing that gave us everything we value ==

I still give a lot of talks on this topic... though I suspect in some cases I'm invited in hope of using me as a strawman "foe of privacy," to be knocked down.  Some find it disappointing to learn that I fear both Big Brother and loss of privacy, as much as (or more than) they do, pointing out that only one thing ever thwarted tyranny or nosy neighbors, and that's light, the ability -- your ability -- to catch would-be oppressors and denounce their misdeeds.

Very few peoples and nations across 6000 years were ever able to apply this power of reciprocal light and accountability. Indeed, we don't sufficiently appreciate the power it gave citizens. Certainly the world's despots know it, and are desperately creating protected shadows for themselves. And lacking upward transparency (sousveillance), a return to feudalism... or much worse... is inevitable. 

With it, you might prevent Big Brother, only to reap a second layer of fearful oppression... by a judgmental majority who demand conformity, using democracy against those they do not like. The nightmare portrayed crudely by books/movies like The Circle and much better in that Black Mirror episode "Nosedive."

Ironically, this is exactly the scenario - fear of oppression by 'the mob' - that Fox/KGB and their pals are now spreading across the MAGAsphere, in order to discredit democracy itself! They must, because if U.S. citizens truly recover voting sovereignty, there would be no political future for today's Mad Right/putinist version of confederate conservatism.

Still, there is an underlying point that they're exploiting, a fear that Ray Bradbury illustrated in Fahrenheit 451. If transparency is universal, but the culture is immature and judgmental, then you don't get Big Brother. Rather you get lateral oppression by that 51% majority - an oppression that's totally legal, democratic and above-board. Indeed, this is how "social credit" might make crude, Orwellian Gestapo-tactics unncessary in future despotisms, as the People themselves enforce conformity, laterally.

Hence, our narrow path of freedom requires a third ingredient, at the level of values. If transparency is universal AND we have a culture that scorns gossips and bullies and privacy busybodies and voyeurs and judgmental conformity-enforcers, then MYOB can prevail.

What's MYOB?

Mind Your Own Business.

It means if I'm not hurting anyone, then my quirks and eccentricities merit protection, same as yours. Lest a day come when I am not tolerated... followed by you.

Yes, I have learned that this simple idea is almost impossible for most folks to wrap their heads about, even though it's a fundamental, base level zeitgeist of our present society! Indeed, I show how Sci Fi books and films have been at the vanguard in promoting appreciation of individual eccentricity, in my recent nonfiction book: VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood.

Tolerance is actually encouraged best by transparency, especially when gossips and bullies and privacy busybodies and voyeurs are caught in the act... but only when gossip and bullying and conformity-enforcing are in disrepute.

Again, yeah it sounds counter-intuitive. Yet, it is exactly the baseline value system of a majority of westerners now.  It's very likely your baseline value!  And it is the only way we'll get beyond the danger zone to something decent.

== MORE ==

Under a broad program called "signature reduction", it is said (in this article) that the U.S. Pentagon supervises a secret force more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, that “carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.” This is in part to deal with the difficulties of modern intel gathering when adversaries have massive files and face recognition. Also: “The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”

Which raises a basic question. How will we evade this devolving into:

1) A deep state that is unaccountable to constitutional systems*… or

2) The sort of tit for tat conflict of reciprocal sabotage that the great science fiction author Frederik Pohl warned about in his terrifying novel The Cool War.

Neither of these outcomes frighten adversaries of the West, who are fully committed to these tactics in order to prevent the psychic collapse of tyranny that their models predict, if the Enlightenment is not toppled soon. But both outcomes should worry us.

Those currently in our intel/military/law officer corps are likely loyal to constitutionalism and law and all that. Moreover they need tools such as these, in order to wage a desperate struggle on our behalf.  But these methods can all too easily anchor into habit. Habits that prevent our servants from even noticing an alternative suite of weapons that have far better long term prospects. In fact, those alternative methods are the only ones that can lead to our sole victory condition.

Weapons of light.

== ...Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks... ==

Finally… Two notes on philosophy.

1) UCSD Professor Benjamin Bratton - author of Revenge of the Real - is fighting for us on a front that seems obscure to 99.999% of us, but is actually important -- the ongoing effort by 'postmodernist' philosophers (especially on French and US campuses) to denounce and discredit science, democracy, so-called 'facts,' and the very concept of objective reality. I recommend his article for those who would blink in amazement over Ben's depiction of the rage-howls that fulminate from elite subjectivity spinners, who demand that their incantations get paramountcy over the evidence and models we laboriously build out of a clay called 'reality.'

2) I had a note from someone else who felt caught between two philosophical “rocks.”

“Is there an intersection between ephemerality and nihilism - lately I have found myself fully seated in ephemerality - not as a negative - but - rather - as an awakening of the transitory aspect of my physical engagement with the universe  - it has awakened my creativity - am I way off – thoughts?” 

My answer is the same one I give at commencement addresses:

You can be large. 

More than one thing. 

Study the phrase "positive sum" as opposed to "zero sum."  Sure your individual life may be short to the point of apparent pointlessness. So is a bee's. But the hive does mighty things. 

We are building a civilization of extraordinary magnitude! One that has accomplished prodigious things, perhaps unprecedented across the galaxy, and we did it by standing on the shoulders of ephemerals who stood on the shoulders of ephemerals who clawed their way a little higher, out of a muck of ignorance. These accomplishments - forged in the spirit of our ancestors - are just hints at what might yet come.

You don't have to accomplish great things to be part of all that. Or even remembered! You will know the things you did, to be part of that rising pyramid of shoulders. Feel the weight of future generations on them. 

You have our gratitude.

Will masks save us?

I'm not gloating, just sad. It turns out the one thing that might save us from the monsters in this looming night... is light. Did I tell you so, 22 years ago? No, make that 29 years ago. 

Ponder any aspect of the Putin-centered, Fox-propelled, Saudi/Mercer/Koch-financed Trump fiasco, and ask yourself: "What if every single secret were exposed?" Yes, including every secret of every Democrat or pundit or "deep stater." Fair exchange. Why am I confident which cabal would dissolve, like vampires under the sun? 

Because one of them openly raves against every possible type of revelation*, forbidding officials to speak, enforcing NDAs, railing against investigations, begging John Roberts to safeguard all their secrets. Oh, he will. But that won't be the end of it. Oh, no.**

== The dismal reflex ==

To be fair, it's not just the vampire right who declares hatred of light. Or suspicion of it. Some of the very best folks - those who honestly feel they are fighting for the enlightenment - fall prey to the lure of shadows. Take this example:

Can protesters hide behind masks? Recently - protestors wearing head-mounted cameras scanned 13,000 faces in D.C., as part of a protest organized by Fight for The Future. These privacy activists are vigorous and rightly concerned about misuse of surveillance tech. Right problem! They demand absolutely and spectacularly the wrong solution! One that is not only technologically and historically clueless, but that plays right into the hands of every would-be Big Brother.

I debated this very topic on NPR's "To The Point" with Warren Olney. An ACLU attorney - Kade Crawford - was smart, cogent, agile... and she again utterly missed what history tells us -- that it's no use 'hiding' from elites, and that technology does... not... stop still, no matter how hard you denounce it, or even if you pass laws. 

What works -- the only thing that has ever protected freedom and, yes, some privacy -- is when average citizens can maximally see, and thus hold elites accountable.

Why do you think Putin and Trump and Fox desperately seek to preserve secrecy? The sole fallback position of the GOP today always distills to "Don't Look At Us!" Tax returns, staffer testimony, Trump's bragged-about "Great Wall of NDAs"... enemies of the enlightenment are terrified of light! We mustn’t be the ones giving them excuses to blind us, while retaining in secret all the powers we foolishly “outlawed.” Listen to the stimulating debate on NPR.

Ironically, those Capitol steps protesters were doing the right thing. Looking. And teaching others how to look. And rightfully-rapidly criticizing today's perhaps-racially-biased facial recognition systems so that tomorrow's will be better. It's where you see open, knowing criticism that things are working. I worry about where the light isn't shining. 

== More smartpeople foolishness ==

But it goes on, the incredible foolishness of well-intended folks:

This article from The New York Times about "the Privacy Project" shines light on important topics. Alas, like nearly all paladins of privacy, the author yet again dances around the key point, never zeroing in on the blatant lesson. Take the following, excised from her piece: "Sahil Chinoy, a graphics editor for the Opinion Section, built a facial recognition system for less than $100. There are many ways this technology can be abused. San Francisco has banned the use of facial recognition technology by its police and other agencies, but other cities, including New York, haven’t taken any steps to impede its use."

Can it be that a knowledgable person of above average intelligence actually wrote that paragraph, without contemplating the ironic contradiction and conclusion? That banning face-recognition systems -- or almost any type of surveillance-type technology -- is not only futile and hopeless, but actually distracts from the real problem? And the real solution. Seriously. What can be replicated now for $100 will cost pennies, tomorrow.

I have been engaged in this issue for 25 years, having won the Freedom of speech Award for The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? I've been involved in so many Privacy Conferences and I hope the Privacy Project will help spread growing Awareness of the problems we face, especially as we see deployment of "social credit" systems and ubiquitous camera tech. Unfortunately, nearly all these conferences wind up being festivals of hand-wringing, offering no plausible solutions.

There is a way out -- a way we can forge into the future without falling into surveillance hell by governments, corporations and other elites. But it will not come by banning "Orwell Tech." Or hiding from it, or screaming "don't look at me!"

It happens to be the same method we've used with growing effectiveness for 200 years, the method that's responsible for all our freedom. Alas, it seems that it's utterly counter-intuitive to contemporary pundits, who cannot conceive of any solution except prescribing darkness.

Want a better example of transparency/accountability in action? “Law enforcement agencies in Dallas and Florida on Thursday became the latest to announce they are investigating allegations some of their employees made offensive comments on Facebook after a watchdog group compiled screenshots of the posts and shared them in an online database.”

This is how citizens can break omerto and corner the good cops into helping cull their ranks of the bad. Most are dedicated public servants. A large minority are former Jr. High bullies who crave the power to instill fear. The answer is simple. Hire and encourage and support the former... if they help rid the ranks of the latter.

 And if they do, then they can be trusted with the new technologies that are coming, anyway. That is, they can be trusted... if we get to watch.

== Worries about deadly drones ==

In “The Real Robot Threat,” Robert Zubrin (otherwise known as a zealous proponent of Mars colonization, asserts that autonomous weaponry — bereft of conscience or human sentiment — could become either police state enforcers or the ultimate doomsday weapons.  To be clear this is a step beyond today’s mere remote-controlled drones, whose operators have been shown to be just as morally cautious — if not more so — as the pilots of fighter-bomber aircraft. Zubrin frets that whole swarms of  robot killers might be dispatched by a single tyrannical decision-maker, and even that entity might not be human.

Of course we’ve all seen the movie. And there’s an interesting thing about such flicks… in a free society, they have often become self-preventing warnings.  In this case, it had better be. Zubrin cites a commission that recommended a worldwide moratorium on development of such tools, along with weapons that find, track, and engage specific individuals whom a human has decided should be engaged within a limited predetermined period of time and geographic region.

== Incantations for aristocracy... on the left ==

Lest it ever occur to you to imagine that dogmatic insanity is restricted to the mad-right, go every now and then to any university campus and attend a lecture on semiotics or post-modernist criticism. Here’s one that defends the power asymmetries that have always given elites control over information flows and thus power over nations, peoples and races… all couched in airy fairy claims to “liberate” us from neo-liberalism: Transparency as Ideology; Ideology as Transparency by Jorge I. Valdovinos: 

“Abstract: Along with the increasing commodification of all aspects of culture and the persistent aestheticisation of everyday life under late capitalism, there is an equally increasing longing for objectivity, immediacy, and trust. As the mediation of our everyday experiences augments, a generalised feeling of mistrust in institutions reigns; the sense of a need to bypass them increases, and the call for more “transparency” intensifies. As transparency manages to bypass critical examination, the term becomes a source of tacit social consensus. This paper argues that the proliferation of contemporary discourses favouring transparency has become one of the fundamental vehicles for the legitimation of neoliberal hegemony, due to transparency's own conceptual structure—a formula with a particularly sharp capacity for translating structures of power into structures of feeling. While the ideology of transparency promises a movement towards the abolition of unequal flows of information at the basis of relations of power and exploitation, it simultaneously sustains a regime of hyper-visibility based on asymmetrical mechanisms of accountability for the sake of profit. The solution is not “more” transparency or “better” information, but to critically examine the emancipatory potential of transparency at the conceptual level, inspecting the architecture that supports its parasitic logic.”

This Orwellian gobbledygook is part of a general shriek of hatred aimed at all flat-open-fair systems of accountability that are rooted in the thing they hate most – the very concept of objective reality. Never forget that our enemy is zero-sum, incantatory justifiers of bullying power. And while today the worst examples work for a powerful "rightist" attempted Oligarchic Putsch, aiming to restore 6000 years of feudalism, there are would be savanarolas and Robspierres and Stalins among our (temporary) allies on the far-left, as well. 

== Transparency-pertinent news items ==

The 15 Biggest Ever Cases of Bank Fraud. Wow, a fascinating recounting of thefts and frauds, showing how much is being stolen by hackers and insiders… and this is probably not a complete list, by far! And the only long term solution is not “security.” It is transparency.

"Stephen Fry has narrated a new animated intro video for ChangeAView.com, discussing why we need (and may get) much better forums for argumentation and negotiation. The enemy of knowledge is not ignorance… Stephen Fry narrates.

Finally, futurist speaker David Orban offers a video on 21st Century Life Design Skills.

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===footnotes ====

* Except for the malignant, spiteful, sadistic and opposite-to-Jesus "Book of Revelation," which the Dominionists worship instead of Jesus.

** When, not if, John Roberts succeeds in demolishing the credibility of the US Supreme Court, it will be up to all of us to stand up for Enlightenment Constitutionalism in our own ways. I offer 100+ suggestions in POLEMICAL JUDO.