"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.

Privacy vs Omniveillance

Media discussions of privacy, freedom and the information age are starting to get more interesting, as folks finally start to realize a core truth... that everything eventually leaks. That the reflex of whining and demanding shadows to hide-in will never work. The data we entrust to banks and retail chains?  The trade secrets that companies rely on for competitive advantage? The cherished spy programs of our governmental professional protector caste (PPC)? If these do not leak because of hackers, or accidents, then would-be (or self-styled) whistle-blowers will see to it, sooner or later.

It has long been pointed out that information is not like other commodities.  It can duplicate itself at virtually zero cost, and those copies can escape even without you noticing it's happened.  That is Fact Number One. Everything eventually leaks.

Fact number two is one I've tried to point out for decades.  That this is fundamentally a clash of values and civilizations.  The Western Enlightenment (WE) has always been the rebel and underdog, versus the 99% standard human (and zero-sum) pattern of top down control by hierarchs. (There was never much functional difference between leftist-communist oligarchies and right-wing wealth-inheritance oligarchies; both hewed to the endlessly-repeated feudal model.)  In contrast, the positive-sum WE has many disadvantages and instabilities, though it is also vastly more creative, successful and productive.  The one trait that tips the balance, though, is Fact Number Two: 

All enemies of the WE are lethally allergic to light. Go ahead and name one. If it is not allergic to light, then it probably is not an "enemy" at all, but a peaceful rival that can easily be incorporated into the diversity-friendly WE. (Indeed, the "western" part is already fading away.)

Which provokes our core question... is the world of information leakage one that we should (at a fundamental level) be fighting against... at all? Or actively encouraging?

Let's suppose we do decide to support an ongoing secular trend toward a world of accountability and light. Yes, this end-goal will stymie almost all bad guys. But does that mean we must bare ourselves overnight?  Or completely? Especially, must we do it before the other guy does?

Suppose we choose a path of moderate-pragmatic, incremental, gradually-increasing transparency... what are our options?

== Fretful oversimplification ==

Let's start with an extensive article on : The Death of Privacy in the Guradian, by Alex Preston, on the psychological, social and cultural repercussions of loss of privately secret space:

"While outposts of civilization fight pyrrhic battles, unplugging themselves from the web – "going dark" – the rest of us have come to accept that the majority of our social, financial and even sexual interactions take place over the internet and that someone, somewhere, whether state, press or corporation, is watching."

Preston continues: "Perhaps the reason people don't seem to mind that so much of their information is leaking from the private to the public sphere is not, as some would have it, that we are blind and docile, unable to see the complex web of commercial interests that surround us. Maybe it's that we understand very clearly the transaction. The internet is free and we wish to keep it that way, so corporations have worked out how to make money out of something we are willing to give them in return – our privacy. We have traded our privacy for the wealth of information the web delivers to us, the convenience of online shopping, the global village of social media."

All of this is true... and misleading and shrill.  Because it buys into zero-sum thinking, which is the fundamental enemy of everything the WE stands for.  The dismal (but deeply human) notion that every gain must have a paired loss.  That a "trade-off" between security and freedom, or between privacy and all that cool-stuff available online, cannot be evaded, and therefor we must choose the painful righteousness of the writer's simplistic prescription.

Let me reiterate. The Enlightenment's fecundity at problem solving came from refusing dichotomies... like the insane "left-right axis" that has lobotomized politics everywhere.Only people who decide that we can have our cake and eat it and share it with the poor and see the cake thereupon grow... only such people will come up with enough innovative approaches to get any cake at all.

Only they will save the world.

==Giving up Privacy==

In one of life’s ironies, I am “Mister Transparency…” yet I believe some privacy can and should be preserved. A whole chapter of The Transparent Society is about how the only way we can preserve a little secluded intimacy or confidential sharing may be if we live in a society where most of the people know most of what’s going on, most of the time. Only such openness will stand a chance of deterring snoops and busybodies and peeping toms.

But some folks are far more transparency-radical! They “get” that all of our enlightenment innovations — like science, democracy, markets, justice, art and personal freedom thrive best in light… so they demand that it ALL be laid bare! As a moderate pragmatist (though perhaps a militant one) I find such zero-sum passion unnerving. But such people merit our attention.

In one extreme example...

Noah Dyer, a professor at Tempe’s University of Advancing Technology, wants to “live without privacy for a full year” by paying a camera crew to film him at all times. “The way I see it is that we’re going to lose our privacy, but that’s going to be awesome. The society that most quickly embraces not having any privacy is going to have the biggest evolutionary advantage. All of their citizens are going to be able to act in their own best interest based on totally accurate information.”  ( Why We Care About Privacy.)

Dyer is getting a lot of press for a hackneyed and simplistically predictable stunt that we've actually seen before… posting online absolutely everything about his life, from his email passwords to bathroom breaks and sex.  

Pardon me for yawning, but if you expect “Mr. Transparency” to get excited about this, either way, sorry about that. Likewise the frantic, “danger, Will Robinson!” hysterics of this reporter who writes about Dyer, in the Atlantic.  Please.

== More zero-sum contempt == 

Much attention has also been given to Dave Eggers's book -- The Circle -- portraying a future in which Dyer's view is dominant and the plot-propelling oppressive nosiness comes not from a single Big Brother state but from millions of insatiably nosy little brothers, nagging and judging and chivvying those who seem reluctant to "share everything." Most people don't realize that this failure mode... and not an orwellian state ... is the scenario taking place in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451."  In the Eggers book, his heroes desperately seek a little privacy or space to be themselves, to be unique and autonomous human beings.

Of course, this zero-sum, either-or kind of thinking is poisonous. It is just as oversimplifying as any would-be tyrannical system, clothing itself in sanctimony, by portraying an "opposite" that can be nothing but vile.  A strawman that Eggers sets up in order to be knocked down.

In fact, We do not have to choose between triplet fangs: Big Brother surveillance or stripped-naked little-brother coveillance, or (heaven forbid) the MYOB (mind your own business) rage of privacy "defenders" who just play into Big Brother's hands, by denouncing cartoon versions of transparency.

In fact, the society of nosy jerks portrayed in The Circle will not happen, because your neighbors would hate it just as much as you hate the thought of it!  Eggers's portrayal of his fellow humans and citizens is depressing not because it might come true, but because Eggers and the critics who praise him actually seem to believe (in their sanctimony) that their neighbors would put up with such a world... instead of using transparency and openness to catch the voyeurs and say "hey man!  Back off."

Well, well.  Perhaps they are members of a different species than you and me.

== More shallow privacy articles ==

Is there anyone out there even slightly interested in probing this important matter with nuance and a positive-sum frame of mind?  Maybe suggesting ways we that can win-win?

Jacob Morgan’s rather shallow article in Forbes suggests that “Privacy Is Completely And Utterly Dead, And We Killed It”  -- without contemplating at all whether there are types of privacy, and whether some kinds might be protected, even enhanced, in a mostly transparent world, wherein we are empowered to watch the watchers and to catch the peeping toms.

As I mentioned, in the Guardian, Alex Preston falls into the same zero-sum thinking: “Google knows what you're looking for. Facebook knows what you like. Sharing is the norm, and secrecy is out. But what is the psychological and cultural fallout from the end of privacy?”

At least a little better than those dismal jeremiads... read the article: Why We Care About Privacy. And yes, my positive-sum temperament makes me believe we can gain the advantages of a transparent society without going this far, still, it is a refreshing contrast against the usual zero sum reaction to the info-age… railing laments and demands for levels of privacy that only ever existed in our minds, plus shrilly silly-unrealistic demands that the mighty “stop looking at me!”

As if such wailings ever stood the slightest chance of working. We will never blind the eyes above us.  But we still have a chance to strip them naked.  And look back.

== Can we see what’s watching us? ==

To illustrate how pervasive omni-veillance is becoming.... Computer vision is embedded in toilets, urinals, hand- wash faucets, as well as those domes in the ceilings that monitor you in buildings like banks and casinos (and soon everywhere.) Now, sousveillance maven and Toronto professor Steve Mann has a fascinating paper describing methods to easily reveal the scanning field of such visual sensing systems: The Sightfield: Visualizing Computer Vision, and seeing its capacity to "see:"

“Moving a wand through space, while tracking its exact 3D position, makes visible the otherwise invisible “rays of sight” that emanate from cameras. This capacity to sense, measure, and visualize vision, is useful in liability, insurance, safety, and risk assessment, as well as privacy/priveillance assessment, criminology, urban planning, design, and (sur/sous)veil lance studies.”

Mann concludes, "The device may be used cooperatively, e.g. by a user or owner of a surveillance system to visualize the efficiency of their own cameras, or uncooperatively, as a video "bug sweeper" which uses video feedback to detect a hidden surveillance or sousveillance."

There is hope.  If we insist on a general ability to see, that will include the ability to spot voyeurs.  If we start designing systems right, then we will be able to do what assertively brave humans have always been able to do, when some busybody stares.  Tell them: "Hey bub.... back off."

POSTSCRIPT: Following up from last time.

America’s police departments need greater accountability—and it must come from outside the forces.

Yes... though with less sanctimony. Do this progressively, pragmatically, irresistibly, with some sympathy for the 85% of cops who are sincerely trying to do a really, really hard job.