The idea behind the cult of radical transparency was that “sharing” would make the world a better place. Private-life was now passe, our photos, our experiences, our thoughts, our opinions were to be endlessly shared not just with an ever expanding group of “friends” but with the world. Transparency would lead to individual authenticity, an end to hypocrisy, to open and accountable government. It would even allow us to re- stitch together our divided selves our work- self with
our family-self with our social-self or as Mark Zuckerberg himself stated it:
The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.”
Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
Yet, radical transparency has come in for a thumping lately. We can largely thank Edward Snowden ,whose revelations of how the US government used the ubiquitous sharing and monitoring technologies used by FaceBook, Google et al to spy on foreign and American citizens alike, has cast a pall over the whole transparency project. Still, both the Silicon Valley giants and much of the technorati appear to be treating the whole transparency question as a public relations problem or an issue of government surveillance alone. They continue to vigorously pursue their business model which is based on developing the tools for personalization.
A technorati semi-royalty like Kevin Kelly put the matter this way in Jeff Stibel’s book , Breakpoint:
Total personalization in this new world will require total transparency. That is going to be the price. If you want total personalization, you have to be totally transparent (93)
Or as Kelly put it over at The Edge:
Or as Kelly put it over at I don’t see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I’m trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched.
It’s suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can’t stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there’s no tracking in a temporary basis. I don’t know, but this is the question I’m asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?
The problem with this, of course, is that technology in and of itself doesn’t “want” anything. Self- tracking as in the “quantified-self” or surveillance of individuals by corporations and governments is not just an avenue being opened up by technological developments, it is a goal being pursued actively by both private sector companies, and the security state who are in light of that goal pushing technological evolution further in that direction. Indeed, Silicon Valley companies are so mesmerized with their ideal of a personalized economy that they are doubling down on forcing the transparency upon the public it requires even as cracks are beginning to show in the model’s foundation.
Let’s look at the cracks: people under 30, who have never lived in a world where the private and public had sharp boundaries might be more interested in privacy than their elders, many of whom are old enough to remember Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover and should, therefore, know better. Europeans, who were never as comfortable with corporate snooping as their American counterparts (Germany gave Google Street View the boot) are even less comfortable now that they know these companies were willing to act as spying tools for the US Government. There is an increasing desire among Europeans to build their own Internet with their own (higher) privacy standards.
The biggest market in the world, China, has already pressured Google to such an extent that it left country. It has its own public/private spying infrastructure in the form of front companies that work with US firms such as Microsoft, along with it own companies like Baidu, persons with sensitive information to hide; namely, criminals or terrorists are onto the fact that they are being watched and are embracing technologies to hide their data, including developing technologies that are anti-transparent. If technology wants anything here, in Kelly’s phraseology, it is an arms race between the watched and the watcher.
Fans of transparency, who are at the same time defenders of civil liberties, sometimes make the case that everything would be alright if the field was leveled and everyone: individual, corporation and government alike was made transparent. Yet, even if the powers unleashed by transparency were totally taken out of the hands of government and put in the hands of corporations and citizens, there would still be problems because there are issues of asymmetry that universal transparency does not address. We can already see what our government is really like: want to understand D.C. ? Read This Town- and yet such knowledge seems to change nothing. It is still the big-wigs who go on as usual and call the shots. And even if we could wave a magic wand and rid ourselves of all invasive government snooping private-sector transparency has the same asymmetries.
Fans of transparency, who are at the same time defenders of civil liberties, sometimes make the case that everything would be alright if the field was leveled and everyone: individual, corporation and government alike was made transparent. Yet, even if the powers unleashed by transparency were totally taken out of the hands of government and put in the hands of corporations and citizens, there would still be problems because there are issues of asymmetry that universal transparency does not address. We can already see what our government is really like: want to understand D.C. ? Read Personalization, as imagined by Silicon Valley would work something like this example, which I’ve essentially ripped and twisted from Stibel’s Breakpoint. I wake up in the morning and haven’t had time for breakfast which is known by my health monitoring system. This fact is integrated with my tracking system which knows that in my morning commute I pass The Donut Shop which has a two for one special on my favorite doughnut the Boston Cream. Facts known by my purchase tracking or perhaps gleaned from the fact that I once “liked” a comment by a “friend” on FaceBook who had posted about eating said donut. All this information is integrated, and I am pinged before passing The Donut Shop. Me being me, and lacking any self control, I stop and buy my donuts on the way to work.
Really?
What personalization means is constant bombardment by whatever advertiser has paid enough for my information at the moment to suggest for me what I should buy. The fruit and vegetable vender down the street is likely invisible to me in such a scenario if he hasn’t paid for such suggestions, which is unlikely because he is, well… Amish. This is the first asymmetry. The second asymmetry is between me and The Donut Shop. What possible piece of information could they share with me that would make the relationship more equal? Pictures of people made obese by their obsession with the Boston Cream? Nobody advertises to destroy their own business. The information “shared” with me is partial and distorted.
The biggest danger of the cult of radical transparency is not, I think, in Western countries where traditions of civil liberty and market competition (meaning as ubiquitous surveillance gets more “creepy” there will be a rising number of alternative businesses that offer “non-creepy” services), although this does not mean that things will work themselves out- we have to push back. Rather, the bigger danger lies in authoritarian countries, especially China, where radical transparency could be pursued to its logical limit both by companies and the security state or, most disturbing of all, the collusion of the two.
The biggest danger of the cult of radical transparency is not, I think, in Western countries where traditions of civil liberty and market competition (meaning as ubiquitous surveillance gets more “creepy” there will be a rising number of alternative businesses that offer “non-creepy” services), although this does not mean that things will work themselves out- we have to push back. Rather, the bigger danger lies in authoritarian countries, especially China, where radical transparency could be pursued to its logical limit both by companies and the security state or, most disturbing of all, the collusion of the two.Yet, even there, I tend to have a faith that, over the long run, the more ornery aspects of human nature will ultimately rule the day, that people will find ways to tune out, to ignore, to play tricks on and be subversive against anything that tries to assert control over individual decisions.
The question of transparency is thus political, cultural, and psychological rather than technological. A great example of the push against it is Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle, which not only gives a first hand account of absurdity of the cult of radical transparency, but brings into relief questions which I believe will prove deeper and more long lasting for the human condition than current debates over FaceBook privacy settings, or the NSA’s spy-a-thon.
These other, deeper and more existential questions deal with the boundary between self and community, the tension between solitude and togetherness. They are questions that have been with us from our very beginning on the African savanna, and will likely never be fully resolved until our species is no more. These questions along with The Circle itself is where I will turn next time…
