The Transparent Society

by David Brin

  This approach is relevant to the issues we’ve been discussing for one major reason. Strong privacy advocates often talk about how appreciative they are for the glorious Internet. We have seen quotations proclaiming the Net to be a greater advance than Gutenberg’s printing press. In sometimes fervid paeans, they describe how electronic media will open up a bright future for all humankind. And yet, they seldom note, or seem to recall, where this wonder came from!

  It came from science. Scientists conceived it, built it, improved it, and then shared it with everybody, all according to the principles they live and work by. In its nascent forms, the Internet had little use for encryption or anonymity, because these were alien concepts, anathema to most of its originators. Rather, it burgeoned, thrived, and grew beautiful in an ambience of near-total accountability.

  Now I am fully aware that things change. The needs of a vast worldwide user base clearly differ from those of a few thousand technical workers. We may need to make a great number of alterations and pragmatic compromises in order to serve those masses. Some of those compromises will certainly involve confidential pseudonyms and forms of encrypted secrecy. The tool is ours, to modify as we see fit.

  And yet, if the Internet is so wonderful, why are strong privacy advocates so eager to rush and change the premise, the most fundamental core belief, that underlay its origins?

  The Internet is a gift from science to the rest of humanity. If we admire the Net, should not a burden of proof fall on those who would change the basic assumptions that brought it about in the first place?

  In the end, the argument for transparency goes beyond logic and pragmatism, boiling down to plain good manners.

  When you’ve been invited to a really neat party, try to dance with the one who brought you.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE ROAD OF OPENNESS

  Men’s natural abilities are too dull to see through everything at once; but by consulting, listening, and debating, they grow more acute, and while they are trying all means, they at last discover those which they want, which all approve, but no one would have thought of in the first place.

  BARUCH SPINOZA

  It is our nature to strive to explore

  everything, alive and dead, present and

  past and future. When once the

  technology exists to read and write

  memories, one mind to another, the age

  of mental exploration will begin in

  earnest. Instead of admiring the

  beauties of nature from the outside, we

  will look at nature through the eyes of

  the elephant, the eagle, and the whale.

  We will be able, through the magic of

  science, to feel in our own minds the

  pride of the peacock and the wrath of

  the lion.

  FREEMEN DYSON, INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS

  THE GARDEN OF LIBERTY

  A Greek myth tells of a farmer, Akademos, who did a favor for the sun god. In return, the mortal was granted a garden wherein he could say anything he wished, even criticism of the mighty Olympians, without retribution.

  I have often mulled over that little story, wondering how Akademos could ever really trust Apollo’s promise. After all, the storied Greek deities were notoriously mercurial, petty, and vengeful. They could never be relied upon to keep their word, especially if provoked by censuring mortals. In other words, they were a lot like human leaders.

  I concluded there were only two ways Akademos could truly be protected. First, Apollo might set up impenetrable walls around the glade, so dense that even keen-eyed Hermes could not peer through or listen. Alas, the garden wouldn’t be very pleasant after that, and Akademos would have few visitors to talk to. The alternative was to empower Akademos, somehow to enforce the god’s promise. For this some equalizing factor was needed to make them keep their word, even when the mortal and his friends started telling bad Zeus jokes.

  That equalizing factor could only be knowledge.

  The roots of this particular legend permeate Western thought. In the days of Pericles, free citizens of Athens used to gather at the Academy, named after that same garden of Akademos where individuals would freely debate issues of the day—a liberty that lasted while Pericles was around to remind them of the contract they had made. A pact of openness.

  Alas, it was a new and difficult concept, far more complex than rule by king or oligarchy. For a variety of reasons, the miracle did not long outlive the great democrat. Outspoken Socrates eventually paid a stiff price for practicing candor in the Academy, whereupon his student, Plato, took paradoxical revenge by writing stern denunciations of openness, calling instead for strict government by an “enlightened” elite (of his own design). Plato’s advice, which served to justify countless tyrants during the following two and a half millennia, remained influential almost to this generation.

  But now, at last, the vision of Pericles is getting another trial run. Today’s “academy” extends far beyond the sacred confines of the world’s thousand or so major universities. Throughout the neo-West, and to some extent the rest of the world, people have begun to accept the daring notion that ideas are not in themselves toxic. At least not to those (from all social classes) who cultivate brave minds. Free speech is increasingly seen as the best font of criticism, the only practical and effective antidote to error. Moreover, most honorable people have little to fear if others know a great deal about them, so long as it goes both ways.

  Let there be no mistake; this is a hard lesson to swallow, especially since each of us would be a tyrant, if we could. (Some with the best of intentions.) Very little in our history has prepared us for the task ahead, namely, living in a tribe of more than six billion equal citizens, each guided by his or her own sovereign will, loosely administered by chiefs we elect and by just rules that we made through hard negotiation among ourselves. Any other generation would have thought it an impossible ambition, though countless ancestors sweated and strove, getting us to the point where we can try.

  Even among those who profess allegiance to this new hope, there is a bitter struggle over how best to protect it from the old gods of wrath, bigotry, conspiracy, and oppression—spirits who reside not on some mountain peak, but in the hearts of each man or woman who tries to expand a little secular power, or to profit by suppressing others. Perhaps someday our descendants will all be mature enough to curb these impulses by themselves. But meanwhile, a way is needed to foil the self-justified ambitions of those who would rationalize robbing freedom from the rest of us, saying that it is their right—or that it is for our own good.

  According to some vigorous champions of liberty, the best means to protect our worldwide “academy” is obvious—we must build walls to safeguard every private garden, so that freedom may thrive in each secure sanctum of the mind.

  To this I can only reply that it’s been tried. And there is not a single example of a commonwealth based on that principle that thrived.

  There is a better way. A method that is primarily responsible for this renaissance we’re living in. Accountability is a light that can shine even on the gods of authority. Whether they gather in the Olympian heights of government, amid the spuming currents of commerce, or in the Hadean shadows of criminality, they cannot harm us while pinned by its glare.

  Accountability is the only defense that ever adequately protected free speech, in a garden that stands proudly, with no walls.

  I am not the first to say this. Pericles, Bruno, Spinoza, and countless others gave openness a voice during their own dark epochs. Nor can I pretend to have offered the scholarly precision and eloquence that Karl Popper poured into The Open Society and Its Enemies, at a time when it seemed all too likely that our grand experiment would be destroyed, either from outside or from within. During the dark early days of the Cold War, Popper movingly praised those common folk who manage to transform themselves into citizens—independent, cooperative, and indomitable.

  Writi
ng about the “longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice” he posited hope in “their unwillingness to leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority, and their willingness to share the burden of responsibility for avoiding suffering, and to work for its avoidance.”

  Even when it comes to popularized versions of the same message, I am not alone. Take the following extract from an article that appeared before this book went to press.

  With the coming of a wired, global society, the concept of openness has never been more important. It’s the linchpin that will make the new world work. In a nutshell, the key formula for the coming age is this: Open, good. Closed, bad. Tattoo it on your forehead. Apply it to technology standards, to business strategies, to philosophies of life. It’s the winning concept for individuals, for nations, for the global community in the years ahead.

  In this Wired magazine commentary, Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden went on to contrast what the world may look like if it takes either the “closed” route or an “open” one. In the former case, nations turn inward, fragmenting into blocs. This strengthens rigidity of thought, stagnates the economy, increases poverty, mutual fear, and intolerance, leading to the vicious cycle of an even more closed and fragmented world. If, on the other hand, society adopts the open model, then a virtuous circle turns cultures outward, making them receptive to innovation and new ideas. Rising affluence and trust lead to growing tolerance and trade, smaller economic units, a more open society, and a more integrated world.

  Synergies like this underlie the movement for openness, in stark contrast to “zero sum” approaches offered by the devil’s dichotomies, which call for wretched trade-offs between pairs of things we cannot endure without. Those who favor an open society believe we can have both liberty and efficient government, both freedom and safety. In fact, we know that those pairs will thrive or fail in unison, as they have for years in our present culture.

  This confidence extends to the way we would envision developing the character and institutions of the information age, which until now have been “deposited like sediment” rather than sapiently planned. Drawing an analogy to the framing of the U.S. Constitution, Jaron Lanier called for a pragmatic mutualism of competition and cooperation as we design, and then redesign, the Internet to come.

  Well-meaning and brilliant people with nasty, conflicting interests somehow created a collective product that was better than any of them could have understood at the time.... [A]s in Philadelphia two hundred years ago, a collective product [the Internet] has to emerge that is better than any of them, or any of us, could achieve singly.

  In such negotiations it is perfectly reasonable to “trade off” particular interests and resources, negotiating a give-and-take of concessions from one group to the next. That is adversarial pragmatism, a form of accountability. But it does not have to entail accepting dour dichotomies about matters of fundamental importance.

  If we are all doomed to be either courteous slaves or liberated barbarians, what’s the point? In the long run, what use is a civilization unless it gently helps us become smart, diverse, creative, and confident enough to choose, of our own free will, to be decent people?

  Teach your children to be politely but firmly skeptical about any- thing they see or hear [on the Net]. Teach them to have no fear of rejecting images or communications that repel or frighten them. Teach them to have a strong sense of their own personal boundaries, of their right to defend those boundaries physically and socially. Teach them that people aren’t always who they present themselves to be [in e-mail], and that predators exist. Teach them to keep per- sonal information private. Teach them to trust you enough to con- fide in you if something does not seem right.

  HOWARD RHEINGOLD

  A SHOPPING LIST FOR THE FUTURE

  If a transparent society is in our future, there will be a rough transition before its advantages crystallize around us. A transparency threshold will have to be reached before the odds of getting caught finally make sneakiness and cheating unprofitable. When people feel safer, we will worry less about what others know about us. In the meantime, we may need ways to track society’s degree of “sentinelity,” or how effectively our myriad “T-cells” are watching the watchers and guarding the guardians.

  Many of the practical tools we discussed in this book will help, including free-market means for testing the veracity of would-be prophets (predictions registries), as well as alternative routes for good ideas and surprising art to rise to our attention, uncontrolled by the masters of media (percolation). Ways must be found to solve the problem of intellectual property. If old approaches to copyright are no longer effective, it behooves us to come up with new social compacts to achieve the same basic practical aim of rewarding inventive people for sharing their creative efforts rather than caching them secretively away. This openness will be especially urgent when it comes to double-edged breakthroughs that have potential either to foster or to undermine freedom, depending on how they are used. Examples might include lie detectors, proclivities testing, new techniques for parsing neural patterns of thought, or countless other plausible discoveries that could serve the purpose of tyrants, unless revealed and openly discussed.

  Regarding the Internet, it is interesting to note that this supremely connecting system, which ironically arose out of deadly suspicions dividing the human race during the mid-twentieth century, might not have received funding under any logical peacetime criteria. Its deep sturdiness against physical destruction eventually implies robustness against coercion—or even, in the long run, legal authority. And yet there are worries. Will the new tools empower citizens, or exacerbate a widening gulf between “haves” and “have nots”? Oceans of information are available, but much is not well organized, cataloged, or verified. Data overload looms as a real danger, sometimes making it seem as if we are “sipping” from a fire hose. Controlled anarchy and creative chaos have their charms, but can they last for long before demands ring out for order?

  Can anyone agree what kind of order would best serve a world that is so rapidly turning on, tuning in, and downloading?

  Right now the Internet serves countless diverse groups, helping them to coalesce and organize. But this “centrifugal” trend should ideally be countered by inward or “centripetal” forces that draw these adversarial groups back together again. One way to help this happen without pushing conformity will be through the establishment of “disputation arenas,” managed by persnickety T-cell types whose own peculiar fetish is a passion for fair and meticulous debate. If it becomes an accepted norm for advocacy groups to send their greatest champions into arduous duels that go on for months, watched and heckled by a fascinated populace, the result could be not only superb entertainment but also the demolition of many bad ideas. Even more important, it may help improve some good ones.

  Such arenas might also remind us of an essential truth: free speech deserves our devotion, but we have a right to ask for something in return. In the long run, free speech should be the rich stew out of which better models of the world emerge. Surprises that rock our complacency. Better paths into the future. New virtues that we’ll share in common.

  If transparency is to thrive, it will be especially important that nothing impede the continuing rise of an age of amateurs, in which skill and expertise become so widely dispersed that no cabal of professionals can ever become dominant, or indispensable. Above all, the mysteriously pervasive Western propaganda campaign—the relentless drumbeat of messages extolling individualism, eccentricity, and suspicion of authority—must continue. This “new meme” is essential if rambunctious T-cells are to pervade everywhere, using their expanded powers of sight and free speech to test every assumption, probe every so-called “neat idea,” and discover potential errors before they are allowed to shatter this new and profoundly interdependent world.

  Would it be so bad if the media would also start lea
vening these cantankerous themes with a soft murmur of humor and gratitude? A little appreciation for getting to live in such a civilization? That slight modification might help some bright T-cells remain passionate error seekers, instead of transforming into self-righteously paranoic cancers. But it is far more important that this new and vibrant commons have a vigorous “immune system” than none at all.

  As Alfred North Whitehead once said, “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” We should not shrink back from that trial. The only proper response is to embrace it.

  The challenge is not to keep everything secret, but to limit misuse of information. That implies trust, and more information about how the information is used. At the same time we may all become tolerant if everyone’s flaws are more visible.

  ESTHER DYSON

  NEGOTIATING WITH THE ENEMY

  For those who pored through this book expecting prescriptions and were aggrieved only to find tentative suggestions, all I can say is that I never promised a road map to a transparent utopia. Idealized essences and ideologies have caused enough death and suffering during the last few centuries.

  My main task was contrarian—to criticize too much attention being paid to an appealing but wrongheaded mythology: that you can enduringly protect freedom, personal safety, and even privacy by preventing other people from knowing things. A fallacy no more true because it is believed all across the political spectrum. And yet, I realize the opposite notion, transparency, could be just as bad, if taken to extremes, or if applied unevenly or too soon. We need to study how it has worked at fostering the three greatest, most successful endeavors of humanity: science, free markets, and democracy. In each case there have been pragmatic compromises ... while maintaining a basic fealty toward openness and light.