by David Brin
“Yes, but that’s arson.”
“The dead man has no heirs for his Shadow House,” said Carlo Pizzi. “Our friend has just checked thoroughly, and that old man was so egotistical, and so confident that he would live forever, that he died intestate?… No, correction.” Pizzi tapped his earpiece, listening. “I mean having already settled with any and all potential heirs. They all signed quit-claims, years ago. So, if you burn the house down, no one will miss it.”
“There’s the cat,” said Tullio. “The cat would miss the house.”
“What?”
“A cat lives in this house,” said Tullio. “Why don’t you get your friend the AI to negotiate with our house cat? See if it can make the cat a convincing offer.”
Carlo Pizzi mulled this over behind his face-mounted screens. “The German AI was entirely unaware of the existence of the house cat.”
“That’s because a house cat is a living being and your friend is just a bunch of code. It’s morally wrong to burn down houses. Arson is illegal. What would the Church say? Obviously it’s a sin.”
“You’re just emotionally upset now, because you can’t think as quickly and efficiently as an Artificial Intelligence,” said Carlo Pizzi. “However, think it over at your own slow speed. The offer stands. I’ll be going now, because if I stand too long around here, some algorithm might notice me here, and draw unwelcome conclusions.”
“Good luck with your new novel,” said Irma. “I hope it’s as funny as your early, good ones.”
Carlo Pizzi left hastily on his small and silent electric scooter. Tullio and Irma retreated within the Shadow House.
“The brazen nerve of that smart machine, to carry on so ‘deus ex machina,’” said Tullio. “We can’t burn down this beautiful place! Shadow House is a monument to privacy—to a vanishing, but noble way of life! Besides, you’d need thermite grenades to take out those steel panic rooms.”
Irma looked dreamy. “I remember when the government of Italy went broke building all those security lighthouses. There must be dozens of them, far out to sea. Maybe we could have our pick.”
“But those paranoid towers will never be refined and airy and beautiful, like this beach house! It would be like living in a nuclear missile silo.”
“All of those are empty now, as well,” said Irma.
“Those nuclear silos had Big Red Buttons, too, now that you mention it. We’re all here because they never got pressed.” He pondered a long moment. “We’re never going to push that button, are we, Irma? I always wondered what kind of noise it would make.”
“We never make big elephant noises,” Irma replied with an eloquent shrug. “You and me, that’s not how we live.”
There is no SPF 9000 …
A TSUNAMI OF LIGHT
DAVID BRIN
Light appears to be pouring across the planet. Young people log their lives with hourly True Confessions. Cops wear lapel-cams—and citizens stare back, uploading images to safe storage in the Cloud. Spy agencies peer at us—but suffer defections and whistleblowers. Bank and corporate records leak like a torn sponge and “uncrackable” firewalls topple. As we debate Internet privacy, revenge porn, the NSA and Edward Snowden, one technological trend propels all others. Cameras will keep getting cheaper, smaller, better, more mobile and more numerous—each year—at a rate much faster than Moore’s Law. Soon they will be too small to detect—concealed in that woman’s earring, or that fellow’s shirt button. Then on the corner of every cheap pair of sunglasses.
Meanwhile, biometric scanners will detect who you are, using a myriad individual identifiers that you cannot help but emit, from iris or retinal patterns to your face structure or voiceprint or walking gait, to the ratios of bones in your hands … all the way to otto-accoustic tones that most people involuntarily and unconsciously emit from their own ears. The gas that you pass will carry samples of your micro-biome, laying a trail no less decipherable than any left by a snail.
Now throw in lie detectors and strongly predictive personality profiling—two technologies glimmering on the near horizon.
Is it the dawn of Big Brother? Either the old-fashioned kind—top-down oppression by all-seeing elites? Or else something equally scary but more lateral: scrutiny by a billion nosy neighbors and judgmental “little brothers”? Certainly, the press and airwaves and blogosphere surge with relentless jeremiads of imminent doom.
In fact, some trends defy the dystopian reflex—the tendency for our simplistic fears to focus only on downsides. For example, 2013 was the best year for U.S. civil liberties in three decades, when it became “settled law” that citizens may record their encounters with police. No single matter could have been more important because it established the most basic right of sousveillance or looking back at power. For in altercations with authority, what recourse can a citizen turn to, other than the Truth? A huge victory for the little guy … though making it stick will be another matter.
A balanced view would reveal both good and bad trends, more evenly distributed than you’ll ever see told by the Fear and Anger Industry. In fact, the core issue of our time is mostly ignored by hand-wringing pundits and mass media.
Light is going to flow.
You may try to stand athwart history with your hand out, shouting “stop!” But it will do scant good against a river.
In which case, can we at least use light to enhance the things we cherish most, and to serve as—in the words of Justice Brandeis—a “great disinfectant” of the bad? I interrogated this topic in a nonfiction book—The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Also in two novels, Earth and Existence.
Others have also been exploring this territory. And if science fiction is (per James Gunn) the “R&D department of the future,” then no topic is more fitting for SF examination than how we all, as individuals and societies, will deal with all this firehose—this tsunami—of illumination.
And hence this volume, offering a broader range of visions about our near future. Authors contributing stories and essays to Chasing Shadows were encouraged to explore their own notions of what might propel—or obstruct—a world civilization awash, for well or ill, in information. When soliciting stories, among many provocative questions that we posed were:
• Can citizens answer surveillance with sousveillance, or shining accountability upward? Is that how we got the freedom we already have? Is there an answer to the famous saying by Juvenal: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who will watch the watchmen?
• Might light spread unevenly among countries, classes or genders? Even if it’s fair, might effects vary? Will those with power find ways to keep it, even while being watched?
• In Damon Knight’s famous “I See You,” humans adapt blithely to an extreme case—all people seeing all things, all the time. In contrast, the Dave Eggers novel The Circle portrays privacy becoming a social crime. In classic cyberpunk, a skilled rat manages to stymie “the machine” by exploiting shadows invisible to others. What possibilities strike you?
• Will we spiral into busybody judgementalism? Or might people choose a habit of leaving each other alone? Will some privacy survive, if you can always catch voyeurs in the act, and tell their moms?
• John W. Campbell said “an armed society is a polite society.” (Also attributed to Robert A. Heinlein, who followed Campbell.) Is that assertion true? History clearly says: not really. But might Campbell’s riff come true if guns are replaced by cameras? The quickest draw may not always win!
• For generations, in the west, formerly pariah groups became more accepted, after public exposure. Take gays and lesbians and trans people, for example—to everyone’s surprise, light became their best friend.
Is this effect—tolerance via revelation—limited to a few cultures? Does it arise from eyewitnessing the pain of others? So far, so good, but might empathy reach limits in a much more transparent world?
• If cheap methods will soo
n let us detect both lies and psychopathy, will such tools make resistance to tyranny futile, locking in Big Brother forever?
Or—if all citizens can apply such tools upward, aiming them at all elites—might those same tools ensure Big Brother happens never?
• Can we own our information? Will folks jealously guard it? Or buy and sell it in a web bazaar?
• What does openness do to Hollywood rhythms of drama? Tech-driven disasters—e.g. those of Michael Crichton—always happen amid and because of secrecy. Would transparency help? Or might too many staring critics stifle innovation?
• Will artificial intelligences be as open as Facebook teens? Or will they skulk, looking for the last remaining shadows? Will they hold each other accountable? Is transparency, then, our best defense against “Skynet”?
• “Cycling Stasi!” shouts the London Daily Mail: “Vigilantes in lycra are filming your every move!” The complaint? A trend for urban bicyclists to carry helmet-mounted cams and then upload anything they deem improper, from genuine misbehavior to a woman eating cereal in her car. Oh, each time something like this happens, handwringers never imagine ways that victims might fight back, as in the old song, “Harper Valley PTA.” Can you, as a science-fiction writer or reader, envision this, so that even in an age of cameras, the meek will have the power to say (with some effectiveness) “MYOB!” (Mind Your Own Business)?
• About those tradeoffs—is there some missing element that could tip the balance, making light more effective for good and less threatening to eccentric individualism?
Authors and essayists who were invited to contribute to Chasing Shadows were asked to explore all these topics and more, in this anthology about a coming era when—for well and ill—we all step into the open. Into the light. But you, the reader, should judge. Was this challenge taken up successfully? Or else, scanning the list of topics above—plus your own concerns—do you feel there’s more than enough unexamined ground for a sequel?
A word or two about how we got rolling on this project. It was sponsored, in part, by The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination which—in cooperation with UCSD’s Center for Design and CalIT2—plans to hold a two-day symposium to correlate with this anthology. The symposium may also produce an accompanying volume of academic papers. This kind of synergy among science-fiction authors, academics, civil servants and the corporate world has precedents, such as the successful 100 Year Starship conference of 2013, also sponsored by the Clarke Center. It is a template for combining and crossfertilizing various methods for exploring the ground ahead, a future filled with both dangers and opportunities.
LIBERTAS PERFUNDET OMNIA LUCE
The stories in this volume certainly span a range, with Nancy Fulda and Aliette de Bodard showing true science-fictional daring, as they portray far future worlds very different from ours, yet still realms where human beings struggle for self-discovery and growth. In contrast, Jack Skillingstead and Karl Schroeder depict very near tomorrows, revealing how the lives of normal people might change, if light flows in just the next few years.
We got political, in some places, with libertarian-leaning pieces by Gregory Benford and Robert Sawyer, who suggest that technologies of vision will enable free citizens to dispense with most government. Other authors, like Brenda Cooper and Vylar Kaftan, come from a more communitarian inclination, yet reach generally the same conclusion! How interesting that such a wide range of visionary authors—from liberal to libertarian and in wildly varied visions—nevertheless converge toward a shared ambition, reflecting how individuals may be empowered to hold each other accountable without (very much) coercion from above. (Who else but science-fiction authors would have the guts to transcend hobbling clichés like the shallow-silly left-right political axis?)
Oh but change won’t come without poignancy or loss! Tales by Cat Rambo, Kathleen Goonan, David Ramirez, David Walton and Scott Sigler all show (in their own, uniquely vivid ways) how human beings will remain human—still wracked with doubts, worries and heartbreak, even when we’re forced to admit that the world, as a whole, is getting better. Or even if it gets a lot better! Who wouldn’t want to live in the future portrayed by Bruce Sterling? Well, his retired politician, for one. The kind of predatory user who thrived back in the dark ages of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Our reprints in Chasing Shadows are mostly classics of the genre, shining ageless light upon the problems and potential benefits of transparency, as well as revealing how far back great authors were thinking about such things. I’ll leave it to our scholars—James Gunn and Stephen W. Potts—to comment on these treasures by Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, R.C. Fitzpatrick and Neal Stephenson. Let me only comment that my own reprinted contribution to the volume, a story about crime and punishment in a tech-illuminated future, could be taken as an homage to Bob Silverberg’s timeless tale … though I don’t recall reading “To See the Invisible Man,” before I wrote “Insistence of Vision.” Sometimes great ideas …
Our essayists pursue truth more explicitly, offering perspective on how transparency might make us all more safe (Vinge), or help to keep us free (Gibson), or turn us into better citizens, or make government more effective at both protecting and serving us.
Of course, the treatises by Gunn and Potts remind us that one tool helps us to explore beyond the horizons of policy and even science. That tool is science fiction—truly the R&D department of human civilization, probing where other methods cannot peer, for dangers and opportunities. Beyond this horizon.
* * *
Speaking of valuable lessons from SF, we have all been taught, especially by George Orwell, to fret about threats to this narrow and recent renaissance of relative freedom. If we do succeed in extending this rare miracle, it will be in no small part owed to the self-preventing prophecy of 1984 and other dire warnings that girded millions to fight against Big Brother. Readers who self-identify with the “right” or the “left” may differ over which direction poses a more likely threat to liberty—bureaucracy or plutocracy—but most of us share the same general dread.
Alas, this excellent instinct all too often translates into a reflex to hide. To believe that we can stymie would-be tyrants by scurrying into shadows, by shrouding our communications in encryption, for example, or by passing noble-sounding laws that forbid elites to look at us. (Name one time when that prescription ever worked.) Or by using hackertech to scurry in hidden corners, as recommended by cyberpunk tales, the most romantic in all of Sci Fi.
Those who have read The Transparent Society know there is another possible approach, one that is more militant and aggressive than hiding, in every way. One that has the advantage of a track record, having actually worked somewhat … a bit, sometimes, barely enough … for two centuries or so. It is the answer to Juvenal’s question about who will watch the watchmen, and it was the Latin title to this section:
“Freedom will flood all things with light.”
Hence, let me conclude Chasing Shadows with a little lagniappe. Part polemic and part parable, it attempts to put our present dilemma in perspective. Not by looking ahead this time, but reaching back to a past era, when human beings first tried this great experiment. In openness. In enlightenment.
THE GARDEN OF OPENNESS
Ancient Greek myths tell of a farmer, Akademos, who did a favor for the sun god. In return, Apollo granted the mortal a garden wherein he could say whatever he liked, even about the mighty Olympians, without retribution. Inspired by this tale-—the earliest allegory about free speech—citizens of Periclean Athens used to gather at the Academy to openly debate issues of the day.
Now the fable of Akademos always puzzled me at one level. How could a mortal trust the storied Greek deities—notoriously mercurial, petty and vengeful—to keep their promise? Especially when impudent humans started telling bad Zeus jokes? Apollo might set up impenetrable barriers around the glade, so no god could peer in. That might work. But Akademos would have few vis
itors to join him, cowering under sunless walls.
The alternative was to empower Akademos with an equalizer, some way to enforce the gods’ promise. And that equalizing factor could only be knowledge.
But more about that in a moment.
First though—how did the Athenians fare in their real-life experiment with free speech?
Alas, democracy and openness were new and difficult concepts. Outspoken Socrates eventually paid a stiff price for candor in the Academy. Whereupon his student, Plato, took paradoxical revenge by denouncing openness, calling instead for strict government by an elite. Plato’s advice served to justify countless tyrants during the millennia since.
But humanity cannot be repressed forever. Right now the democratic vision is getting another trial run. Today’s “academy” extends far beyond Earth’s major universities. Throughout the world, millions have begun to accept the daring notion that disagreement isn’t toxic. Free speech is increasingly seen as the best font of criticism—the only practical and effective antidote to error.
Let there be no mistake; this is a hard lesson, especially since each of us would be a tyrant if we could. (Some with the best intentions.) Very little in history—or human nature—prepared us for the task ahead, living in a tribe of six billion equal citizens, each guided by his or her own sovereign will, loosely administered by chiefs we elect, under just rules that we made through hard negotiation among ourselves. Any other generation would have thought it an impossible ambition—though countless ancestors strove, getting us to the point where we can try.
Even among those who profess allegiance to this new hope, there is bitter struggle over how best to resist the old gods of wrath, bigotry and oppression—spirits who reside not on some mountain peak, but in the heart of each man or woman who tries to gain power at the expense of others. Perhaps our descendants will be mature enough to curb these impulses all by themselves. Meanwhile, we must foil those who rationalize robbing freedom, claiming it’s their right … or that it’s for our own good. In other words, we still face the same dilemma that confronted Akademos.