Over twenty years ago, David Brin wrote The Transparent Society, which offered a vision of how we could learn to live with surveillance technology. I would describe his vision as having two components:
1. Symmetry or mutuality, leading to deterrence. Government would have the ability to spy on us, but government itself would be transparent. Because we could see what government is doing, we could deter government from abusing power.
2. Forbearance. In the restaurant, I could hear everyone’s conversation, but I don’t listen.
It seems to me that right now we have the opposite. The big tech firms see everything about us, but we know very little about how they work.
And people are fighting for attention, rather than for privacy.
Incisive post!
E. Glen Weyl & Eric Posner tried to tackle these problems in their 2018 book, Radical Markets, chapter 4, “Dismembering the Octopus: Toward a Radical Market in Corporate Control,” and chapter 5, “Data as Labor: Valuing Individual Contributions to the Data Economy.”
Forbearance is about motivation or lack of it, rather than personal restraint. As any intelligence professional could tell you, random surveillance is unlikely to yield actionable intelligence. You don’t want to listen to some random conversation in a restaurant; though, if you are trying to order, you may actively attempt to overhear comments from neighboring tables about the food – because in that moment, in that context, the information is highly relevant.
Arnold, both government and big tech can see a lot of what we do and hear a lot of what we say. We will never see and hear more than 1% of what they see and hear and that is one of the two main reasons for them to take advantage of us. The other main reason is self-selection: almost all politicians and owners/managers of big tech are ambitious enough to accumulate power and wealth to meddle in other people’s lives. They don’t care about us, they want to use us — both Obama and Gates are good examples of the malice, mendacity, and hypocrisy of politicians and o/m of big tech.
Regarding forbearance, I don’t understand what you mean.
“And people are fighting for attention, rather than for privacy.”
It’s both. Just like with drug abuse and overdoses, celebrities are a kind of canary in the coal mine, or Hayek’s ‘rich’ early adopters, or tech entrepreneur people “living in the future”.
What we learned from celebrities and extremely wealthy people first, is that what people actually want is *control*, to have the ability and power to manage who knows or believes what about them. They want to be mini-celebrities and micro-influencers with a kind of advertised persona for public consumption with an “image” to maintain full of pictures of an impressive or enviable lifestyle.
And then they also want their private, “counterintelligence best practices” life: a secret, compartmentalized, “non-disclosure agreement” life, to engage in protected personal or socially embarrassing activity, and inaccessible to any but who they specifically want and authorize for exposure to any particular facet, and with those people having no right or ability to share it with anyone else without their knowledge and consent.
All big, sophisticated organizations have the real, secret, insider life of the organization, and a polished (i.e., as fake as they can get away with) public affairs and relations performative presentation of the organization. Celebrities have taken this to the next level where ever the ‘leaks’ are often fake, just part of the act of their public persona.
Human wants don’t obey Kantian principles. You want maximum power and control over your own information, but you want to be able to know everything about everyone else’s affairs. You want other people to mind their own business when it comes to you, but then you want to know all their business too. Principles are about symmetric deals and compromises in which, for example, I’ll mind my own business if you mind your own business too.
The way the technology has evolved is to give a few giant, rich, powerful entities all surveillance power and control over information records and dissemination, and to give the individuals perhaps just a little illusion of privacy and control, with a lot of people being fooled by that mirage, relaxing their prudence, and getting themselves in a lot of trouble.
Then came we to the confine, where disparted
The second round is from the third, and where 5
A horrible form of Justice is beheld.
Clearly to manifest these novel things,
I say that we arrived upon a plain,
Which from its bed rejecteth every plant…
-Dante