{"id":14347,"date":"2013-02-16T14:24:41","date_gmt":"2013-02-16T18:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=14347"},"modified":"2013-02-16T14:41:54","modified_gmt":"2013-02-16T18:41:54","slug":"the-transparent-society-wont-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/02\/16\/the-transparent-society-wont-happen\/","title":{"rendered":"The Transparent Society Won’t Happen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"photo-3\"<\/a>This is just an off-the-cuff post as I do some weekend reading, namely David Brin\u2019s The Transparent Society<\/i> (1998). I\u2019m curious about the common grand narrative that society has become more transparent and thus will continue to be more so, ultimately creating the state of full transparency, full surveillance, where everything is seen, recorded, and known. I\u2019ve critiqued this line of thought before<\/a>, as the issue is common in writing about surveillance or privacy, from silly op-eds to pieces by serious scholars like Zygmunt Bauman.<\/p>\n

Brin begins his book by asking the reader to look 10-20 years in the future, which from 1998 means today. Brin claims in the world of the future-for-him \/ now-for-us there will be no street crime because surveillance cameras peer down from \u201cevery lamppost, every rooftop and street sign\u201d which are \u201cobserving everything in open view\u201d (4).<\/p>\n

Nope. Street crime still exists as well as street signs without cameras. Instead of hyperbolically claiming full transparency and surveillance and the complete end to anonymity, we would be better off discussing the very real increases in surveillance accurately. We owe this issue such respect. As I argued elsewhere<\/a>\u00a0responding to various hyperbolic and incorrect claims,\u00a0there hasn\u2019t, and <\/i>likely will not be, a death of anonymity,<\/p>\n

Anonymity is declining, it is not dead. The web forgets less, but it still sometimes forgets. We are living in an era of more knowledge, not an era of omniscience. The web unmasks some people sometimes, but it does not unmask everyone. The worst thing you\u2019ve done might be the first thing people know about you, but probably not. There is less invisibility, but invisibility is not dead. Society\u2019s memory has become better, but it is not perfect. Much is increasingly revealed, but much remains concealed<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To be fair, Brin thought that while public areas had full surveillance, the home would remain largely hidden. His vision was of cameras everywhere in public so that, for example, any individual could call up the cameras to locate their friends. Want to know if your date has arrived at the bar? Just log onto the camera in the bar and look.<\/p>\n

He gets this wrong in two ways. First, Brin thought of a world where you \u201cpulled\u201d information about what one is doing, whereas, 15 years later, this information is \u201cpushed\u201d at us. Yes, cameras do capture some of what we are doing, but when it comes to public transparency today, we often tell others what we are doing. It is understandable that Brin didn\u2019t see this coming 15 years ago; he lived in a world where the concern was of being watched with the fear of others seeing us. Now many fear not being seen; the concern now isn\u2019t if people know what I\u2019m doing, but the worry that no one cares. As Bauman states in Liquid Surveillance<\/em><\/a>, \u201cthe fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed\u201d (23). While Brin\u2019s transparent society is achieved through cameras passively recording, today, many actively announce. Brin understood \u201cmicrocameras overhead\u201d that see rather than devices in our hands that speak.<\/p>\n

Second, Brin made too strong a distinction between \u201cprivate\u201d and \u201cpublic\u201d, again, understandable given how much those concepts have eroded since. What is happening in the streets, according to Brin, would be transparent, and what happened in the home would be hidden. Today, not only are the streets not fully transparent, what happens inside many homes is much more visible. Homes have become increasingly a domain of surveillance, a type willingly entered into, for example, in the proliferation of our homes, families, food, etc<\/i> in photos on Facebook.<\/p>\n

All of this speaks to the general problem of constructing \u201cgrand narratives<\/a>\u201d, once popular in social theory but these days looked upon with skepticism. Making sweeping claims about how society will change in the future is troublesome because it is downright arrogant; one thinker cannot think for all people in all places and all times, rather, there are infinite standpoints and contingencies that should temper the scope of any one theory. I think of Max Weber, who cautioned against grand narratives on one hand but on the other provided some of his own. Take, for example, his theory that efficiency, the centerpiece of what Weber called \u201cformal rationality\u201d, would come to dominate over anything thought to be inefficient. Western modernity, according to Weber, wipes out anything left to chance, anything unknown, mysterious, or hidden. This efficiency would come to dominate and engulf society in a cold iron cage<\/a> of rationality \u2013a grand narrative to be sure.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t come to pass. Yes, George Ritzer has shown how many sectors of society have been formally rationalized since the time of Weber, for which Ritzer uses McDonalds as the paradigmatic case (McDonaldization<\/a> also updates Weber\u2019s theory from the bureaucracy into globalized consumer spaces). However, even George Ritzer acknowledges that McDonaldized consumer spaces are not an \u201ciron cage\u201d, but rather what he calls \u201cvelvet cages<\/a>\u201d, making reference to the softer, intentionally-entered-into, forms of rationalized control; Weber\u2019s hell is replaced with Ritzer\u2019s purgatory. We never turned into the Brazil<\/em><\/a>-like iron cage Weber thought was inevitable. Grand narratives often make the mistake of assuming the trends of the present will continue to march on unchecked.<\/p>\n

Brin makes the same error, as do the many people claiming we will surely see a society of full transparency, the \u201cdeath of anonymity\u201d, the \u201cend of privacy\u201d and so-forth (again, I list and critique these more here<\/a>). More than just the old-fashioned error of the grand narrative, Brin and these others also fall into the trap of what Michael Sacasas calls the \u201cBorg complex\u201d (here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>), making reference to the Star Trek<\/i> aliens who use technology to assimilate other species and who famous proclaim that \u201cresistance is futile\u201d; akin to what Weber thought of efficiency and Brin of transparency. There is good reason to be skeptical of theories that proclaim a future that must<\/i> come to pass, especially those who hyperbolically and incorrectly claim a fully \u201ctransparent society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson<\/a>] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com<\/a>].<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brin’s 1998 “Transparent Society” predicts a transparent future for 2013, and got it wrong for some interesting reasons. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":559,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[2362,19831,2954,175,2143,19832,66,800],"class_list":["post-14347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-bauman","tag-brin","tag-jurgenson","tag-sociology","tag-surveillance","tag-the-transparent-society","tag-theory","tag-transparency"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14347"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14350,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14347\/revisions\/14350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}