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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
5/3/2001; 8:29:45 AM |
| Topic: |
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| Msg #: |
710 (top msg in thread) |
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Privacy wants to be free
| | Dylan Tweney just put up a good essay on privacy. Scariest line: "It's entirely possible that within the next few years, the FBI will read every single unencrypted email sent in the U.S. (the FBI's controversial "Carnivore" technology already comes close to doing this)." |
| | A brilliant Camoldolese monk once told me that the purpose of the contemplative life was to dwell more deeply in the Mystery that is the unspeakably deep and transcendant state from which we all come and in which we all live, whether we know it or not (and mostly we don't, which is why some of us take drugs, live the monastic life or whatever else it takes). When I asked him to say more about the mystery (which he wisely declined to deify), he added that you can find it in every paradox — that rhetorical place co-occupied by two contradictory truths. He added that the great religious teachers spoke often in paradoxes. |
| | So here's a paradox that comes up for me when I read Dylan's piece: information wants to be public, yet its sources want to be private. |
| | I also think a word we hear too little in discussions about privacy is anonymity. When we're out and about in public, we would rather be strangers than familiars. In fact we depend on it. Ask any celebrity what they like least about their status and they'll tell you it's the lost anonymity they traded for it. Fame is a faustian bargain. |
| | Yet our hunting and gathering ancestors, who lived in small tribes, usually had no anonymity among those groups — perhaps had none in their entire lives. To be anonymous was to belong to a different tribe, or to no tribe at all. It was to be an enemy, frankly. When nobody knows us, we're easier to kill, easier to care less about, like Woody Guthrie's deportees. |
| | Which leads me to think it wouldn't be a bad thing if we all became more familiar to the whole human tribe. Permute weblogs to the whole world and we all become a lot less easy to devalue. |
| | So maybe that bargain isn't so faustian after all. |
| | Or maybe it's only faustian when we trade anonymity for fame. Andy Warhol, who understood mass media deeply, said "in the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes." But he didn't live in a world with the means to make everyone in it familiar to everyone else. What's fame to a world of familiars? |
| | The Web isn't yet another distribution system, like the culture-producing television system Andy knew so well. It's a place. On the Web fame matters less than authority, which is nothing more than the power to inform. Authority is granted to those whose opinions have earned the trust of others. This isn't trivial. That trust means that we are willing to let others help author our own opinions. This is an intimate matter. |
| | On the Web there is no way to push one's authority — or anything else. Without the leverage of a one-way distribution system, our goods have to do their own work. But they can't do it in private. |
| | "Life is a market," they say in Yoruba. Here in the First World we still need to discover what reallly means. |
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