thraxil.org:

end privacy?

by anders pearson Mon 14 Jan 2002 13:58:21

last night i was flipping through the channels and stumbled across an interview with <a href="http://www.well.com/user/jaron/">jaron lanier</a> on TechTV. he's the guy who coined the term "virtual reality" and made a stir recently with his "<a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html">one half a manifesto</a>". pretty smart guy even if i happen to think that "virtual reality" is largely a crock of shite. he was talking about the functioning of our society and how he was afraid to admit that it bore a strong resemblence to a biological organism at least in terms of the potential threat of a small malignant agent in its midst (viruses, cancer, terrorism, etc). he said that he was afraid of the analogy because the sociological equivalent of an immune system to deal with these threats is not a very pleasant thought since it would tend to encourage racism, intolerance and fascism. then, just when he was starting to make some sense, he proposed an alternate solution. i have to give him some credit for actually proposing <em>some</em> kind of solution; that's more than most of us can do. his solution was a rethinking of privacy in our society. he argues that there are two kinds of privacies: the right to be left alone, and the right to not be seen. both are relatively new concepts in society and he wonders if, particularly the latter one, is a very good idea. his solution would eliminate the right to not be seen; everyone's business would be public, making it much more difficult to coordinate an assault on society large enough to damage it as a whole. i'm always suspicious of anything i see/hear/read that has been filtered through the media because i know how badly things have been distorted so i apologize if that wasn't a very accurate representation of what jaron was trying to advocate; it was just the impression i got from seeing the interview. anyway, that impression was of a very naive argument. i would love to live in a society where privacy wasn't necessary; that would imply that there was no stratification of power and all other freedoms were respected absolutely. unfortunately as long as somewhere, some person has authority over some other person, privacy is necessary to prevent abuse of power. Orwell's <i>1984</i> does a much better job of explaining why this is the case than i could do. if we were ever able to reach the utopia necessary to allow us to do away with privacy, terrorism wouldn't be a problem anyway. i'm pretty sure that jaron's a smart enough guy to not actually be advocating the elimination of privacy as a practical solution to our problems. if only for the simple fact that cryptography exists and can't be made to just disappear as much as certain government agencies would like it to.