If 40% of people are adulterers, in a transparent society this will become known. Note that adultery is not a criminal offence in Europe, nor should it be anywhere - in France it is practically compulsory.
In a transparent society, tax fraud will be detected. As a criminal offence, it shouldn’t be happening anyway. Tax avoidance will no longer be a secret - in some cases, of course, tax avoidance is entirely acceptable for a variety of reasons.
If fraud can be detected in a high surveillance/souveillance society, then it won’t be a secret any more. Will cheating still be worth doing if everyone knows you cheated?
People say a lot of crap. In a transparent society we’ll have to get used to that. But if any of these people take the step towards actually committing a crime, that won’t be happening in secret any more.
Once again, talk is cheap, and any transparent society would need to be accompanied both by free speech and accountability for any direct consequences of that speech. But forming secret racist networks on the dark web wouldn’t be possible in a transparent society.
Brin’s version of the transparent society doesn’t remove the right to a secret ballot. We can all despise each other as much as we want- so long as we don’t do anything about it. If we do, everyone will know immediately.
Once the mind reading comes into play, which we will probably be advanced enough to have some day, think of the possibilities we will be living in a real life Minority Report. You will be charged and arrested before you even commit a crime because of the thought you have or are about to think. It all sounds like science fiction but we edge closer every day.
New surveillance technologies will become such a ubiquitous thing that they will chip away at your freedom little by little until there is nothing left to chip away.
The OP is unusually optimistic if he thinks that the government and law enforcement won’t be given a golden pass when it comes to the enforcement of this technology, and corporations as well.
We will be held hostage and they will retain all the power to misuse and harm the populace.
Kind of reminds me of that George Carlin bit about never being a “rat”, you can talk a lot about abuses in law enforcement but one thing you can’t say about them, they don’t rat on each other.
The problem is that so many people don’t have “an open attitude to faith”. There are all too many people in this country who think anyone non-Christian is inherently bad, and atheists are on par with criminals. As just one example of intolerance.
There are still people who think homosexuality should be illegal. As another.
No, beliefs are nothing to be ashamed of, but some beliefs are dangerous in certain contexts because of what other people believe. And frankly, I wish quite a few of my neighbors would shut the fuck up about their religious beliefs - seriously, people, I have heard of this guy you go on about and I’m not impressed, now leave me alone!
And that is the situation in the US where freedom of belief is supposed to be protected - imagine a country where have the wrong religion, or adopting a different religion than the “proper” one, can lead to imprisonmnet or even execution.
I agree - it shouldn’t be a problem. But in this world it very much still is.
Well, I suppose I do - as an atheist, I’m in a small majority in my country. But I’m certainly not going to murder anyone for not being an atheist- not everybody can handle the truth.
This will become increasingly true in the next century or so. Bigots and tyrants won’t be able to do their dirty work in secret any more, because there will always be someone listening. Or are you anticipating that we will develop ‘compassion fatigue’ and become cynical and callous?
Agreed. To simplify the example, if 40% of people are adulterers and 60% cheat on taxes and all are exposed, I don’t see a meeting of the minds to allow these things to go on.
I see the 60% of non-adulterers looking to shame the other side and the 40% of non tax cheats looking to shame the other side. Sort of a circular firing squad where everyone is guilty of something. Pretty much like today actually.
Person 1: I might have cheated on my wife once or twice when things were bad but that is a personal matter. At least I didn’t take public money away from poor people and veterans! Stone them!
Person 2: I might have fudged my taxes a little bit when I needed the money but the government wastes it anyways. At least I have been always virtuous and true to my wife! Stone them!
Maybe the idealized “if all is known, all will have to be accepted” notion could come to pass… only IMO after years or even generations of severe social upheaval. In our networked word it doesn’t take that many people disapproving of you to make your life hard and how many iteration rounds of you cutting people out and others doing the same to you and exposing one another because X or Y or Z is a deal-breaker does it take until everyone is a faction of one?
I’m sure quite a few political establishments would prefer a situation by which *they *don’t persecute anyone, but enforcement against “wrong” conduct or words is carried out through social opprobrium. You’re not in jail but your in-laws, neighbors, colleagues, the credit scoring agencies, social-media mobs and employers will make sure you learn how wrong you were, and they are not going to feel bound to give you the same kind of due process the State must.
Those who are on top of the power establishment, or aligned with it, or directly dependent on it, will not care that they may have their own set of things to be exposed… as long as they can take you out before you can get to them.
this reminds me of the video game “watch dogs” where if you want you can hack into street cameras and scan people and find out personal things about them
like for instance :
missed edit after kb went nuts : this reminds me of the video game “watch dogs” where if you want you can hack into street cameras and scan people and find out personal things about them
like for instance it will say
Mary sue age 26 k teacher
reads books
drinks wine
is having affair with under age neighbor girl
then if its illegal you can send a message for blackmail for pocket change report it to the authorities or other such things
Including killing people. Potentially a whole lot of people.
Obviously, either the committed homophobes will have to go or the gay people will, and looking at the numbers, well, I’m not convinced there’s a happy outcome for this one. It gets even worse if you look at the transphobes versus trans people fight. Allies? Hell, it’s hard enough to find allies to stand up against bathroom bills, it’ll be damn near impossible to find them once the killings truly ramp up.
Ethnic minorities have better odds if they band together, possibly killing a few of the truly outnumbered racists, but people who “jump the fence” are going to have a bad time, as are their mixed-race children. Ditto religious minorities.
And it’s easy enough to force businesses to do that: A few really solid boycotts and all of a sudden it’s financial suicide to do business with Out Group. Anti-discrimination laws help here, but that’s a rock and a hard place: If you squeeze businesses between boycotts and legal action, they’ll get squeezed out of any location where they might have to make that kind of decision.
If you can’t hide anything, you can’t hide your sexual orientation or true gender. If you can’t hide those things, you will be killed by anyone who finds those things to be an abomination, unless you kill them first. Since there are more religious people than there are gay people, the gay people will lose… except being gay is genetic, and can be carried by straight people. Therefore, the pogrom won’t destroy gay people in general even if it kills every single specific gay person. Ditto trans people.
I make erotic hypnosis with a focus on degradation and dehumanization. This is a kink of mine, and of the people who enjoy my material. I’m an ardent feminist (indeed, I work hard to keep real misogynists out of our community), but if all you looked at was “Factory Floor”, a horror erotica piece about kidnapping, brainwashing, and dehumanizing a woman (and, ultimately, doing the same to the listener), you wouldn’t know that. You’d probably come away thinking that I’m deeply disturbed, and possibly a danger to those around me. Would you look deeper into my social media presence to make sure I’m not a hateful misgynist, or would you just immediately write me off on the basis of a kink you don’t understand but which looks very bad on the surface? How about if you knew there were other people who sound a lot like me, but take the more classically misogynist tropes of the genre entirely seriously, and are just straight up cryptofascists?
Sure sounds like a belief worth having openly. I’m sure that wouldn’t go wrong if it were exported from its subculture sans context. And I’m sure everyone who hears about it will look for the additional context. It’s not like you still hear people say “you didn’t build that” entirely divorced from the easy-to-find context of “literally the rest of the sentence”.
And I have to privilege of being very open in these beliefs for a lot of reasons. Someone else in the community had their participation in these things dragged out by lawyers trying to make her look bad in her divorce hearings. None of it was nonconsensual, none of it was evil, but if you’re not clued into the subculture that distinction is easy to miss.
And that’s just reputation and custody. In Brunei, they’re killing gay people. Killing. It is now a capital offense in Brunei to be gay.
Privacy shouldn’t matter? Ha ha, pull the other one.
So what have you done about the recent law passed in Brunei? What have you done about the internment of the Ugyur in China? What have you done about the continuous racism of the USA? Are you aware that Chechnya is putting gay people in concentration camps? The ongoing Yemeni genocide? The occupation of Gaza?
All this shit is out in the open and well-publicized - did you know about all of it? Have you taken action against any of it? Does any of it cross your mind more than occasionally in passing?
Your faith in humanity would be laudible if it wasn’t so obviously wrong and so demonstrably harmful and dangerous. Behind every genocide is a population that is either supportive or indifferent towards the government performing it.
Of course I knew about these things - one of my best friends is a Yemeni. We cannot allow these things to occur in secret any more. Is that what you want- to cover these things up. like the way the Holocaust was concealed until near the end of the war?
Awareness of atrocities against minorities does not mean that those atrocities are going to stop. We’ve all known about the Yemeni genocide for what, a year now? And we can’t even get our own damn governments to stop giving Saudi Arabia weapons. I try to keep abreast of international news and I still get blindsided from time to time. We, as humans, do not have the time or energy to take care of every awful thing going on. Awareness on its own is not enough.
And yeah, it’s obviously better that we know about them… but that’s neither here nor there on the idea of personal privacy. Our understanding of an ongoing atrocity is not necessarily helped by violating the privacy of those it is being visited on. Indeed, the victims usually speak up when given the opportunity to - nobody is saying, “Please respect our privacy to be murdered without you knowing about it”. All the panopticon does in this case is make it easier for the government to find out who it should be targeting.
The idea of the transparent society is that openness goes two ways. We can’t avoid being recorded whenever we venture out into public, or interact with electronic media or sales technology; but we can also strive to ensure that our own governments are open to scrutiny as well. This is already happening- every public figure and government action is closely examined in today’s climate in a way that was not possible when I was a child in the 1950s.