I’m a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke but had never heard of this – will have to check it out.
But that title was familiar to me for a completely different reason, and yet it curiously comes back to the subject of the OP. “The Light of Other Days” is also the name of a wonderful little short story by Bob Shaw that’s based on the concept of “slow glass” – glass that slows light so much that it takes years to emerge from the other side, so that when you look through a pane of slow glass you’re looking into the past. The sci-fi publisher John Campbell liked it so much that Shaw wrote two sequels, then later embedded all three into a novella wrapped around them called “Other Days, Other Eyes” which posits how the ubiquity of slow glass could lead to a total surveillance society.
A total surveillance society would also probably resist cultural change. Any sort of behavior that is not accepted at the time surveillance begins would be unlikely to gain acceptance. So if you impose total surveillance on, for example, a culture that condemns homosexuality, you’re probably dooming gays in that society to stay in the closet forever.
Not merely closeted, but completely asexual, or passing as hetero against one’s own desire.
In essence, you’ll see the complete homogenization of culture by peer pressure, because you can’t hide your kink unless it’s completely in your head… in which case, what good is it?
“Oh, but ubiquitous surveillance means that you can’t secretly bully that person!”
Bullying isn’t always secret, and the riot mob doesn’t really care who knows what they did.
It really would depend on the society. If we’re talking a Big-Brother-like surveillance, then yes it would probably be quite stable. It has mostly been totalitarian type governments that wanted better surveillance.
On the other hand, if it’s a sci-fi surveillance system created by linking computers and security cameras and GPS… the type we may accidentally drift into if certain trends continued… they may very well not care at all about enforcing a standard. It might be that whatever your unusual kink is, you just have to search the Internet to find a hundred enthusiasts who feel just the same way. In that sense, it might actually encourage diversity and change.
But I think that presupposes a society tolerant enough that you and those hundred others aren’t going to be instantly lynched when people see you engaging in your “perversion”.
Yea, to some extent gay-rights advanced so quickly because enough gay people came out of the closet, and people realized how many of them there were, and how many were normal members of society rather than the effeminate perverts homophobes had depicted them as.
So at least in some circumstances, I think a loss of privacy would end up making society more tolerant towards minorities and the like. You couldn’t smear them as participating in weird rituals like blood libels, couldn’t ignore that some prominant or admirable citizens were in fact members, etc
You know how they say not to post party pictures publicly on social media? Imagine looking for work and knowing every potential employer knew everything about your choices in entertainment, how neat your house is, how much you exercise, how much you drink (and every silly thing you ever did while drinking)?
Imagine collecting unemployment while the government is watching over your shoulder to make sure you are spending ALL day EVERYDAY looking for work.
Imagine trying to get a loan when your bank can see how you spent every penny (cash too, not just the stuff on your credit card).
In other words, participating in excessive alcohol consumption with your boss is the normative way of doing business. Why? Because their social norms are that you never criticize your superior, so their solution is to get drunk as an excuse.
So what if employers knew everything about everyone? Three weeks of awkwardness, and then two months later, we’d wonder how it ever worked before. That issue is a little complicated, though. It’s hard to say exactly how it would be resolved, but it is interesting that a low-privacy culture like Japan is the one that encourages the excessive drinking.
Heck, maybe all this lack of privacy convinces us that modern-style jobs are silly and we all go back to a communal state where you apprentice under your father or mother and work for the good of a “tribe.” That worked for millions of people for tens of thousands of years in a setting with virtually zero privacy.
Unemployment doesn’t have the requirement to look for work all day every day now, so I don’t know why loss of privacy would change the standard. The only issue from loss of privacy is that they’d already know when you sent out your resume the minimum number of times so you wouldn’t need to file a report or have them double-check you. (On the plus side, all the employers could already know everything about you and every other unemployed person. Maybe the whole idea of job hunting would be obsolete because the employers would just go find the people they want.)
Likewise with banks. There’s no stipulation that you spend every penny wisely. They just want to know whether you can make the required loan payments. If you latte habit isn’t driving you to the poor house, why should they care? Frankly, banks make the best money off of people who spend too much on their homes and their cars, as long as the loans get paid off. (And on the flip side: omniscient banks mean fewer loans are defaulted on, which means a lower cost of lending, which means lower interest rates for those who do get loans.)
See, you keep thinking that we could eliminate privacy without changing the culture in which we conduct our business. Obviously, that’s not going to work. If privacy is eliminated, the culture adapts, much like the culture adapted when privacy was introduced in the first place. People are much more flexible than they give themselves credit for.
I saw this thing where a person was ordering a pizza but the order was cancelled because their insurance company knew the person had obesity issues or something. They changed the order but then the order was cancelled again based on their banks pointing out how the person was spending their money.
So I think it all depends on what is done with information.
There are lots of science fiction treatments of cases where someone invents a viewer that lets you effectively eavesdrop on anyone, anytime. In most cases, the response is to satifle the technology.
Fredric Brown, though, had the most interesting take on it. His novel, Martians, Go Home! features an invasion of the Earth by insubstantial, incorporeal and very literal Little Green Men who can go anywhere, and see anything. They do, and comment on it, sarcastically. This is disruptive in ordinary circumstances, but gets devastating when the start to invade bedrooms, for instance. It’s hard to engage in serious sex with little voyeurs critiquing your technique in real-time. Brown’s novel is a hoot.
(It got turned into an appallingly bad movie in 1989. Do not go and see this.)
How very egalitarian of you. It’s a shame that your scenario is a fantasy, because it neglects the unbalanced distribution of power in society.
Power changes everything. If you have no ability to rebel in private, you either conform or rebel publicly and be punished.
Meanwhile, the proles can of course watch everything their masters do. Except that the masters will do everything they can to make that impossible, or unwise and dangerous. If I order you at gunpoint to divert your eyes and stop watching the anti-privacy-a-matic, what will you do? You obey or die, in which case my privacy magically returns. Once it becomes socially ingrained, like averting your eyes from the King, problem fucking solved.