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Inspired by Manuel de Landa's writings,
http://t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
I think the world needs both meshworks and hierarchies, but the hierarchies have the upper hand right now so we need more meshworks to balance.

Some ideas:
Solar power -- like better PV panels or hot water heaters, literally decentralizing the power infrastructure (after production)
Wireless mesh networking -- like in OLPC, decentralizing the information infrastructure
Home gardening literacy and simulation -- decentralizing the food production infrastructure
3D printing -- like RepRap, decentralizing the production industry
Free and Open Source software -- like Debian, decentralizing the copyright industry

Think along those lines for whatever works with your skills and local conditions.

Then of course there is David Brin's approach (make all surveillance cameras publicly accessible, including ones in police rooms):
    http://www.davidbrin.com/privacyarticles.html
See also this related story:
    http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Privacy is dead. The only way to keep the playing field level is to make sure everyone has access.

This is exactly the point made by a book by David Brin: The Transparent Society. As bugging gets cheaper and easier, maintaining current standards of privacy is going to become increasingly unrealistic. What we really should be doing, he argues, is enabling people to "spy" on their supposedly publicly accountable government.

The Transparent Society.

In a few years people are going to be taking advantage of Google's storage to upload everything pretty close to 24/7 from their phonecam to broadcast on Google's video servers, and you'll be be able to mashup this with Google maps street level and redirect it to your VR-of-choice and it'll be just like being there (if you look past the lag and compression artifacts), except with a rewind button.

I can think of worse guardians of the transparent society.

Hey, don't forget SETI vs. the nuts who want to broadcast our position to the Berserkers!

The idea of privacy is a very, very recent. Most societies have a point in their history where everyone in the community lived together, ate together, maybe even slept communally. Even if there were walls, the neighbors would usually know when Jones' were working on making another kid.

And in all of those cases, privacy existed! There were always places to go to be alone with your thoughts. It's just that people had different ideas of what they wanted to be private about.

Perhaps the more important aspect was a parity of privacy. A stranger knew nothing about you either. You knew all about the people who knew all about you. It is only recently that the possability arose for a person you've never even heard of before to know what food you like, what books you read, how much money you have in the bank, etc. Another form of parity is that those who could see you could be seen by you. Even if they hide, they risk discovery. We naturally consider people why spy in secret to be untrustworthy. People who openly violate boundarys are merely annoying.

Until recently, you could travel only a few miles and completely re-invent your identity. No record followed you at all.

David Brin suggested one extreme solution.

I suspect that the real imperitive is to maintain a parity of privacy. When we object to government collecting information about us it's driven by the government's lack of transparency. We are instinctively open with others only to the extent that they are open with us. One reason we're viscerally uncomfortable if a stranger sits down and starts discussing his sex life is the implicit expectation thet we should be equally open when we don't care to be.

the standard mythology is that cameras everywhere is all about the government controlling you. but with google maps, with cell phone cameras, etc., we are actually seeing the rodney king effect: that governments suddenly have to get used to a new democratic form of transparency that they never had to deal with before

David Brin actually wrote a pretty good non-fiction book about this topic, The Transparent Society. I have a link to the first (freely-downloadable) chapter of the book in my sig.

I'll go along with David Brin's speculations about the transparent society so far as to see it as the lesser evil, but I suspect the transparent society will be more like Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" than Brin's "Earth".

By the way, I would recommend reading those two books in order of publication. There are a number of parallels between them: Alex Lustig isn't Donald Hogan or Norman House, but I suspect if the three got together they'd discover he's got a lot in common with them.

Sheesh, The Transparent Society came out nearly 10 years ago, Earth was published in 1990, and some of the same themes show up in Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Shockwave Rider (1975). Professor Steve Mann took this further and developed a series of Wearcams through the '90s.

Anyone who hasn't been anticipating this for at least the past decade, if not longer, has some remedial reading ahead of them.

Sheesh, The Transparent Society came out nearly 10 years ago, Earth was published in 1990, and some of the same themes show up in Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Shockwave Rider (1975). Professor Steve Mann took this further and developed a series of Wearcams through the '90s.

Anyone who hasn't been anticipating this for at least the past decade, if not longer, has some remedial reading ahead of them.

The Transparent Society by David Brin.

Wonderful Special Effects. Poor material, especially after the first released movie.

Please take if off the pedestal.

See:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06/15 /brin_main/index.html/
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06/15 /brin_side/index.html/
http://www.davidbrin.com/starwarsarticle1.html/

Go have a look at all the stuff David Brin has written about a transparent society - definitely lots to think about on this subject.

It is incidents like this and so many others (the police arressting people for taking a picture of their actions, etc.) which cry out for David Brin's "Transparent Society"http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html.

Bring on the cameras! Just give the ordinary citizens the right to access the feeds and observe and watch those who are the watchers. If a police officer knew a live feed of their activities was going out via the web, don't you think they would be a little bit more carefully in how they treat people?

Yours,

Jordan

I'm not thrilled with the idea of universal surveillance either, but it's been argued that the only choices are between that and one-way surveillance against us by governments and other powerful groups. See David Brin's The Transparent Society, a good chunk of which is free here. He wrote this pre-9/11, and I suspect he's not thrilled with the direction we're heading between those two alternatives.

You mean Tank Farm Dynamo.

This is a tale of two cities. Cities of the near future, say ten or twenty years from now.

Barring something unforeseen, you are apt to live in one of these two places. Your only choice may be which.

--The Transparent Society

In the long term, the ease of disclosing information--both employees about employers and vice versa--may lead precisely to the situation David Brin describes in his essay The Transparent Society .

After proposing the equation Fermi pointed out if intelligent life is so common, where are they? A space faring civilization travelling at 1% the speed of light would cross the galaxy in ten million years. Relative to the age of the Milky Way Galaxy, ten million years is a very short period of time. This is called the Fermi Paradox. Where are they?

The so-called "Fermi Paradox" seems a weak argument against the existance of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

First: life, intelligent life, spacefaring civilization, and interstellar-faring civilizations are quite different things. The last may never be practical, not just for technical but for biological and sociological reasons. The universe could be filled with civilizations that fill their own star systems, but aside from an occasional uncrewed probe, never leave.

Second: how would we know the signs of interstellar civilization? Our models are founded on the assumption that what we see is natural. Maybe gamma-ray bursts are wormhole construction blasts. Maybe the "missing mass" is billions of stars each contained in some Dyson-sphere like container, doing something unimaginable to the energy they collect so that there's no radiation visible to us. I'm not seriously proposing these, just pointing out that if there were a galactic civilization out there doing some stellar hyper-engineering, we'd assume it's traces were results of natural processes.

Third: any civilization that survives long enough to become interstellar, is going to have to develop an ecological ethic, else they'd have choked on their own shit before they got off-planet. If they learned to leave few footprints on their own planet, maybe they carry that into space. (Yes, this is the opposite of my second option above. For more speculation along these lines' David Brin's Uplift series is a fun read.)

With whatever apologies might be due to the author, his early exposure to BASIC has damaged his mind so beyond repair that he cannot concieve of a good learning language as being anything other than line oriented.
You've not heard of David Brin then?

This is David Brtin.

Master's in Applied Physics, 1973. Doctorate in Philosophy, 1981. Hugo and Nebula award winner. Author of The Postman.

While trawling through eBay, one day, (my son) came across listings for archaic 1980s-era computers like the Apple II. "Say, Dad, didn't you write your first novel on one of those?" he asked.

"Actually, my second. 'Startide Rising.' On an Apple II with Integer Basic and a serial number in five digits. It got stolen, pity. But my first novel, 'Sundiver,' was written on this clever device called a typewrit --"

With all the talk about "If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide from the government", it's only natural that people will start to snoop on each other. After all, if you haven't done anything wrong, you have no reason to hide it, right?

It seems like the Transparent Society is coming closer all the time. I'm not sure it's a good thing, though.

On the other hand, I'm suprised social conservative types haven't pulled more of this kind of crap before. Outing a few dozen gay men would make them hesitant to associate, and it's not like fundamentalist churches don't have lots of money and members with free time... Maybe they're afraid some of their own would be caught or something.

I wonder if you've ever heard of the Transparent Society. It's David Brin's concept of what privacy should be like in the 21st century. Basically, he sees privacy as a tool of the elite because they will always be able to afford privacy, while the masses will always be monitored. He thinks that cameras and other monitoring will be ubiquitous in the near future anyway, so we should have it open for anyone to view, in order to check those in power. Otherwise, according to him, we will end up with a surveilance state where the few watch over the many, instead of everyone watching everyone else.

Now, the concept is ineresting, but I think this search data leak shows what would happen if we really let the masses monitor everyone else. Instead of people learning to accept each other's quirks and differences, I think most people will be horrified when they find out the kinds of "deviant" interests their neightbors are into. We would see mass witch-hunts for perverts and terrorists, ending in a totalitarian society where people actually try to act as puritan as society dictates and those who step out of line are ostracized. Heck, we're halfway there now.

Just imagine if *all* the consumer databases were released for public perusal - purchases, reading habits, political leanings, travels. It would make the Soviet Union look like a a amateur attempt at social control. I, for one, do not welcome our web-searching overlords.

All -

Several years ago in an excellent book "The Transparent Society:How Technology Will Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom, David Brin argued convincingly, that "privacy is gone, get over it!", and that in trying to hang onto it, we put our freedom at risk. For we would put ourselves in the position that those in authority/power would be able to hide their actions and those of us who aren't would be on the short end of the stick.

In the society envisioned by Brin, this street would have been covered by cameras, the homeowners would be able to dump their feeds into the grid for observation by others, and all of the officers and their vehicles would have cameras. And all of us would be free to examine the feed in real-time or pull materials out of the archive. In fact, the "surveillance" Brin envisions would provide the kind of check that articles such as this do.

I will be honest, I would be more than willing to live in Brin's world - with the checks it would give us on those in authority - and the privacy zones it would grant us (need to read the book to get the full details).

All -

Several years ago in an excellent book The Transparent Society:How Technology Will Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom, David Brin argued convincingly, that "privacy is gone, get over it!", and that in trying to hang onto it, we put our freedom at risk. For we would put ourselves in the position that those in authority/power would be able to hide their actions and those of us who aren't would be on the short end of the stick.

In the society envisioned by Brin, this street would have been covered by cameras, the homeowners would be able to dump their feeds into the grid for observation by others, and all of the officers and their vehicles would have cameras. And all of us would be free to examine the feed in real-time or pull materials out of the archive. In fact, the "surveillance" Brin envisions would provide the kind of check that articles such as this do.

I will be honest, I would be more than willing to live in Brin's world - with the checks it would give us on those in authority - and the privacy zones it would grant us (need to read the book to get the full details).

David Brin's book "The Transparent Society" (1998, online excerpts) talks about the effects of cheap computing/camera/database technology on privacy. It's a pre-9/11/2001 look at what societies and governments can do with Moore's Law kicking technology. A major point was that either society forces the government to be open about what it's doing and allow the public to watch it, or else the government will use all the same technology _without_ anybody watching it. Now, of course, we've got the Bush Administration, so all the happy 90s-boom speculation about "Well, what if another president as evil as Nixon got elected?" "No way, the public wouldn't let that happen again!" is moot, and we didn't get the transparency locked down when we could.

David Brin did a very wonderful essay called "The Transparent Society". Where basically he argued that all camera's like stop light camera's, street corner camera's, and all of this big brother stuff should be open to the public to view. His idea was "Who Watches the Watchers" in order to keep government honest. Not to mention the theory that more people watching technically means more chance to be caught doing something wrong which increases the deterrent factor. Ofcourse I know if a criminal has thier mind set on a crime, not amount of deterrent will stop him. Also, just for fun, here's David Brin's Wiki article.

Population growth is not necessarily a good thing, especially when the demands of population exceed sustainable resources. That currently includes most of our food which needs fossil fuels to achieve the high levels of production which keep us from starving and the long supply chains which literally span the globe to keep us from starving. In many regions, staple food items are no longer produced.

Also in many areas, the carrying capacity is already exceeded, breeding or importing more people will only make that problem worse. Some credible (at least to me) biologists and ecologists posit that we've already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. Most can see that in regards to renewable resources and sustainable development, we're probably pretty far over the red line. The question is, have we crossed the point of no return yet?

Sure a redistribution of wealth might ease the pain for a few years or months, but it doesn't address the issue of diminishing resources needed for our civilization and increased population pressure on these remaining resources. Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed gives an interesting analysis of the current situation. As an amateur anthropoligist and dyed-in-the-wool misanthrope, after extensive travel, dialogues and reading, I myself arrived at a more pessimistic prognosis than he did, based mostly on different case studies and a few years before even hearing of him. Agree or disagree with his conclusion, it's still a very interesting read. Alternatively, a softer, lighter read might be his earlier book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Unlike some other technologies, societies do not generally degrade gracefully. In the case of most readers here, neither arable land nor the appropriate skills remain to "wind back" to an agrarian society. The land most easily farmed with muscle power has long since been paved.

Offtopic, but I don't so much mind any particular level of privacy as I mind the privacy differential. While my privacy level is going down, the privacy of the government is going up. It's like Brin's worst-case scenario.

"When given a choice between privacy and accountability we always choose privacy for ourselves and accountability for everyone else. This is especially noxious when it's some all-powerful leader making the choice."
  -David Brin

Of course, that was before George Bush was elected. So there's nothing to worry about.

In David Brin's book "Earth" he talks about a future society with zero privacy.

He also discusses it in great detail in his non-fiction book The Transparent Society. A sample chapter is available online. A quote:

Consider City Number One. In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image-processors to scan for infractions against the public order -- or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.

Now let's skip across space and time.

At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.

Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.

Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.

A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds which way her child wandered off.

Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.

In City Two, such micro cameras are banned from some indoor places... but not Police Headquarters! There, any citizen may tune in on bookings, arraignments, and especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime.

Despite their initial similarity, these are very different cities, disparate ways of life, representing completely opposite relationships between citizens and their civic guardians. The reader may find both situations somewhat chilling. Both futures may seem undesirable. But can there be any doubt which city we'd rather live in, if these two make up our only choice?

For those who haven't heard the term before, sousveillance refers to the use of technology by members of society to watch and record the activities of others, particularly authority figures. It seems like it's becoming increasingly futile for organizations to try to resist sousveillance, as the police in the article attempted to do. As technology progresses, cameras and cameraphones are just getting smaller, cheaper, and harder to detect. Eventually it gets to the point where people have things like retinal implants and little remote-control cameras, and it becomes absurdly impractical to try to keep them away from all the things you want to keep secret.

I've recently started reading David Brin's The Transparent Society, which proposes the somewhat counterintuitive notion that instead of resisting government invasions of privacy, we instead ensure that everybody is able to watch everybody. In effect, the answer to the question "Who watches the watchers?" becomes "Make everybody a watcher." This of course has its problems and I'm still not sure what I quite think of it, but it's certainly an interesting idea. The first chapter of his book is available online. I highly recommend skimming through it.

From the desk of David Brin, Ph.D.
August 11, 2005

An Open Letter to Researchers of Addiction, Brain Chemistry and Social Psychology
 
...Only now, taking this into especially important new territory, please consider the related phenomenon known as self-righteous indignation.

We all know self-righteous people. (And, if we are honest, many of us will admit having wallowed in this state ourselves, either occasionally or in frequent rhythm.) It is a familiar and rather normal human condition, supported -- even promulgated -- by messages in mass media.

While there are many drawbacks, self-righteousness can also be heady, seductive, and even... well... addictive. Any truly honest person will admit that the state feels good. The pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong.

Sanctimony, or a sense of righteous outrage, can feel so intense and delicious that many people actively seek to return to it, again and again. Moreover, this trait crosses all boundaries of ideology. 2

Indeed, one could look at our present-day political landscape and argue that a relentless addiction to indignation may be one of the chief drivers of obstinate dogmatism and an inability to negotiate pragmatic solutions to a myriad modern problems. It may be the propellant behind our "culture war."

If there is any underlying truth to such an assertion, then acquiring a deeper understanding of this one issue may help our civilization deal with countless others....

From the desk of David Brin, Ph.D.
August 11, 2005

An Open Letter to Researchers of Addiction, Brain Chemistry and Social Psychology
 
...Only now, taking this into especially important new territory, please consider the related phenomenon known as self-righteous indignation.

We all know self-righteous people. (And, if we are honest, many of us will admit having wallowed in this state ourselves, either occasionally or in frequent rhythm.) It is a familiar and rather normal human condition, supported -- even promulgated -- by messages in mass media.

While there are many drawbacks, self-righteousness can also be heady, seductive, and even... well... addictive. Any truly honest person will admit that the state feels good. The pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong.

Sanctimony, or a sense of righteous outrage, can feel so intense and delicious that many people actively seek to return to it, again and again. Moreover, this trait crosses all boundaries of ideology. 2

Indeed, one could look at our present-day political landscape and argue that a relentless addiction to indignation may be one of the chief drivers of obstinate dogmatism and an inability to negotiate pragmatic solutions to a myriad modern problems. It may be the propellant behind our "culture war."

If there is any underlying truth to such an assertion, then acquiring a deeper understanding of this one issue may help our civilization deal with countless others....

Candid Cop Camera (6/28)
  John Bell took a photograph of a Hudson, Ohio, police cruiser being towed out of mud. David Devore, the police officer whose u-turn put the car into the mud, apparently didn't appreciate the move. And Devore's cruiser camera captured the exchange. "Camera and film now. I'm not going to ask you again. I'll give you the count of three or I can make your life a living hell. You made the decision, I'll give you that choice," he told Bell. Then he took the memory card from Bell's digital camera and erased the image. Devore was suspended for one day for his action. But Bell says that isn't enough. He has sued Devore and the city claiming he was stopped without probable cause, wrongfully detained, verbally abused and deprived of his property.

if the government's going to stick cameras all over the public sphere, then if there's a civilian-cop altercation of any kind, if the film is not available for whatever reason then the civilian will be automatically presumed innocent and blameless. Otherwise, it's FAR too easy for the government to conveniently "lose" any film that makes it out to be the guilty party.
Comment by: Jennifer at July 29, 2005 11:53 AM

The Aurora police department, which shot seven people last year and killed five, is taking steps to examine the use of deadly force....On Dec. 3, 2003, Jammal Bonner, 20, found himself outside the Top Star motel selling crack cocaine to an undercover police officer posing as a hooker. Police were trying to arrest prostitution patrons. A police surveillance camera was rolling and a "street arrest team" was in place, ready to take down suspects. Bonner wasn't interested in sex, though, and the undercover police officer said she lured him up to a motel room. But what exactly happened in that room at the Top Star motel? As four SWAT officers pour into the room, the surveillance tape was turned off....
Comment by: Nobody Important at July 29, 2005 01:56 PM

Any chance of getting this law to go in a more benign direction?

Brin is far too optimistic here. Those with power are almost never willing to give it up or allow it to be reduced in any way. Quite the opposite in fact: they tend to want to increase their power.

Making records such as this publicly available will by default mean that the records about those in power will also be available. That will reduce their power over the public, which is something they will never allow. So either the records of those in power will be removed from what gets published to the public (thus negating Brin's entire point) or the set of records as a whole will be kept under wraps, accessible only to those in power. The latter is much simpler and, in general, grants greater power to those who have it, so that's what will happen.

And no, there's not a damned thing the "little people" can do about it. You can protest it all you want. It won't change a thing, because those in power know that they don't need to listen to the people anymore.

Face it: the entire world is rapidly decending into a totalitarian nightmare, and there won't be any way back out, because the overthrow of totalitarianism requires an outside influence. When the entire world is a police state, there is no outside influence.

Any chance of getting this law to go in a more benign direction? If there's going to be all these cameras anyway, might as well see if the data they pick up can be made public so that abuse of the data is reduced. Gaak. Crazy times we live in!

In fact, if you look at the main things social conservatives of all religions are "for", it amounts to supporting this stone age social structure. Have lots of kids, be fearful of your lord, keep the young folks locked up until they can be indoctrinated in the system, don't question any of this or we'll knock the shit out of you. Actually, large parts of the world still work this way.

David Brin writes about this a lot. He talks about the feudal pyramid being replaced by a diamond-shaped society, where the poor aren't the largest class, for the first time in human history.

...I browsed an old topic, and read this post of yours..

You really should check out David Brin's "Stones of Significance", it's a good read, about exactly what you mention in that post.

Sorry for OT, but you have no active discussions in your journal, and Slashdot lacks PMs. The discussion in question has been archived.

Wow. That's just eerily similar to David Brin's The Loom of Thessaly.

Another highly recommended book on this topic is The Transparent Society, by David Brin. (Yes, the same David Brin who write sci fi.)

Well, in the previous article about IBM, I mentioned that technology is forcing us in a direction of less technology. David Brin wrote an essay called Transparent Society. Very interesting stuff.

David Brin's Transparent Society, where everyone, including our government, is under equal scrutiny, is probably the only way forward for those who believe that information wants to be free.

Are you thinking of the Transparent Society essay by David Brin?

It seems to me that simply painting the tank would eliminate the "dandruff" problem. Doing good science near the space station has always been problematical because it's always sitting in a little "cloud" of human exudate no matter how air-tight they make it... and in any case it's awfully low in the well to get a good vacuum. Those kinds of projects should really only use the station as a construction shack.

Even if you weren't going to use the tank, there were probably going to be a few tons of LOx/H2 which would have been incredibly useful for on-orbit fuel-cells and thrusters...if only there was a way to transfer it. I don't know if there was any way to do that.

Tank Darm Dynamo (1983) by David Brin uses tethers to provide enough gravity. Incidentally, Brin's afterword is particularly telling 22 years later: "Ironically, what we thought would be obvious -- the need to find ways to use external tanks in space -- has met with substantial resistance by the aero-space community. Tethers on the other hand, an idea we thought would be seen as "California freaky" have been taken up with enthusiasm as an important future component in space transportation."

Only if the loss of privacy is one-way.

You might want to read some Brin then.
http://www.davidbrin.com/

I doubt that David Brin will be writing any Hollywood blockbusters soon. (His Uplift series, while it looks fascinating, doesn't look like it would lend itself to a ninety-minute BAM BAM KABOOM fest.

Serenity may be more your cup of tea, perhaps not. If the Firefly series floated your boat, the movie should as well.

His Dark Materials is being made into a series of movies. It's been described as a secular response to Narnia, but I haven't read it, so perhaps it's not what you're looking for.

Surprisingly, I really enjoyed Pitch Black . Vin Diesel apparently forgot how to act after that, but it's a pretty interesting story. You can read the screenplay; someone was kind enough to put it online. But that's not really that space opera-y.

--grendel drago

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination?

But of course. Yoda is evil!

I like David Brin's take on it from 6 years ago:
http://www.davidbrin.com/starwarsarticle1.html

Specifically follow-up point #5. He's going the same direction that you're talking about. I agree with you that it could have made a significantly more interesting over-all story.

But that would have been asking audiences to think about what they were seeing. Can't have that!

-B