Depending on how you present it you can potentially get people to keep these kinds of writings even if they don’t believe it will extend their lives in any meaningful way,
Writing isn’t feasible, but lifelogging might be. (see gwern’s thread). The government could hand out wearable cameras that double as driving licenses, credit cards, etc. If anyone objects all they have to do rip out the right wires.
I object a great deal! Once we’re all carrying around wearable cameras, the political possibility of making it illegal to rip out the wires would seem much less extreme than a proposal today to introduce both the cameras and the anti-tampering laws. Introducing these cameras would be greasing a slippery slope.
I’d rather keep the future probability for total Orwellian surveillance low, thanks.
Have you read David Brin’s The Transparent Society? Surveillance societies are already here (look at London and its million-plus cameras), and purely on the side of the authorities. Personal cameras at least may help even the scales.
I find most of the public debates on these issues rather myopic, in that they focus on the issue of surveillance by governments as the main problem. What I find to be a much more depressing prospect, however, are the consequences of a low-privacy society that may well come to pass through purely private institutions and transactions.
Even with the most non-intrusive and fair government imaginable, if lots of information about your life is easily available online, it means that a single stupid mistake in life that would earlier have only mild consequences can ruin your reputation forever and render you permanently unemployable and shunned socially. Instead of fading memories and ever more remote records about your past mistakes, they will forever be thrown right into the face of anyone who just types your name into a computer (and not to even mention the future more advanced pattern-matching and cross-referencing search technologies). This of course applies not just to mistakes, but also to any disreputable opinions and interests you might have that happen to be noted online.
Moreover, the social norms may develop to the point where it’s expected that you constantly log the details of your life online. We do seem to be going in that direction, if the “social networking” sites are any indication. In such a situation, even if you had the option of reducing your online profile, it would send off a powerful signal that would make you look weird and suspicious.
I am worried about these developments much more than about what our sclerotic governments might do with their new surveillance capabilities. After all, even today, they can find out whatever they want about you if they really care for some reason—they just need to put some effort into cross-referencing the already abundant information you leave behind at every step. However, as long as you pay your taxes and don’t misbehave in those particular ways they care about, you’ll be comfortably under their radar, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t stay that way. Even nowadays, if I were to express some opinions that aren’t very respectable, I’d be much more worried about the prospect of these words forever coming up whenever someone searches for my name online than about the much more remote possibility that the government might take active interest in what I said.
Even with the most non-intrusive and fair government imaginable, if lots of information about your life is easily available online, it means that a single stupid mistake in life that would earlier have only mild consequences can ruin your reputation forever and render you permanently unemployable and shunned socially.
I’ve heard this opinion expressed frequently, but it always seems to kind of contradict itself. If there’s lots of information available about everyone, and all kinds of stupid mistakes will easily become permanently recorded...
...then wouldn’t that lead to just about everyone’s reputation being ruined in the eyes of everyone? But that doesn’t make any sense—if almost everyone’s going to have some stupid mistakes of theirs caught permanently on file, then all that will happen is that you’ll find out you’re not the only one who has made stupid mistakes. Big deal.
In fact, this to me seems potentially preferrable than our current society. Right now, people’s past mistakes get lost in the past. As a result, we construct an unrealistic image where most people seem far more perfect than they actually are. Some past mistake coming out might ruin someone’s reputation, and people who have made perfectly normal and reasonable mistakes will feel a lot more guilty about it than would be warranted. If the mistakes everyone had made were available, then we wouldn’t have these unrealistic unconscious conceptions of how perfect people must be. Society might be far healthier as a result.
But that doesn’t make any sense—if almost everyone’s going to have some stupid mistakes of theirs caught permanently on file, then all that will happen is that you’ll find out you’re not the only one who has made stupid mistakes.
There are at least three important problems with this view:
First, this is only one possible equilibrium. Another possibility is a society where everyone is extremely cautious to the point of paranoia, so that very few people ever commit a faux pas of any sort—and although most people would like things to be more relaxed, they’re faced with a problem of collective action. I don’t think this is at all unrealistic—people living under repression quickly develop the instinct to watch their mouth and behavior obsessively.
Second, even under the most optimistic “good” equilibrium, this argument applies only to those behaviors and opinions that are actually widespread. Those whose unconventional opinions and preferences are in a small minority, let alone lone-wolf contrarians, will have to censor themselves 24⁄7 or suffer very bad consequences.
Third, many things people dare say or do only in private are not dangerous because of laws or widespread social norms, but because of the local and private relations of power and status in which they are entangled. You need look no further than the workplace: if your bosses can examine all the details of your life to determine how docile, obedient, and conformist you are, then clearly, having such traits 24⁄7 is going to become necessary to prosper economically (except for the minority of self-employed folks, of course). Not to mention what happens if you wish to criticize your employers, even in your own free time! (Again, there’s a collective action problem of sorts here: if everyone were mouthing off against their bosses and couldn’t help but do it, it would lead to a “good” equilibrium, but the obedient and docile will outcompete the rest, making such traits more valuable and desirable.)
Second, even under the most optimistic “good” equilibrium, this argument applies only to those behaviors and opinions that are actually widespread. Those whose unconventional opinions and preferences are in a small minority, let alone lone-wolf contrarians, will have to censor themselves 24⁄7 or suffer very bad consequences.
I think it can apply even to minority opinions, because the minority opinions add up. Even if only 1% of the population has a given minority opinion, significantly more than 1% of the population is probably going to have at least one minority opinion about something. If people choose to be super-intolerant of 1% opinions, and if 70% of the population has at least one 1% opinion, then it’s not 1% of the population that people will have to be super-intolerant of, but 70% of the population.
Or if 70% seems too extreme a possibility, try 30%. The point is that the sum total of small minorities adds up to a total that is less small, and this total will determine what happens. Take the extreme case: suppose the total adds up to 100%, so that 100% of the population holds at least one extreme-minority opinion. Can a person afford to ostracize close to 100% of the population (consisting of everybody who has at least one extreme-minority opinion that he does not share)? I think not. Therefore he will have to learn to be much more tolerant of extreme-minority opinions.
While that is only the extreme case, and 30% is not 100%, I think the point is made, that the accumulated total of all people who have minority opinions matters, and not merely the total for each minority opinion.
It seems unlikely that people would think that way. Taking myself as an example, I favor an extensive reworking of the powers, internal organization, and mode of election of the U.S. House of Representatives. I know that I’m the only person in the world who favors my program, because I invented it and haven’t yet described it completely. I’ve described parts of it in online venues, each of which has a rather narrow, specialist audience, so there might possibly be two or three people out there who agree with me on a major portion of it, but certainly no one who agrees on the whole. That makes me an extreme minority.
There are plenty of extreme minorities I feel no sympathy for at all. Frankly, I think moon-hoax theorists should be shunned.
You are not facing the situation I’m describing, because it hasn’t happened yet. It is a future speculation that would occur in a sufficiently transparent society. As long as you are unaware of most people’s odd opinions, you can afford to shun the tiny minority of odd thinkers whose odd thoughts you are aware of, because in doing so you are only isolating yourself socially from that tiny minority, which is no skin off your nose. However, in a sufficiently transparent society you may, hypothetically, discover that 99% of everyone has at least one opinion which (previously) you were ready to shun a person for. In that hypothetical case, if you continue your policy of shunning those people, you will find yourself socially isolated to a degree that a homeless guy living under a bridge might feel sorry for. In that hypothetical situation, then, you may find yourself with no choice but to relax your standards about whether to shun people with odd opinions.
On second thought, in a sense it has happened. I happen to live in that world now, because I happen to think that pretty much everybody has views about as batty is moon-hoax theorists. In reaction to finding myself in this situation, I am not inclined to shun people who espouse moon-hoax-theory-level idiocy, because I would rather have at least one or two friends.
You’re assuming that because someone has made mistakes themselves they will judge others less harshly. That is not necessarily the case.
Besides, most people make indeed mistakes but not the same mistakes. If you’re boss is a teetotaler and you are a careful driver, you are not going to think well of each other if you get drunk and your boss gets into an car accident.
Even I have the same problem. I tend to procrastinate so if a coworker is past his deadline I don’t really care. But I dislike sloppy thinking and try to eradicate it in myself so it really gets on my nerves if someones goes all irrational on me. (Although I seem to be getting better as I get older in accepting that most people don’t think like me.)
You’re assuming that because someone has made mistakes themselves they will judge others less harshly.
Actually, I don’t think that’s the only or most important factor. People who learn about the skeletons in your closet will compare you, not only to themselves, but to other people. If everyone has skeletons in their closet and everyone knows about them, then your prospective employer Bob (say) will be comparing the skeletons in your closet not only to the skeletons in his own closet, but more importantly to the skeletons in the closets of the other people who are competing with you for the same job.
As for people not making equal mistakes, to put it in simple binary terms merely for the purpose of making the point, divide people into “major offenders” and “minor offenders” and suppose major offenders are all equally major and minor all equally minor. If major offenders outnumber minor offenders, then being a major offender is not such a big deal since you’re part of the majority. But if minor offenders outnumber major offenders, then only a minority of people will be major offenders and therefore only a minority will have to worry about a transparent society. So either way, the transparent society is not that big a thing to fear for the average person. It’s a self-limiting danger. The more probable it is that the average person will be revealed to have Pervert Type A, the greater the fraction of people who will be revealed to be Pervert Type A, and therefore the harder it will be for other people to ostracize them, since to do so would reduce the size of their own social network.
...then wouldn’t that lead to just about everyone’s reputation being ruined in the eyes of everyone? But that doesn’t make any sense—if almost everyone’s going to have some stupid mistakes of theirs caught permanently on file, then all that will happen is that you’ll find out you’re not the only one who has made stupid mistakes. Big deal.
One part of how that plays out depends on whether there’s a group that can enforce “it’s different when we do it.”
An overall view of the 20th century would note that one’s own government is a major threat to one’s life. I don’t especially see why one would think this has ceased to be true in the 21st; history has seen many sclerotic regimes pass and be replaced by fresher ones, and a one-way surveillance society would only enhance government power.
Why do you think social norms are a greater threat?
Well, that’s a complex topic that can’t possibly be done justice to in a brief comment. But to put it as succinctly as possible, modern governments are already so powerful that given the existing means at their disposal, additional surveillance won’t change things much. Your argument can in fact be used to argue against its relevance—all the sundry 20th century totalitarians had no problem doing what they did without any surveillance technology to speak of.
My view, which would take much more space than is available here to support by solid arguments, is that the modern Western system of government will continue sliding gradually along the same path as now, determined by bureaucratic inertia and the opinions fashionable among high-status groups; both these things are fairly predictable, as far as any large-scale predictions about human affairs go. Whether these developments should be counted as good or bad, depends on many difficult, controversial, and/or subjective judgments, but realistically, even though I’m inclined towards the latter view, I think anyone with a little prudence will be able to continue living fairly comfortably under the government’s radar for the foreseeable future. Even in the conceivable scenarios that might end up in major instability and uncertain outcomes, I don’t think surveillance technology will matter much when it comes to the trouble that awaits us in such cases.
On the other hand, I see a very realistic prospect of social norms developing towards a zero-privacy world, where there would be no Orwellian thought police coming after you, but you would be expected to maintain a detailed public log of your life—theoretically voluntarily, but under the threat of shunning and unemployability in case you refuse it. Already, employers, school admissions bureaucrats, etc. are routinely searching through people’s trails left on Facebook and Google. What happens when an even greater portion of one’s life will be customarily posted online? How long before not having a rich online trail is considered weird and suspect by itself?
Already, an easily googlable faux pas will be a horrible millstone around your neck for the rest of your life, even if the government couldn’t care less about it. What will happen when far more stuff is online, and searchable in far more powerful ways?
Already, employers, school admissions bureaucrats, etc. are routinely searching through people’s trails left on Facebook and Google. What happens when an even greater portion of one’s life will be customarily posted online? How long before not having a rich online trail is considered weird and suspect by itself?
While we’re simply stating our beliefs...
I view this as merely a transition period. You say we cannot both maintain our old puritanical public standards and ever increasing public disclosure. I agree.
However, the latter is driven by powerful and deep economic & technological & social trends, and the former is a weak creature of habit and tradition which has demonstrated in the 20th century its extreme malleability (just look at homosexuality!).
It is a case of a movable object meeting an unstoppable force; the standards will be forced to change. A 10 year old growing up now would not judge harshly an old faux pas online, even if the 30 and 40 year olds currently in charge would and do now judge harshly. Those 30 and 40 year olds’ time is numbered.
On the whole, I don’t think that people are becoming more tolerant of disreputable behaviors and opinions, or that they are likely to become so in the future—or even that the set of disreputable traits will become significantly smaller, though its composition undoubtedly will change. Every human society has its taboos and strong status markers attached to various behaviors and opinions in a manner that seems whimsical to outsiders; it’s just that for the last few decades, the set of behaviors and opinions considered disreputable has changed a lot in Western societies. (The situation is also confused by the fact that, similar to its inconsistent idealization of selectively applied “free-thinking,” our culture has developed a strange inconsistent fondness for selectively applied “tolerance” as a virtue in its own right.)
Of course, those whose opinions, preferences, and abilities are more in line with the new norms have every reason to be happy, and to them, it will look as if things have become more free and tolerant indeed. Trouble is, this is also why it’s usually futile to argue the opposite: even by merely pointing out those things where you are now under greater constraint by social norms than before, you can’t avoid the automatic status-lowering association with such things and the resulting derision and/or condemnation.
Realistically, the new generations will react to reduced privacy by instinctively increasing conformity, not tolerance. Ultimately, I would speculate that in a world populated by folks who lack the very idea of having a private sphere where you can allow yourself to do or say something that you wouldn’t want to be broadcast publicly, the level of tolerance would in fact go way down, since typical people would be brought up with an unrelenting focus on watching their mouth and their behavior, and lack any personal experience of the satisfaction of breaking a norm when no one untrusted is watching.
On the whole, I don’t think that people are becoming more tolerant of disreputable behaviors and opinions, or that they are likely to become so in the future—or even that the set of disreputable traits will become significantly smaller, though its composition undoubtedly will change.
It is commonly said that status competition is zero-sum. This seems a more certain invariant than what you just wrote above. If that’s the case, then any change in the degree of tolerance will be perfectly matched by a corresponding change in the degree of conformity—and vice versa.
The picture you paint, however, is of the average person becoming more of a pariah, more unemployable, fewer friends, because they are haunted by that one ineradicable disreputable behavior in their past. This picture violates the assumption that status competition is zero-sum—an assumption which I have a stronger confidence in than I do in your claim that we are not going to become “more tolerant”. In fact your claim is ambiguous, because there is surely no canonical way to compare different sets of taboo behavior so that the degree of tolerance of different cultures can be compared. It is a similar problem to the problem of adjusting for inflation with price indexes. I have more confidence in our ability to measure, and compare, the fraction of the population relegated to low status (eg unemployability), than I do in our ability to measure, and compare, the magnitudes of the sets of taboos of different societies.
The picture you paint, however, is of the average person becoming more of a pariah, more unemployable, fewer friends, because they are haunted by that one ineradicable disreputable behavior in their past.
Maybe I failed to make my point clearly, but that is not what I had in mind. The picture I paint is of the average person becoming far more cautious and conformist, and of a society where various contrarians and others with unconventional opinions and preferences have no outlet at all for speaking their mind or indulging their preferences.
Average folks would presumably remain functioning normally (within whatever the definition of normality will be), only in a constant and unceasing state of far greater caution, hiding any dangerous thoughts they might have at all times and places. The number of people who actually ruin their lives by making a mistake that will haunt them forever won’t necessarily be that high; the unceasing suffocating control of everyone’s life will be the main problem.
What the society might end up looking like after everyone has grown up in a no-privacy world, we can only speculate. It would certainly not involve anything similar to the relations between people we know nowadays. (For example, you speak of friends—but at least for me, a key part of the definition of a close friend vs. friend vs. mere acquaintance is the level of confidentiality I can practice with the person in question. I’m not sure if the concept can exist in any meaningful form in a world without privacy.)
In fact your claim is ambiguous, because there is surely no canonical way to compare different sets of taboo behavior so that the degree of tolerance of different cultures can be compared. It is a similar problem to the problem of adjusting for inflation with price indexes.
That’s a very good analogy! But note that none of my claims depend on any exact comparison of levels of tolerance. Ultimately, the important question is whether, in a future Brinesque transparent society, there would exist taboo opinions and preferences whose inevitable suppression would be undesirable by some reasonable criteria. I believe the answer is yes, and that it is unreasonably optimistic to believe that such a society would become so tolerant and libertarian that nothing would get suppressed except things that rightfully should be, like violent crime. (And ultimately, I believe that such unwarranted optimism typically has its roots in the same biases that commonly make people believe that the modern world is on an unprecedented path of increasing freedom and tolerance.)
There is of course also the issue of thoughts and words that are dangerous due to people’s specific personal circumstances, which is more or less orthogonal to the problem of social norms and taboos (as discussed in the third point of this comment).
Thanks—I have nothing specifically in reply. Just to be clear about where I’m coming from, while I am not convinced that the future will unfold as you describe, neither am I convinced that it will not. So, I agree with you that popular failure to devote any attention to the scenario is myopic.
I’ll throw some complexity in—those social standards change, sometimes as a result of deliberate action, sometimes as a matter of random factors.
The most notable recent example is prejudice against homosexuality getting considerably toned down.
I agree that there’s a chance that just not having a public record of oneself mightl be considered to be suspicious.
I’m hoping that the loss of privacy will lead to a more accurate understanding of what people are really like, and more reasonable standards, but I’m not counting on it.
Once it becomes sufficiently obvious that everyone frequently does or says “not very respectable” things, people will begin to just laugh when someone brings them up as a criticism. It will no longer be possible to pretend that such things apply only to the people you criticize.
That is only one possible equilibrium. The other one is that as the sphere of privacy shrinks, people become more and more careful and conformist, until ultimately, everyone is behaving with extreme caution. In this equilibrium, people are locked in a problem of collective action—nobody dares to say or do what’s on his mind, even though most people would like to.
Moreover, even in the “good” equilibrium, the impossibility of hypocrisy protects only those behaviors and opinions that are actually characteristic of a majority. If your opinions and preferences are in a small minority, there is nothing at all to stop you from suffering condemnation, shunning, low status, and perhaps even outright persecution from the overwhelming majority.
I found it stunningly naive. So far the actual response of governments to citizen surveillance has been to make it illegal whenever it becomes inconvenient, and of course government systems are always fenced in with ‘protections’ to prevent private individuals from ‘misusing’ the data they collect. In an actual surveillance state the agency with control of the surveillance system would have the ability to imprison anyone at any time while being nearly immune to retaliation, a situation that ensures it will quickly mutate into an oppressive autocracy no matter what it started out as.
This has the cheering implication that surveillance by citizens makes a difference when it does happen, and it’s important to push to make sure it’s legal.
I’d rather keep the future probability for total Orwellian surveillance low, thanks.
Sadly, that horse has long left the barn—and in any case, it seems to me that privacy is even in principle incompatible with highly developed digital technology.
What I find to be a much more realistic danger than the prospect of Orwellian government are the social and market implications of a low-privacy world. If a lot of information about your life is easily accessible online, this means that embarrassing mistakes that would cause only mild consequences in the past can now render you permanently unemployable, and perhaps even socially ostracized. In such a world, once you do anything disreputable, it’s bound to haunt you forever, throwing itself into the face of anyone who just types your name into a computer (and not to even mention the future technologies for other sorts of pattern-matching and cross-referencing search).
To make things even worse, in a society where you’re expected to place a detailed log of your private life online by social convention—and it seems like we are going towards this, if the “social networking” websites are any indication—refusal to do so will send off a thunderous signal of weirdness and suspiciousness. Thus, the combination of technology and social trends can result in a suffocatingly controlling society even with the most libertarian government imaginable.
Writing isn’t feasible, but lifelogging might be. (see gwern’s thread). The government could hand out wearable cameras that double as driving licenses, credit cards, etc. If anyone objects all they have to do rip out the right wires.
I object a great deal! Once we’re all carrying around wearable cameras, the political possibility of making it illegal to rip out the wires would seem much less extreme than a proposal today to introduce both the cameras and the anti-tampering laws. Introducing these cameras would be greasing a slippery slope.
I’d rather keep the future probability for total Orwellian surveillance low, thanks.
Have you read David Brin’s The Transparent Society? Surveillance societies are already here (look at London and its million-plus cameras), and purely on the side of the authorities. Personal cameras at least may help even the scales.
I find most of the public debates on these issues rather myopic, in that they focus on the issue of surveillance by governments as the main problem. What I find to be a much more depressing prospect, however, are the consequences of a low-privacy society that may well come to pass through purely private institutions and transactions.
Even with the most non-intrusive and fair government imaginable, if lots of information about your life is easily available online, it means that a single stupid mistake in life that would earlier have only mild consequences can ruin your reputation forever and render you permanently unemployable and shunned socially. Instead of fading memories and ever more remote records about your past mistakes, they will forever be thrown right into the face of anyone who just types your name into a computer (and not to even mention the future more advanced pattern-matching and cross-referencing search technologies). This of course applies not just to mistakes, but also to any disreputable opinions and interests you might have that happen to be noted online.
Moreover, the social norms may develop to the point where it’s expected that you constantly log the details of your life online. We do seem to be going in that direction, if the “social networking” sites are any indication. In such a situation, even if you had the option of reducing your online profile, it would send off a powerful signal that would make you look weird and suspicious.
I am worried about these developments much more than about what our sclerotic governments might do with their new surveillance capabilities. After all, even today, they can find out whatever they want about you if they really care for some reason—they just need to put some effort into cross-referencing the already abundant information you leave behind at every step. However, as long as you pay your taxes and don’t misbehave in those particular ways they care about, you’ll be comfortably under their radar, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t stay that way. Even nowadays, if I were to express some opinions that aren’t very respectable, I’d be much more worried about the prospect of these words forever coming up whenever someone searches for my name online than about the much more remote possibility that the government might take active interest in what I said.
I’ve heard this opinion expressed frequently, but it always seems to kind of contradict itself. If there’s lots of information available about everyone, and all kinds of stupid mistakes will easily become permanently recorded...
...then wouldn’t that lead to just about everyone’s reputation being ruined in the eyes of everyone? But that doesn’t make any sense—if almost everyone’s going to have some stupid mistakes of theirs caught permanently on file, then all that will happen is that you’ll find out you’re not the only one who has made stupid mistakes. Big deal.
In fact, this to me seems potentially preferrable than our current society. Right now, people’s past mistakes get lost in the past. As a result, we construct an unrealistic image where most people seem far more perfect than they actually are. Some past mistake coming out might ruin someone’s reputation, and people who have made perfectly normal and reasonable mistakes will feel a lot more guilty about it than would be warranted. If the mistakes everyone had made were available, then we wouldn’t have these unrealistic unconscious conceptions of how perfect people must be. Society might be far healthier as a result.
Kaj_Sotala:
There are at least three important problems with this view:
First, this is only one possible equilibrium. Another possibility is a society where everyone is extremely cautious to the point of paranoia, so that very few people ever commit a faux pas of any sort—and although most people would like things to be more relaxed, they’re faced with a problem of collective action. I don’t think this is at all unrealistic—people living under repression quickly develop the instinct to watch their mouth and behavior obsessively.
Second, even under the most optimistic “good” equilibrium, this argument applies only to those behaviors and opinions that are actually widespread. Those whose unconventional opinions and preferences are in a small minority, let alone lone-wolf contrarians, will have to censor themselves 24⁄7 or suffer very bad consequences.
Third, many things people dare say or do only in private are not dangerous because of laws or widespread social norms, but because of the local and private relations of power and status in which they are entangled. You need look no further than the workplace: if your bosses can examine all the details of your life to determine how docile, obedient, and conformist you are, then clearly, having such traits 24⁄7 is going to become necessary to prosper economically (except for the minority of self-employed folks, of course). Not to mention what happens if you wish to criticize your employers, even in your own free time! (Again, there’s a collective action problem of sorts here: if everyone were mouthing off against their bosses and couldn’t help but do it, it would lead to a “good” equilibrium, but the obedient and docile will outcompete the rest, making such traits more valuable and desirable.)
I think it can apply even to minority opinions, because the minority opinions add up. Even if only 1% of the population has a given minority opinion, significantly more than 1% of the population is probably going to have at least one minority opinion about something. If people choose to be super-intolerant of 1% opinions, and if 70% of the population has at least one 1% opinion, then it’s not 1% of the population that people will have to be super-intolerant of, but 70% of the population.
Or if 70% seems too extreme a possibility, try 30%. The point is that the sum total of small minorities adds up to a total that is less small, and this total will determine what happens. Take the extreme case: suppose the total adds up to 100%, so that 100% of the population holds at least one extreme-minority opinion. Can a person afford to ostracize close to 100% of the population (consisting of everybody who has at least one extreme-minority opinion that he does not share)? I think not. Therefore he will have to learn to be much more tolerant of extreme-minority opinions.
While that is only the extreme case, and 30% is not 100%, I think the point is made, that the accumulated total of all people who have minority opinions matters, and not merely the total for each minority opinion.
It seems unlikely that people would think that way. Taking myself as an example, I favor an extensive reworking of the powers, internal organization, and mode of election of the U.S. House of Representatives. I know that I’m the only person in the world who favors my program, because I invented it and haven’t yet described it completely. I’ve described parts of it in online venues, each of which has a rather narrow, specialist audience, so there might possibly be two or three people out there who agree with me on a major portion of it, but certainly no one who agrees on the whole. That makes me an extreme minority.
There are plenty of extreme minorities I feel no sympathy for at all. Frankly, I think moon-hoax theorists should be shunned.
You are not facing the situation I’m describing, because it hasn’t happened yet. It is a future speculation that would occur in a sufficiently transparent society. As long as you are unaware of most people’s odd opinions, you can afford to shun the tiny minority of odd thinkers whose odd thoughts you are aware of, because in doing so you are only isolating yourself socially from that tiny minority, which is no skin off your nose. However, in a sufficiently transparent society you may, hypothetically, discover that 99% of everyone has at least one opinion which (previously) you were ready to shun a person for. In that hypothetical case, if you continue your policy of shunning those people, you will find yourself socially isolated to a degree that a homeless guy living under a bridge might feel sorry for. In that hypothetical situation, then, you may find yourself with no choice but to relax your standards about whether to shun people with odd opinions.
On second thought, in a sense it has happened. I happen to live in that world now, because I happen to think that pretty much everybody has views about as batty is moon-hoax theorists. In reaction to finding myself in this situation, I am not inclined to shun people who espouse moon-hoax-theory-level idiocy, because I would rather have at least one or two friends.
You’re assuming that because someone has made mistakes themselves they will judge others less harshly. That is not necessarily the case.
Besides, most people make indeed mistakes but not the same mistakes. If you’re boss is a teetotaler and you are a careful driver, you are not going to think well of each other if you get drunk and your boss gets into an car accident.
Even I have the same problem. I tend to procrastinate so if a coworker is past his deadline I don’t really care. But I dislike sloppy thinking and try to eradicate it in myself so it really gets on my nerves if someones goes all irrational on me. (Although I seem to be getting better as I get older in accepting that most people don’t think like me.)
Actually, I don’t think that’s the only or most important factor. People who learn about the skeletons in your closet will compare you, not only to themselves, but to other people. If everyone has skeletons in their closet and everyone knows about them, then your prospective employer Bob (say) will be comparing the skeletons in your closet not only to the skeletons in his own closet, but more importantly to the skeletons in the closets of the other people who are competing with you for the same job.
As for people not making equal mistakes, to put it in simple binary terms merely for the purpose of making the point, divide people into “major offenders” and “minor offenders” and suppose major offenders are all equally major and minor all equally minor. If major offenders outnumber minor offenders, then being a major offender is not such a big deal since you’re part of the majority. But if minor offenders outnumber major offenders, then only a minority of people will be major offenders and therefore only a minority will have to worry about a transparent society. So either way, the transparent society is not that big a thing to fear for the average person. It’s a self-limiting danger. The more probable it is that the average person will be revealed to have Pervert Type A, the greater the fraction of people who will be revealed to be Pervert Type A, and therefore the harder it will be for other people to ostracize them, since to do so would reduce the size of their own social network.
Good points. Just read the whole conversation between you and Vladimir_M and I agree it could go both ways.
One part of how that plays out depends on whether there’s a group that can enforce “it’s different when we do it.”
An overall view of the 20th century would note that one’s own government is a major threat to one’s life. I don’t especially see why one would think this has ceased to be true in the 21st; history has seen many sclerotic regimes pass and be replaced by fresher ones, and a one-way surveillance society would only enhance government power.
Why do you think social norms are a greater threat?
Well, that’s a complex topic that can’t possibly be done justice to in a brief comment. But to put it as succinctly as possible, modern governments are already so powerful that given the existing means at their disposal, additional surveillance won’t change things much. Your argument can in fact be used to argue against its relevance—all the sundry 20th century totalitarians had no problem doing what they did without any surveillance technology to speak of.
My view, which would take much more space than is available here to support by solid arguments, is that the modern Western system of government will continue sliding gradually along the same path as now, determined by bureaucratic inertia and the opinions fashionable among high-status groups; both these things are fairly predictable, as far as any large-scale predictions about human affairs go. Whether these developments should be counted as good or bad, depends on many difficult, controversial, and/or subjective judgments, but realistically, even though I’m inclined towards the latter view, I think anyone with a little prudence will be able to continue living fairly comfortably under the government’s radar for the foreseeable future. Even in the conceivable scenarios that might end up in major instability and uncertain outcomes, I don’t think surveillance technology will matter much when it comes to the trouble that awaits us in such cases.
On the other hand, I see a very realistic prospect of social norms developing towards a zero-privacy world, where there would be no Orwellian thought police coming after you, but you would be expected to maintain a detailed public log of your life—theoretically voluntarily, but under the threat of shunning and unemployability in case you refuse it. Already, employers, school admissions bureaucrats, etc. are routinely searching through people’s trails left on Facebook and Google. What happens when an even greater portion of one’s life will be customarily posted online? How long before not having a rich online trail is considered weird and suspect by itself?
Already, an easily googlable faux pas will be a horrible millstone around your neck for the rest of your life, even if the government couldn’t care less about it. What will happen when far more stuff is online, and searchable in far more powerful ways?
While we’re simply stating our beliefs...
I view this as merely a transition period. You say we cannot both maintain our old puritanical public standards and ever increasing public disclosure. I agree.
However, the latter is driven by powerful and deep economic & technological & social trends, and the former is a weak creature of habit and tradition which has demonstrated in the 20th century its extreme malleability (just look at homosexuality!).
It is a case of a movable object meeting an unstoppable force; the standards will be forced to change. A 10 year old growing up now would not judge harshly an old faux pas online, even if the 30 and 40 year olds currently in charge would and do now judge harshly. Those 30 and 40 year olds’ time is numbered.
On the whole, I don’t think that people are becoming more tolerant of disreputable behaviors and opinions, or that they are likely to become so in the future—or even that the set of disreputable traits will become significantly smaller, though its composition undoubtedly will change. Every human society has its taboos and strong status markers attached to various behaviors and opinions in a manner that seems whimsical to outsiders; it’s just that for the last few decades, the set of behaviors and opinions considered disreputable has changed a lot in Western societies. (The situation is also confused by the fact that, similar to its inconsistent idealization of selectively applied “free-thinking,” our culture has developed a strange inconsistent fondness for selectively applied “tolerance” as a virtue in its own right.)
Of course, those whose opinions, preferences, and abilities are more in line with the new norms have every reason to be happy, and to them, it will look as if things have become more free and tolerant indeed. Trouble is, this is also why it’s usually futile to argue the opposite: even by merely pointing out those things where you are now under greater constraint by social norms than before, you can’t avoid the automatic status-lowering association with such things and the resulting derision and/or condemnation.
Realistically, the new generations will react to reduced privacy by instinctively increasing conformity, not tolerance. Ultimately, I would speculate that in a world populated by folks who lack the very idea of having a private sphere where you can allow yourself to do or say something that you wouldn’t want to be broadcast publicly, the level of tolerance would in fact go way down, since typical people would be brought up with an unrelenting focus on watching their mouth and their behavior, and lack any personal experience of the satisfaction of breaking a norm when no one untrusted is watching.
It is commonly said that status competition is zero-sum. This seems a more certain invariant than what you just wrote above. If that’s the case, then any change in the degree of tolerance will be perfectly matched by a corresponding change in the degree of conformity—and vice versa.
The picture you paint, however, is of the average person becoming more of a pariah, more unemployable, fewer friends, because they are haunted by that one ineradicable disreputable behavior in their past. This picture violates the assumption that status competition is zero-sum—an assumption which I have a stronger confidence in than I do in your claim that we are not going to become “more tolerant”. In fact your claim is ambiguous, because there is surely no canonical way to compare different sets of taboo behavior so that the degree of tolerance of different cultures can be compared. It is a similar problem to the problem of adjusting for inflation with price indexes. I have more confidence in our ability to measure, and compare, the fraction of the population relegated to low status (eg unemployability), than I do in our ability to measure, and compare, the magnitudes of the sets of taboos of different societies.
If there are a lot of pariahs in a connected world, then they will form their own subcultures.
Constant:
Maybe I failed to make my point clearly, but that is not what I had in mind. The picture I paint is of the average person becoming far more cautious and conformist, and of a society where various contrarians and others with unconventional opinions and preferences have no outlet at all for speaking their mind or indulging their preferences.
Average folks would presumably remain functioning normally (within whatever the definition of normality will be), only in a constant and unceasing state of far greater caution, hiding any dangerous thoughts they might have at all times and places. The number of people who actually ruin their lives by making a mistake that will haunt them forever won’t necessarily be that high; the unceasing suffocating control of everyone’s life will be the main problem.
What the society might end up looking like after everyone has grown up in a no-privacy world, we can only speculate. It would certainly not involve anything similar to the relations between people we know nowadays. (For example, you speak of friends—but at least for me, a key part of the definition of a close friend vs. friend vs. mere acquaintance is the level of confidentiality I can practice with the person in question. I’m not sure if the concept can exist in any meaningful form in a world without privacy.)
That’s a very good analogy! But note that none of my claims depend on any exact comparison of levels of tolerance. Ultimately, the important question is whether, in a future Brinesque transparent society, there would exist taboo opinions and preferences whose inevitable suppression would be undesirable by some reasonable criteria. I believe the answer is yes, and that it is unreasonably optimistic to believe that such a society would become so tolerant and libertarian that nothing would get suppressed except things that rightfully should be, like violent crime. (And ultimately, I believe that such unwarranted optimism typically has its roots in the same biases that commonly make people believe that the modern world is on an unprecedented path of increasing freedom and tolerance.)
There is of course also the issue of thoughts and words that are dangerous due to people’s specific personal circumstances, which is more or less orthogonal to the problem of social norms and taboos (as discussed in the third point of this comment).
Thanks—I have nothing specifically in reply. Just to be clear about where I’m coming from, while I am not convinced that the future will unfold as you describe, neither am I convinced that it will not. So, I agree with you that popular failure to devote any attention to the scenario is myopic.
The interesting thing is that is isn’t just going to be reasonable individual choices.
I assume there will be serious social pressure to take some faux pas seriously and ignore others.
I’ll throw some complexity in—those social standards change, sometimes as a result of deliberate action, sometimes as a matter of random factors.
The most notable recent example is prejudice against homosexuality getting considerably toned down.
I agree that there’s a chance that just not having a public record of oneself mightl be considered to be suspicious.
I’m hoping that the loss of privacy will lead to a more accurate understanding of what people are really like, and more reasonable standards, but I’m not counting on it.
Once it becomes sufficiently obvious that everyone frequently does or says “not very respectable” things, people will begin to just laugh when someone brings them up as a criticism. It will no longer be possible to pretend that such things apply only to the people you criticize.
That is only one possible equilibrium. The other one is that as the sphere of privacy shrinks, people become more and more careful and conformist, until ultimately, everyone is behaving with extreme caution. In this equilibrium, people are locked in a problem of collective action—nobody dares to say or do what’s on his mind, even though most people would like to.
Moreover, even in the “good” equilibrium, the impossibility of hypocrisy protects only those behaviors and opinions that are actually characteristic of a majority. If your opinions and preferences are in a small minority, there is nothing at all to stop you from suffering condemnation, shunning, low status, and perhaps even outright persecution from the overwhelming majority.
I found it stunningly naive. So far the actual response of governments to citizen surveillance has been to make it illegal whenever it becomes inconvenient, and of course government systems are always fenced in with ‘protections’ to prevent private individuals from ‘misusing’ the data they collect. In an actual surveillance state the agency with control of the surveillance system would have the ability to imprison anyone at any time while being nearly immune to retaliation, a situation that ensures it will quickly mutate into an oppressive autocracy no matter what it started out as.
This has the cheering implication that surveillance by citizens makes a difference when it does happen, and it’s important to push to make sure it’s legal.
Here’s one vote for total Orwellian surveillance.
DSimon:
Sadly, that horse has long left the barn—and in any case, it seems to me that privacy is even in principle incompatible with highly developed digital technology.
What I find to be a much more realistic danger than the prospect of Orwellian government are the social and market implications of a low-privacy world. If a lot of information about your life is easily accessible online, this means that embarrassing mistakes that would cause only mild consequences in the past can now render you permanently unemployable, and perhaps even socially ostracized. In such a world, once you do anything disreputable, it’s bound to haunt you forever, throwing itself into the face of anyone who just types your name into a computer (and not to even mention the future technologies for other sorts of pattern-matching and cross-referencing search).
To make things even worse, in a society where you’re expected to place a detailed log of your private life online by social convention—and it seems like we are going towards this, if the “social networking” websites are any indication—refusal to do so will send off a thunderous signal of weirdness and suspiciousness. Thus, the combination of technology and social trends can result in a suffocatingly controlling society even with the most libertarian government imaginable.