Seth Godin has a great post today, musing that accountability and instances of “correct behavior” would go up if service providers (and politicians) knew they were on tape.
Excerpt:
I’ve been counting more and more mail from enraged customers (thanks, but I have enough!). These are people who feel outrage when they are deliberately mistreated by someone who should know better…I wonder what happens once it’s on tape?
All as a way of asking you to bring your videocamera with you when you go to vote on Tuesday (regardless of which side you’re on). The biggest impact of the Net on this election, it seems to me, is that so many things are “on tape.” So many people are now embedded in the process that the process has changed forever.
Another good example of this trend.
(Hat tip: Jeff Jarvis)
Shades of David Brin and the privacyless world he described in his novel Earth and other essays and interviews. Basically, Brin’s thesis is that the demise of individual privacy is inevitable in the wake of smaller, cheaper means of spying. The only defense, he argues, is that everyone spy on those doing the “official” spying: “quis custodiet” writ large.
It’s dystopian, but given what we’ve seen recently (and what’s documented in this post) it may be the best-case outcome.
For another example of my youthful SF readings coming to life, juxtapose John Brunner’s “The Sheep Look Up” and Jared Diamond’s “Collapse.” I keep seeing scenes of “Sheep” while reading Diamond. Pretty damn depressing.
–David
david, i hear you. we may be in an inevitable arms race between privacy and surveillance…