Brin on Transparency

David Brin -- best-selling author, charter member of CRN's Global Task Force, and occasional Responsible Nanotechnology blog contributor -- publishes a new defense of his ideas in favor of a transparent society.

In a commentary at Wired, Brin says:

We already live in the openness experiment, and have for 200 years. It is called the Enlightenment -- with "light" both a core word and a key concept in our turnabout from 4,000 years of feudalism. All of the great enlightenment arenas -- markets, science and democracy -- flourish in direct proportion to how much their players (consumers, scientists and voters) know, in order to make good decisions. To whatever extent these arenas get clogged by secrecy, they fail.

How did we get the freedom we already have, becoming the first civilization in history to (somewhat) defy ancient patterns? Yes, it's imperfect, always under threat. We swim against hard currents of human nature. But reciprocal accountability is the innovation that lets us even try.

Read the whole thing.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog

Comments

[kurt9]

I read Brin's response and was not impressed. Schneier's main point was the dissimilarity of power issue of the individual relative to the state or other large institution. Brin failed to address this issue at all in his reply.

The dissimilarity in power issue is the fundamental flaw of Brin's open society concept. His failure to address it undermines the credibility of his open society concept.

[Hal]

Unfortunately, David Brin got off on the wrong foot from the beginning of his crusade for transparency, by casting himself as an opponent to cryptography and its potential uses to enhance privacy. His book The Transparent Society was going to be called The Blinding Fog, and references remain in his introduction:

"In recent years there have erupted widespread calls to 'empower' citizens and corporations with tools of encryption -- the creation of ciphers and secret codes--so that the Internet and phone lines may soon fill with a blinding fog of static and concealed messages. A haze of habitual masks and routine anonymity."

http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp2.html

It is clear at this point that this focus was just a sideshow and has distracted to some extent from the larger issue of assuring open access to government actions and decision making. That is surely a good idea and Brin would do best to focus on it, rather than continuing to perpetrate a pointless feud with cryptographers and security experts like Schneier.