by Flemming Funch
Jon Husband quotes from an excellent article by William Gibson (Neuromancer, etc) in NY Times. It is in part reflections on Orwell and 1984 and where we're at today."Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information." I think he's right. In the long run the transparency of information will be a democratizing force. And this piece here makes me outright start rubbing my hands in glee:"In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did." Heheh. So, you might as well start doing what you ought to be doing right now, rather than what merely looks good on the surface. Because eventually it will all be abundantly clear, and your legacy will be the truth about you, not your corporate brochures or your campaign speeches or your double-speak.
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