Science fiction writer & future/tech consultant David Brin was kind enough to give me his take on a quote from grand master Robert Anson Heinlein!
The main thing achieved by any ‘privacy law’ is to make the spy bugs smaller.
In the last decades, surveillance grids have been established that caused critics to despair 1984 had arrived, just a few years late… Fast forward to today: smartphones capture personal/corporate/government abuses & the internet transmits them to millions it then rallies against those abuses.
David Brin has been mulling that quote for a while, & argues in his book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom that “(i)f police cameras watch us, shouldn’t we be able to watch police stations?
Brin started ‘The Transparent Society’ with a piece in Wired:
If Western Civilization has one new trick in its repertoire, a technique more responsible than any other for its success, that trick is accountability…Disclosure is a watchword of the age, and politicians grudgingly have responded by passing the Freedom of Information Act, a truth-in-lending law, open-meeting rules, then codes to enforce candor in housing, in dietary content of foodstuffs, in the expense accounts of lobbyists, and so on…This morality pervades our popular culture, in which nearly every modern film or novel seems to preach the same message – suspicion of authority.
Yet this demand for ‘sunlight laws’ coexists with ever greater pressures for locking down rights and freedoms. Back we go to the Heinlein quote:
“The main thing achieved by any ‘privacy law’ is to make the spy bugs smaller.”
Back we go to Mr. Brin:
I often cite (that) snippet from one of Robert Heinlein’s novels…It makes a point that I stress – though much less efficiently or colorfully – in my novel Earth and in my nonfiction book The Transparent Society…
The point Heinlein is making should be clear. The powerful – elites of all kinds – will use whatever means they can, to see. We are monkeys and when humans have power, they will look. Passing laws against them looking is utter futility. But there is an alternative… to look back! To pillory (the) mighty – of all kinds – with light.
David Brin is an award winning author, future/tech consultant and the author of one of my favorite novels “The Postman” (only tenuous relation to the novel of the same name).
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Serving Worlds is JOHN MIERAU, science fiction & fantasy author, storyteller.
David Brin: “Make the spy bugs smaller”
The main thing achieved by any ‘privacy law’ is to make the spy bugs smaller.
In the last decades, surveillance grids have been established that caused critics to despair 1984 had arrived, just a few years late… Fast forward to today: smartphones capture personal/corporate/government abuses & the internet transmits them to millions it then rallies against those abuses.
David Brin has been mulling that quote for a while, & argues in his book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom that “(i)f police cameras watch us, shouldn’t we be able to watch police stations?
Brin started ‘The Transparent Society’ with a piece in Wired:
If Western Civilization has one new trick in its repertoire, a technique more responsible than any other for its success, that trick is accountability…Disclosure is a watchword of the age, and politicians grudgingly have responded by passing the Freedom of Information Act, a truth-in-lending law, open-meeting rules, then codes to enforce candor in housing, in dietary content of foodstuffs, in the expense accounts of lobbyists, and so on…This morality pervades our popular culture, in which nearly every modern film or novel seems to preach the same message – suspicion of authority.
Yet this demand for ‘sunlight laws’ coexists with ever greater pressures for locking down rights and freedoms. Back we go to the Heinlein quote:
“The main thing achieved by any ‘privacy law’ is to make the spy bugs smaller.”
Back we go to Mr. Brin:
I often cite (that) snippet from one of Robert Heinlein’s novels…It makes a point that I stress – though much less efficiently or colorfully – in my novel Earth and in my nonfiction book The Transparent Society…
The point Heinlein is making should be clear. The powerful – elites of all kinds – will use whatever means they can, to see. We are monkeys and when humans have power, they will look. Passing laws against them looking is utter futility. But there is an alternative… to look back! To pillory (the) mighty – of all kinds – with light.
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