A few recent trends–twitter, facebook, credit card coupons–and events–Wikileaks, the hacking of citi, and sony–have led me to wonder whether in 50 years there any secrets at all. Currently, several aspects of society are based on the concept of keeping a piece of information secret. You’re not supposed to give out your credit card or social security numbers. Governments spend billions keeping their secrets hidden from the world.
But could that culture change? What if, instead of keeping my credit card secret, I didn’t worry about who knew my credit card number, and just worried that only I could use my credit card. In other words, perhaps we’ll move from a secrecy society to an authentication society. Engineers will invent ways to securely verify who is authoring information, and that will be good enough. If Williams-Sonoma can verify that I’m the one purchasing the bundt pan with my credit card, then I don’t care who has knowledge of my personal information.
People already post a lot of (used-to-be-private) information on Twitter and Facebook. Could we reach the point where people are forced to own up to all their interactions because there’s really no secrecy? If you buy tickets to the new horror flick, you need to be proud of that decision because maybe everyone will be aware of that decision. (Facebook tried to foist a similar regime upon us with Beacon and it backfired, but maybe one day such a system will become a reality.) Perhaps a newfound sense of ownership of our actions will be a net positive; as in, you won’t do anything that you’d be embarrassed for your social circle to know about. I say “your social circle” because while the world could know about all your actions, your friends (and, alas, enemies) are likely the only people who would care.
And while we might lose secrecy, I think we’ll hang on to privacy. Things you do in your own house, in private, without interacting with companies or other human beings, would still be private. Since no one will know about, for example, your proclivity to sing Beiber songs in the shower, that fact can stay private. But, I’m not sure that “what happens in Vegas” will stay in Vegas anymore — information wants to be free.
This trend will probably affect inter-government relations, and already has to a minor degree thanks to Wikileaks. As more states become fully-accepted members of the international community (i.e., the United Nations), perhaps countries will start treating each other as friends rather than, as so often is the case today, distrusting allies. Certainly in recent years, we’ve narrowed the list of enemy states (e.g., North Korea); perhaps the next decades will see a ballooning of countries’ “friends” lists. Then we’ll have fewer reasons to keep secrets from one another. And hence fewer reasons to be distrustful, fewer worries about security breaches, and hopefully fewer reasons to go to war.
I embrace our emerging secret-less society, and think the positives outweigh the negatives. To get the ball rolling, you all should know that I just purchased Nothing To Envy for my Android Kindle. And, so far, it’s a great read.