Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Transparent society back to the past?   posted by Razib @ 1/07/2009 09:44:00 PM
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Of late I have come to believe that something close to the Transparent Society is inevitable in the near future. One of the primary complaints about the proliferation of surveillance and distribution of personal information is that it curtails privacy. But it came to my mind that perhaps this is another case of the the future looking much more like the past? After all, there is a common perception that in small villages and hunter-gatherer bands "everyone knew everyone else," and that individual privacy is an expectation only in the avenues toward anonymity which emerge in mass societies. The curve below shows is a stylized conception of what I have in mind.

transsociety.jpg