Toggle Background Color
(M. R. Peters, The Transparent Mind, continued.)
On Scrutiny
We must understand that there are already other limits to the transparent society, both technical and in terms of labor-time. It has been said that these make it so that, effectively, most Hive citizens have a good degree of relative privacy despite the fact that the transparent society is backed by the universal and perpetual surveillance and recording of every physical space of a Hive colony and every Hive citizen. Accomplishing this presents an enormous challenge. As of this writing, the Hive has existed for 40 years. This means (for example) that for every citizen born on Earth who has survived to this day, there are up to 350,400 hours of audiovisual recordings. For reference, the average time a Hive citizen spends watching television for leisure is 5 hours per week.
As of this time, our computer and data storage technology is barely up to the standards (both in terms of sophistication and sheer infrastructural development) we left behind on Earth. These developing systems are responsible for storing and serving up to roughly four-million gigabytes of data per Hive citizen. Records thus have an "expiration date" after which two stages of archiving occur. First, the record is compressed by software so it takes up less space. Second, and much later, it is transfered to some physical media - in the early years, tape drives, and then various optical storage media. None of this archived data is off limits to anyone. However, the farther back one goes, the more onerous the process of obtaining a record. How quickly archiving occurs depends on the authority and responsibility of those depicted. For the average citizen, this is 30 days and one mission year respectively for each stage. For Cadre Adjuncts such as myself, it's 5 and then 10 years respectively for each stage. The Chairman's footage never gets archived.
This not only places a burden on physical resources (from power to space), but also human resources, including dedicated security staff tasked specifically with observing and also the technical staff needed to maintain, repair, and expand the surveillance system. Another Morganite trope is that the opportunity costs of maintaining the transparent society are principally what stifles the Hive's economy. Were these resources put to other, more productive uses, we would be more prosperous. This is undeniably correct. Such is the value we place on transparency.
This has implications for the average Hive citizen's observation activity as well. There are usually better things to spend one's free time on. With so many people and so many hours recorded, and so few hours to spend observing, we say with some confidence that this provides effective privacy for most ordinary individuals. The amount of time any one citizen is observed scales with stature in terms of authority and responsibility. Hence, the most observed individual is Chairman Yang himself, followed by the Cadre Adjuncts.
There are, however, social limits to this which become apparent when considering how an average citizen's observation time is spent. Here, "average citizen" means anyone not within the Advisory Cadre or of higher stature. For these ordinary people, only about a quarter (24%) of their observation time is devoted to high-stature citizens who are strangers to the observer. The other half is devoted to people the observer knows: family (26%), current and former romantic partners (29%), and friends and colleagues (21%). This, as we will see, has had great implications for the wellbeing of Hive citizens.
On Secrecy
One of the goals of total surveillance is to prevent conspiracy, the organized secret behavior of factions within society which, because they act in secret, can only have bad intentions. The belief that only those who do evil fear the light is the moral bedrock of this policy. And yet, in practice, it depends on society as a whole having a clear idea of what "evil" constitutes such that it does not censure normal, healthy, non-destructive behavior. So long as latent prejudices lingered, people felt the need for some degree of secrecy. This would ultimately prove that there was no secret worth keeping, but at a truly dire cost.
On Earth, human society was burdened with the weight of centuries of history, of shifting social values and the diverse traditions and ideals of many different groups of people. This made any attempt at a "cultural revolution" fraught with risks: of factional strife, of reactionary backlash, of excessive zeal in defeating opponents of progress. Humanity on Chiron has the advantage of a break from this past, and the whittling down of loyalists to the Unity mission has resulted in the most disruptive ideologues and those prone to their ideas self-selecting out of the mission. This, the Human Hive is in the best position in the history of humankind to enact a sweeping program for the changing of ways.
Still, we have not completely escaped the weight of history so long as any who remember life on Earth remain alive. We Earthborn have brought cultural baggage with us which has sometimes stifled the development of the transparent society. Most of the Unity mission colonists came from societies shaped by the values of Earth's Western culture, in which privacy became an increasingly valued condition over the course of centuries.
The Earthborn could not shed that within a few decades, and many of us still have not. Our deeply ingrained expectations resulted in an emergent "bargain" with the demands of total surveillance that played out in both social mores and unofficial policy. For example, it is still considered the height of impolite behavior to purposely observe people using the lavatory for extended periods of time without any real basis in providing security or accountability. There are few such pretexts, and since the watchers have as little privacy as the watched, social pressure stifles this behavior.
The other great stumbling block to full acceptance of transparency was sex. There were many things the Earthborn were willing to accept constant surveillance of, but their most physically intimate moments were not among them. The practice of "veiling" originated due to this. Earthborn citizens would contrive various means of blocking visual recording of their location in order to discretely engage in sex acts. This was technically illegal, but security staff was generally as squeamish about the surveillance of these moments as anyone.
A sort of polite agreement was implicitly reached that so long as citizens did not block out audio recording, limited veiling of video recording for about a half hour was overlooked. It was considered unlikely that in this window, conspirators could plot while faking the sounds of physical intimacy. The Chairman only reluctantly took the advice of his Cadre to overlook this breach in protocol in the name of spurring population growth, but warned - quite presciently - that it would have dire consequences.
On Suicide
These consequences manifested in the first generation of Chiron-born humans within two decades. At the time, no one understood what it was about. We only knew that adolescents were committing suicide at significantly abnormal rates compared to both their parents' generation and to statistics from Earth. The most disturbing aspect of this was that total surveillance provided no guide in providing a warning until years had passed and we knew what signs to look for. Before then, teenagers and young adults managed to fool everyone around them about the actions they were taking to orchestrate their own demises.
When we finally unraveled the tangled knot of doomed life paths, we discovered that the root cause was the compromise we had made with our own prudish scruples. Children born on Chiron know the reality of the transparent society their whole lives. Still, they learn from their parents, and they learn by example. When their parents insist on not being disturbed or observed for inexplicable reasons, in seeming defiance of the morals their parents instill in them to be open and honest in their actions, it compromises their actual appreciation for the necessity of total surveillance. The standard gains mysterious and bizarre exceptions. Children found that they could not fully trust their parents, both due to their random demands of privacy and the seeming hypocrisy this represented. When they inevitably learned why their parents behaved in this way, they implicitly developed a deeply regressive and repressed attitude towards sex, which became the cancerous heart of the Routing Tragedy.
When children became adolescents, they began to experiment with their sexuality. They carried forward the practice of veiling. And they believed deep down that this natural bodily function which propagates the entire human species must be something shameful or filthy, something so wrong that even their parents sought to hide it from the authorities. For the most part, rationally, they did not worry because they also knew how effective privacy by obscurity worked, and felt confident that few would come across their intimate activities in the record. They did not count on jealous, vindictive, or simply cruel sexual partners managing to resurrect one of the most hateful social crimes of Earth society: revenge porn.
Children raised in the transparent society have a hard time understanding the idea of "publishing" one's creative or intellectual works. The best way they can make sense of it is a matter of calling attention to something that few would have noticed even though anyone might have. This leads to certain oddities of historical analysis, such as accusing the Catholic Church of incompetence for not having spotted Martin Luther's development of his written protest against Church excesses before he "routed" people to it by posting it on a door. This word, "routing," is what had replaced publication in a society where everything is public. It involves literally routing the attention of others to specific times and places in the surveillance record, thus "exposing" what had previously been effectively hidden from most peoples' view.
In the Routing Tragedy, there was actually a wide variety of behavior exposed by routing which could have been the trigger for the victims' self-destructive impulses. The most common, though, was sexual behavior. The perpetrator would discretely lower the veil at some point in the act, and later call these moments to the attention of both partners' peers. The feeling thereafter that the people closest to the victims, the people that everyone knows has the most interest in observing you, might be constantly judging and disapproving of their behavior for having been thus exposed, created a sense of existential angst, self-loathing, and ultimately suicidal ideation. Less well known than those who actually acted on these impulses are those whose lives were damaged by lingering and ongoing depression that persists to the present day.
On Sincerity
Discovering the actions that led to these suicides was the easy part. At that point, the perpetrators faced an extensive battery of psychological evaluations and strict punishments for their behavior. It took longer to figure out why this exposure was such a potent source of shame, and once we did, the repercussions were severe for those who had advocated accommodation of veiling. Cadre Adjuncts who did not immediately step forward to confess that they understood the error they had made in excusing veiling were all summarily dismissed from their positions, and even those who did step forward were sharply questioned and often ultimately dismissed as well. Veiling was once again treated as a criminal act and would be punished wherever it was discovered.
The Chairman took bold and decisive action in responding to the Routing Tragedy. He declared a requirement that every citizen of the Hive was to spent one day directly observing his own every waking moment. Citizens had two months to arrange a day for this exercise or face sanctions. After that, he required that this be repeated for at least one Cadre Adjunct. We Adjuncts were warned not to deviate from our usual routines in any way, and we knew that abnormally reserved behavior could be detected by comparison to the record. Further viewing requirements followed, until everyone was required to watch someone they knew well for a day. The demand to observe others, from those in high authority to everyday associates, was in inversion of the usual demand to be observed which served to show, by example, that nothing one did which was not socially destructive should be shameful. Every Hive citizen is now required to do this as a part of their standard education. It has been remarkably effective: to this date, routing-related psychological issues are so rare as to be effectively eradicated as a social ill.
Still, this is cold comfort for the victims' loved ones. Everyone who helped to unravel this tragedy wishes that they could have prevented it, but none of us knows how we could have: limited time resources for surveillance made it hard to know who to observe and for what, even when we realized the need for generalized suicide watches. The victims would have benefited from knowing who was willing to betray them. The victims' loved ones would have benefited from knowing who the victims were and what they were feeling. Even today there are still issues with taboo-related privacy crimes. The longer-term effect of the Routing Tragedy was to make the first Chiron-born generation so adverse to privacy of any kind as to make their children see privacy itself as a forbidden fruit, when they come to conceive of it themselves, resulting in what psychologists call "privacy fixation." This is not only dangerous as a threat to the values of social transparency but for the risk this presents for enabling crime.
All these problems stem from the fundamental limitation of total surveillance: recording actions only provides a guide to future actions if people are being sincere. This is because sincerity of conduct is the only available insight on others' minds. Discerning from behavioral and body language clues what others are thinking is often difficult enough in person, but it is nearly impossible from simply watching recordings. So long as the mind remains opaque, society cannot be fully transparent.
On Solidarity
But the mind is not opaque to all on Chiron. Unfortunately for many of our brave military personnel, there is one observer on Chiron who sees the truth of human hearts without fail, who holds up a living mirror on our souls: the mindworm. This entity seems, by as yet unknown means, to be able to see into our thoughts and memories. It uses this ability for a truly horrific goal: to psychologically incapacitate human beings by forcing them to experience their worst fears, most troubling doubts, and sources of deepest shame so that they can burrow into our brains and devour them, leading to an unimaginably painful death. Without this ability, the mindworm is small and frail and easily crushed underfoot. But it takes incredible resolve to overcome their psychological attacks.
For years, I have been studying the nature of their attacks and how to defend against them. There is a scale of severity to them, with those based on fear, the most common, being the least potent and the most easily recovered from. The worst attack a mindworm can launch causes shame, and it is the hardest to recover from for those who survive. Specialists on treating the victims of the Routing Tragedy have found their expertise needed once again. Reports from the field indicate the possibility of new and more potent attack-types: desire attacks which stun victims by presenting them with the specter of what they most crave may be worse the shame, and the awful fungal tower may incite betrayal in the ranks of soldiers, infecting them with a sense their their own comrades are plotting against them.
Still, we must deal with what we know for sure. It can be shown that the stronger a boil of mindworms is, the more likely they are to use more potent attacks. In light of this, I have set about a project of social engineering designed to minimize a population's capacity for shame. A people who love and accept and trust themselves cannot be shamed into defeat. This has the happy synergistic effect of also improving support of social transparency overall. Indeed, prevention of conspiracy and prevention of self-harm and accountability of the powerful must make room for a new benefit to transparency by total surveillance: resistance to mindworm attacks based on shame. Minimization, however, is not eradication, and while this project of mine has proven beneficial to the perpetuation of the transparent society, I suspect that we will never be able to really address the secrets - both socially destructive and self-destructive - which lurk in our hearts without our hearts being visible to all.
It is for this reason that I have a suggestion for future research efforts: we must try to discover how mindworms are able to execute their psychological attacks. What can be used to harm us with our secrets can be used to productively uncover and address them. When we have the ability to discern the truth of the human heart in the way that these aliens do, only then can we build the truly transparent, secure, and accountable society of which he dream.