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I'm fairly confident you mean "The Transparent Society", which happens to be one of my all time favorites. While its true Brin advocates giving up the illusion
by mercutio2 14y ago
I'm fairly confident you mean "The Transparent Society", which happens to be one of my all time favorites.
While its true Brin advocates giving up the illusion of privacy and (especially poignantly) that we should stop screwing around pretending identity keys are secrets, he does so in a framework that we should each individually own and control our identities, a position which seems to me antithetical to the noxious "we own your identity and can screw with you at will" approach Facebook has taken.
I hate that Facebook captured the social space.
- wpietri 14y agoAh yes, thanks for the correction. I agree with you about not liking Facebook's capture of the medium. But I think the main way people are fighting that now is by pretending that they can go back to the age of privacy. I wish we could get past that.
- mercutio2 14y agoYes, I agree completely that even very technical people often have a surprising blind spot, thinking either we can put the database/facial recognition/cheap cameras genie back in the bottle, or alternately that leaving no digital trace is a Good Idea for the mainstream. One good thing Facebook has done is demonstrate that most people (arguably with a lot of unethical shifting of visibility preferences) are happy to live portions of their life in public. These people are not sheep, they're happy sharing portions of their identities. If only we had more nuanced, robust, personally controlled identity infrastructure. Much harder to achieve with Facebook owning a rudimentary, simplistic but very large subset of the social graph.