I love the duality of the Jeffrey Rosen piece about the End of Forgetting in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the release of the Afghanistan files via Wikileaks. Citizens and governments are faced with a fundamental challenge to privacy and secrecy. This is not a change in degree, like the advent of photo copiers compared to hand-cranked ink paper (yup, old enough to have used that!). It is a completely different world and many individuals and almost all institutions are in denial about how radical a transformation is ahead of us.
I believe that embracing transparency is a far better approach than any system (legal or technical) for trying to control the information once it it out. The overhead and unintended consequences of those systems would be tremendous. Imagine a world in which you could send a take-down notice to anyone for content that you may deem no longer appropriate. Everything would grind to a halt. Or imagine a world in which information on one of your machines can be deleted automatically by a third party without your consent. The potential for abuse would be horrendous.
I believe that over time the net result of a transparent world will be a real premium on authenticity and direct communication. If you are a person, company or institution that is actually doing more good than bad and you are communicating that directly to the world, then it will be difficult for others to try to “override” your image. This comes with one crucial proviso: it assumes we continue to have net neutrality! Without it, others might manipulate the flow of information in a way that could in fact drown out your own communication.
P.S. If you don’t have have domain yet, at which you control entirely what you communicate, now would be a good time to get one!
