True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (13 page)

That is, if we can say with a high degree of confidence that all yuppies will do such-and-such (for example, buy a new car within the next three years), and we have assigned you to such a category, then we can infer that you are likely to buy a car within three years. Although professional statisticians caution against such descents from the general to the specific level, nevertheless these predictive techniques are widely used.

Anyone who has ever dealt with a recalcitrant bureaucracy or an unyielding corporate “service” person knows how dehumanizing such a process can be. Classifications are based on particular measurements; differences that are not measured—such as individual variation—do not exist for the purposes of the panoptic sort. On an individual level, we might argue that no matter the accuracy of predictive statistics in regards to any group of people, they do not account for our individual behavior. But once assignments into these groups are made, we are no longer treated as individuals. Instead we become “welfare mothers” or “older graduate students” and are expected to conform to type. Interestingly, people seem eager to assign such labels to themselves, perhaps for the sense of community they feel in being part of an identifiable group. Many groups have used such self-identification to reclaim a sense of history (e.g., the black experience in America) or assert control over terminology (e.g., gays reclaiming the word “queer”).

Classification is never value-neutral; it always includes an assessment, a form of comparative classification. What makes someone “black” is often more a matter of politics than genetics or any other science. In Nazi Germany it was decided that anyone who had at least one Jewish grandparent was thereby Jewish. The income boundaries for such classifications as “upper class” or “middle class” are highly arbitrary and usually reflect the value system of the classifier: Think of the phrase “middle-class tax cut” and how it is used. Even such seemingly objective classifications as medical diagnoses are subject to the vagaries of time and culture: Think of the changes in psychiatric evaluations of female “hysteria” or homosexuality. Statistical techniques cannot take into account these variations.

Assessment is the process of measuring deviance or variation from the statistical norm of the class to which the assignment has been made. Assessment is a risk-avoidance procedure, a means by which the company seeks to limit its risk in relation to possible goods or services it might provide the person involved in the transaction. Assessment also encompasses the delineation of whole classes of people who may be systematically excluded or treated specially. Assessment involves computations based on probability, opportunity reduction, and loss prevention.

Assessment is based on prediction and events today show that prediction techniques are being extended to ever more ambiguous domains. For example, the defense lawyers in the O. J. Simpson trial accumulated detailed profiles on potential jurors and used these profiles to “predict” which people were more like to vote for conviction. These people were, of course, peremptorily challenged to prevent them being on the jury.

Gandy points out that there are actually three kinds of prediction and that each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but these are rarely noted: statistical prediction, based on comparisons of the behavior of a group with the behavior of an individual; “anamnestic” prediction, based on the person's past behavior; and clinical prediction, based on an expert's evaluation of the individual's behavior.

We might instinctively prefer statistical prediction because it is “scientific” and open to proof and challenge of assumptions; however, the meaning of statistics is not often so clear. The fact that a person is a member of a group which is, for example, ninety-five percent likely to buy a new car in three years does not mean that the person in question is ninety-five percent likely to do so.

From the point of view of the panoptic sort, though, this is not relevant. Concerned with optimal efficiency, it appears more efficient to (for example) prevent default than coerce those who might default or who have defaulted.

What Might Be Done

One of the most frightening things about the panoptic sort is that it is not the result of some massive heinous centralized bureaucracy. Rather, it is a particular tragedy of the information commons, wherein each rational actor does that which seems to be in his best business interest but the overall result is the loss of something valuable. In many ways the panoptic sort is not new—it has roots at least as far back as the time-and-motion studies of the early Industrial Age. However, the presence of telecommunications technologies is permitting the extension of control over times and distances which were insurmountable in the past. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern multinational corporation simply could not exist without these technologies and it is these corporations that are the primary agents of the panoptic sort.

One might argue that the simple solution to the problem posed by these corporations' information gathering and to the commons tragedy of the panoptic sort in general is to control the release of information about oneself. Indeed, Gandy discusses the growing refusal of Americans to participate in marketing or opinion surveys and their resistance to official statistics-gathering, such as the U.S. Census. Gandy points out that though awareness of privacy problems is growing, peoples' attitudes toward the problem and potential solutions (such as government regulation) is related to their power relative to the organizations in the panoptic sort. Generally speaking, the more power people believe they have, the less they are concerned (though this can be changed by direct personal experiences with the panoptic sort, especially negative experiences).

Regardless of our power relations, we must face the reality that in order for commercial transactions we initiate to complete, we are compelled to give up information. This is most obvious in something like a credit or loan process, which inevitably begins with an application form that demands specific and often very personal information. People may object to the gathering of such personal information. Nevertheless, Gandy points out that businesses often have what we might all agree are legitimate needs for information about the people they transact business with; the results of giving up that information, though, may turn out to be more than expected. This can be true for even the most trivial-seeming interactions.

Gandy uses a simple and compelling example: Imagine that you go to a tailor to have a pair of pants fitted. It is impossible to complete this transaction without giving the tailor your measurements. But based on these measurements, it would not be difficult to detect a segment of the population which could be characterized as overweight. If your tailor was to share this information with your health insurance company, the consequences could be an increase in your insurance rates.

This example may seem silly: no one's tailor talks to his health insurance company. At least, not yet. But in the near-NII future when both the tailor and the insurance company are “wired” it would be a simple matter for the insurance company to make an electronic query of the tailor and offer an incentive for the list of people whose measurements fit certain criteria. In fact, the information could be automatically transmitted as it is entered into the tailor's (insurance-company-supplied) PDA. The company could then not only incorporate this information in its files, but continue to propagate it, perhaps to vendors of weight-loss plans, to defray the costs.

In summary, the problem is not simple release of information; as the example above shows, we must give out some information in order to get what we need. Rather, the problem is the information's propagation to unknown parties and its application to unknown, unintended uses with unforeseeable consequences. The problem is complicated by the fact that we cannot choose to remove ourselves from participation in the panoptic sort without loss of possibly essential goods and services.

Technology and Marketing

One of the most easily understood (and yet least harmfu)l consequences of the panoptic sort is the increasing pervasiveness and intrusion of marketing. As goods and services proliferate in a capitalist culture, an increasing effort must be made by purveyors to bring their particular product to the attention of potential customers.

Advertisers are always seeking to improve the efficiency of their marketing. Currently, direct-marketing firms that mail to lists of “prospects” consider a three to four percent return rate to be very successful. That means that for every potential customer they contact, they must intrude on and annoy to some degree thirty to fifty other people. The ability to target that three to four percent beforehand is a primary motivation in the panoptic collection of information. We might argue on a detailed basis whether we feel it is desirable for advertisers to have this or that level of information about us. One side might argue that having better information reduces the level of intrusion into our lives; the other might argue that personal information is the property of the person about whom it speaks and that people should be able to choose what information they release to whom.

However, Gandy points out that it is worth asking the larger question of why we must have this debate in the first place. That is, we should consider the relationship of technology to marketing and to capitalist culture at large. Technology is not neutral; it is introduced by parties with interests to further and, in turn, it has ripple effects that can be only dimly foreseen.

One obvious example is the Internet itself: originally conceived as a network for researchers to exchange scientific information, it instead became primarily a rapid-communications medium and a means of establishing nongeographical communities. However, while the street has its own uses for things, often it is the humans who must be reshaped to accommodate the technology. The debate about the acceptable level of advertiser knowledge and intrusion would not be occurring without our having previously been conditioned to accept a continual bombardment of advertising. This subtle reworking of people is also a part of the panoptic process.

Gandy shows that this process, too, has roots in the earliest parts of the Industrial Age and, in fact, significantly predates advertising. He cites and quotes Jacques Ellul, an analyst of technology. Ellul traces the mechanization of the production of bread, pointing out that an attribute of the wheat made it difficult for the machines to produce bread that was like that baked pre-machine. Rather than adapting the machines, industrialists set about to create a demand for a new kind of bread. The goal was efficient (that is, profitable for the owners of the bread-making machines) production, and if people had to be reshaped for efficiency, so be it.

This process has become so ingrained in our culture that we no longer recognize it. As we witness the transformation of the Internet into a marketing medium and locus of business transactions, we should remember how far this process has come. Gandy quotes the modern analyst David Lovekin on this:
Thus, a simple food like potatoes becomes Tater-Tots, something that is not clearly food at all and that contains elements of no clearly known nutritional value. What is clear is that each piece is made to look like the other pieces, identities which are also different, new. McDonald's markets and produces sameness … To understand fast food, a purely technological phenomenon, one must look to the walls and notice the pictures of the food. One buys the picture, which will never nourish, but which will always keep the customer coming back for more; the ever-perfect, indeed, the same hamburger, designed in the laboratory and cooked by computers.

As we watch the development of Web sites promoting ever more unrealistic images of companies and their products, it is both an interesting game and a frightening prospect to imagine what new products we are being conditioned to accept. We see the beginnings of the intrusions of panoptic data gathering on the Web. Sites maintain (and sometimes publish) information about the hosts that connect to them. Many sites require users to “register” or “sign in,” once again enforcing the transactional model of information gathering.

Outcomes

As with any analysis of the present situation and associated trends, the range of possible futures that could be developed is quite large. However, we can characterize a spectrum along which the future probably lies by examining its extreme ends. Here are two futures that lie at opposite ends of a realm of possible results. The first is the Panopticon, the second cryptoprivacy.

The Panopticon

This scenario can be seen as the result of momentum, or inertia, rather than the influence of any specific set of factors. As noted above, the panoptic sort is the result of individual (rational) actors working to further what each sees as his own best interest, his most efficient operation.

In this scenario, nothing much changes: companies continue to migrate to places (both real and electronic) where they are most unencumbered by the regulation of increasingly irrelevant governments. Consumers, anesthetized by media, indifferent to the slow erosion of rights they do not understand, silently acquiesce to the process. Governments may even abet the process, as they chase what Bruce Sterling characterized as “the Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse”: terrorists, child pornographers, drug kingpins, and the Mafia. It is notable that the response to each public tragedy or threat in modern America seems to involve a call for citizens to surrender more of their rights. Recently, we have seen such calls for surrender in response to terrorist bombings and in response to the potential availability of pornography on the Internet.

Privacy is, after all, a notion contextualized by social time and place, and legal history. The modern conception of privacy can be traced back to a law review article published in 1890 by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, titled “The Right to Privacy.” In the future, we may reconceive privacy as something less related to information. Perhaps privacy will come to mean something like the ability to keep our moment-to-moment thoughts from being known by others.