Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com)
On the Web: oreilly.com may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
Privacy and Prejudice
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There's a puzzle on the Net, having to do with privacy and prejudice.
Privacy, of course, is a hot issue today, and rightly so. Sitting at my
terminal in my basement, I can probably find out more about you than you
would care to divulge freely. In fact, the question playing itself out
right now in courts and legislative chambers and corporate strategy
meetings is whether we will all be wholly exposed on the Net.
But this sits rather oddly with what many have proclaimed to be the Net's
greatest achievement: it frees us from bias and bigotry. The idea is
that I can't see your age, sex, race, or handicap, and therefore I will
hold no prejudicial feelings against you.
This, as I've pointed out before, is nonsense. We've always managed to
discriminate against each other on the basis of intangibles such as belief
fully as well as on the basis of external traits. In fact, as long as
anything is left of the other person, we can find something to
discriminate against. All of which suggests that our ease in getting rid
of discrimination on the Net is simply our ease in getting rid of the
other person.
But, far from being an end to prejudice, this begins to sound
uncomfortably like that euphemism for murder -- "termination with extreme
prejudice".
So the puzzle is this: are we finding ourselves wholly exposed on the
Net, or are we disappearing into the darkness between the bits and bytes?
The answer, I think, is that both are occurring, and they are fully
consistent with each other. As we reduce ourselves to bodies of
information, collections of data, and screens full of text, we are less and
less there. There isn't much of the individual left to
discriminate against in any deeply personal sense. But at the same time
it's difficult to feel any great respect for the impersonal precipitate of
data that is all we have left.
Our inappropriate exposure on the Net, in other words, is a direct
consequence of our absence from the Net. The two belong together. An
individual whose privacy is worth respecting is also an individual real
enough to be discriminated against by those so inclined. And only a
community whose life together is vivid and multi-dimensional enough to
invite these qualitatively different responses will have any chance to
shape institutions that encourage the respect and discourage the abuse.
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