Thursday, December 23, 2010

PEERING AT SECRETS

I told my friend Tim a funny story about camel drivers.  I had no idea how apt it is.  The drivers put a pebble in the uterus of a camel they are using for a long trip so they won’t get pregnant, a sort of primitive IUD.  This camel driver lifted up the tail of his camel to make sure it had a pebble (you can imagine the moaning protest) and was startled to see an eye staring back at him.  In the end it turned out that some high-tech driver had put a shiny ball bearing in there.  It was highly reflective.

But the eerie feeling that camel driver had for a few minutes is going to be creeping up on a lot of internet creeps when they realize that they are no longer secret.  Transparency has found the masses.  Us ball bearings are reflecting on who’s peering under the camel’s tail.  Google Metrics, which was designed to tell merchants who was hitting their websites (by url, not by name) and where they lingered longest, is now revealing bullies and hackers and stalkers.  This will change society far more than any Wikileak, but it will be one little epiphany at a time, not a huge data dump of international tipi creeping.   Big changes often come through the accumulation of small changes.  Partly this will be because the object of a malicious post will be VERY interested in finding out who is sending it and might even have a few real life clues.  This is quite unlike the huge accumulations of vaguely relevant material and occasionally scary info sucked up in Wikileaks.

I’ve said many times that in circumstances where money doesn’t matter, either because of too much of it or none of it, then secrecy becomes a kind of currency.  But a secret is worth nothing unless you know where to tell it and when.  It’s like any other kind of value gradient:  acquire at low cost/risk, sell at high cost/risk, but you don’t necessarily need recompense in money.  Privilege will do.  Control, power, status.  And again, it is like an object with value -- you have to keep it a secret.  And you have to “handle” that secret, which means that it can’t throw your own internal emotions and sense of reality off base.  What if you really knew a dangerous secret: a suicide bomber, the end of the world, a fatal crack in the fuel tank of a moon rocket -- could you handle the truth?  What would you do?  Would you know whom to tell?  Possibly the most marketable secret of all is the true identity of who knows the secrets and how they got them in the first place.  The first rule of merchandise is acquiring it and the second rule is keeping where and how a secret.

There is another angle to being able to handle the truth.  It is related to stigma, which controls the value of the secret. If there is no stigma attached to being born out of wedlock or being gay or having had an affair while married, then there is no need for secrecy.  Scandal and extortion dwindle daily as we grow more and more accustomed to knowing things about each other.  “Don’t ask, don’t tell” gave too much value to secrets, until the value began to distort lives.  Still, some people can’t handle the truth.  Why should we be forced into pretense to spare their feelings?  Why can’t they grow up? 

But some are busy trying to stigmatize more and more things, trying to build a scandal around the secrets they know -- often fairly obvious things that we pretend do not exist.  What do we make of assertions that one third of women on reservations have been abused?  Do we deny it?  Do we imply it’s because they deserve it, maybe because they are Indians (and use words like “squaw” to carry that idea)?  Do we say that happens to ALL women or do we assume that Indian women are a targeted population, justifiably paranoid?   Do we say “this is NOT normal!  What’s happening?”  Or do we say “Clearly law enforcement, counseling, refuge houses, and a publicity campaign all need to be funded?”  Then do we pull out who has done what to whom, or do we declare amnesty but say,  “in future all offenders must register where they live.”  Thus spawning more secrets.

Some people associate secrecy with security:  hiding your money means it is safe.  Other people think that by keeping symptoms secret they can successfully deny a disease or injury, so my great-grandmother died of breast cancer which she hid until it was too late and the abscess began to smell.  At the time cancer was considered a punishment, a stigmata.

Secrecy in the sense of mystery, like patented ingredients in treats or meds, can be either alluring or threatening.  How do you know what is safe?   And what about the allure of the Great Mystery of Life which charlatans exploit by claiming that they are the only ones who Really Know, but will tell you -- for a price.  Maybe just the price of a movie ticket to watch a movie star become dazzled by number puzzles and strange icons from the Masonic tradition.

Secrets always purport to be truth, but how do you know that’s what they are?  Who guarantees secrets?  Who fact checks them?  They wouldn’t be secrets anymore, would they?  Can you trust a Wiki?  Esp. if it is covertly controlled (edited) by parties invested in either building up or tearing down?  Isn’t that covert control a deeper level of secret than what is “revealed” in the wiki post?

On www.edge.org  the Third Force heavy hitter thinkers have been talking to Danny Hillis about all this stuff.  (If I had to be stranded on a desert island with someone, let it be Danny Hillis!)  What I’m getting out of the discussion so far is that equally relevant to our society’s right to know everything because it is a democracy, is our own obligation to handle secrets intelligently when they are told and to tolerate those that ought to be kept secret out of practicality (military strategy) or compassion (your mother hates your guts).  We need educations that give us context and principles for sorting what out matters from what does not. 

The real secret of murder is not who murdered whom and exactly how -- it is why humans murder at all, which is a secret that seems to be a big ball bearing looking back at us from under the camel’s tail.

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