Exposed

8The Upshot

“Stop children— what's that sound? Everybody look what's goin' down.”

– Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth

The rest of this book has examined why total transparency may offer some benefits to humanity and how loss of privacy might not be a complete tragedy. In this chapter, I discuss how the segue between the quasi-private world and one of total transparency might occur.

This is almost certainly a boneheaded effort. Just about everyone who has ever tried to accurately predict anything, from weather to financial markets to elections¹ to human behavior, has been an utter flop; this is more true for technology and the cultural/societal impact of technology than just about every other prediction.² Yes, there have been a few people who have gotten a few things right, among a mass of predictions they, as individuals, have made³—there are even fewer—who have made a bunch of predictions and had them be mostly accurate.

Almost nobody can accurately predict what will happen with innovation and technology and how disruptive and/or beneficial a particular company/idea/invention might be. IT is a fairly young industry (unless we want to include tactile/hard-copy information tech, such as the abacus, literacy, the printing press, telegraph, and other pre-computer developments as “IT”) and has experienced vast transitions for major participants; today's giant might be tomorrow's amoeba.⁴ It's hard to imagine the current major players going out of business or being reduced ...