David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:
The other night I attended a dinner at which we heard brief presentations of their research from a number of ambitious computer scientists. A lot of interesting work is clearly being done on enhancing graphics and on modeling biological systems. The presentation that most struck me, though, was one from a Dr Capra, part of whose work is focused on how the information collectively generated by remote and mobile devices can be used to increase the efficiency of real time decision making.
Very briefly, it is increasingly the case that the content of mobile communications and the information from RFID tags can help us adjust our plans before we encounter the problem, or opportunity, that would compel us to adjust them anyway. Thus if a tube station is out of action or the supermarket is out of Rye bread we could, with the right systems, glean that information before we set out, and without Transport for London or Tesco having to broadcast it. Broadcast would require indiscriminate information provision and create huge problems of relevance and search; whereas the pull model - leveraging what is already available - could, by contrast be highly efficient. The problem is to know what information to trust, or how much of it is required to engender reasonable confidence.
At the time I only commented on how all of the research activity seems to be, in one way or another, about media, in the McLuhan sense of tools that enable us to manipulate the world. But afterwards what struck me most was the contrast between what Dr Capra described and the discussion around the table. The vision she presented is surely one of an increasingly self-organising society, and was totally at odds with the conversation about keeping information secure that was going on around me.
At the same time as, or perhaps because, trust drains away from institutions and comes to rest increasingly with peer groups, so this possibility of self-organising social systems is emerging. Viewed in that light, data security as we know it is a problem of institutions. In a society where the young are increasingly at home with multiple persona's, and where protecting your privacy is tantamount to a refusal to participate in the dance of mutual self-affirmation, the only information that the individual needs to secure is that required of them by institutions. In a very real sense data security, an apparently huge problem, may in fact be only a fin de siècle challenge - one of transition.
Of course it's not as simple as that, and I am not naive enough to believe that a fully self-organising society which at the same time guarantees the safety and opportunity of all its members will emerge any time soon. But it is interesting to reflect that security and surveillance are, in a very real sense, about institutions fighting for their right to exist. The natural authority with which society once imbued them has gone - now they assert it through exactly these tools of control. I'm uncomfortable with that, more because it smacks of an authoritarianism that has not been publicly legitimised, than the way it impacts me on a daily basis. Security has become the modern manifestation of the divine right of kings.
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