Technology and Making

When Brand (creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue and CoEvolution Quarterly, two vital touchstones of early computer culture), used that phrase at the first hacker's conference back in 1984, it was immediately seized as a motto by a generation of crackers and phone phreaks.

These were the countercultural explorers who tested the communications networks and computer systems to their limits, broke security measures and invaded closed systems. Occasionally they had malicious intentions, very occasionally they were looking for profit. But most of the time (and this is what their opponents could never understand) it was for the pure joy of making the unknown known, of uncovering secrets and releasing information that had been locked away.

At the time, information systems were a string of digital islands in a stormy and uncharted sea, each one occupied by a distinct and unique tribe with its own customs and treasures, many of them wary of outsiders and watchful for invading threats approaching their shores.

In the eighties, keeping your island defended and your treasures hidden was at least feasible. It took a wild and wily explorer to chart that ocean, climb those jagged cliffs, and learn enough of the language of the natives to infiltrate their society.

Now, the ocean is a sea of constantly flowing traffic, and almost every one of the islands is accessible - in fact, it's no longer possible to be a closed and self-contained digital island any more and function. The smartest islands have bloggers, Twitterers and Facebook gurus spreading the word of their golden idols and sandy beaches.

But still throughout the network, and often in the positions of most significant responsibility, are people who cling to the island mentality. "Hold the beaches, guard the cliffs, let no-one hear about our treasures!"

Enough with the island metaphor already.

The trend that Stewart Brand identified twenty-four years ago is now being tested to its limit in a truly open information environment, and it comes up as true as it's ever been. Information wants to be free - not just wants but is driven to be free by forces as powerful and inevitable as gravity.

The fact is that once information is out, it's damn near impossible to put it back. Once the span of human memory and the survival of a piece of papyrus or vellum were the tenuous connection between a piece of information and the future. Now, carried by materials (magnetic charges and constantly-changing electrical circuits) which are ironically far more volatile, information survives and spreads to an extraordinary extent.

A post on the most ignored blog on the Web has a good chance of being Google-cached, Wayback-Machined and crossposted in a dozen different places by human or automated agencies. And Google may be ahead of the game on storage and indexing, but a thousand competitors are racing to join the quest to save, spread and organise every piece of knowledge available.

Ironically, the organisations with the strongest island mentality - government, law enforcement and monolithic corporations - are also the most eager to have available every piece of information about someone else. Their hypocrisy is bad enough, but the belief that they can somehow guide or dam the flow of information to suit their ends borders on the hilarious.

Now we have not just a small group of technical prodigies who work to spread covert information but an entire population of information-creators and -spreaders, armed with cheap, user-friendly tools.

A contemporary example is the case of the recent G20 summit riots, where CCTV cameras were turned off in many of the potential hotspots of police-protestor violence (a fact, incidentally, not reported in any of the mainstream media I've been able to search), but amateur video footage revealed more than one human rights violation by police officers.

Of course, "Information wants to be free" cuts both ways. It may remain possible in the future, through the exertion of enormous effort and expense, to keep secret such personal information as medical and criminal records, personal relationships and indiscretions. But the evidence so far has indicated that any large collection of data leaks like a sieve, and the gathering of data into large repositories is not going to stop any more than the creation and dispersal of that information.

We may all have to resign ourselves to a future in which there is no way to retain any degree of privacy, a kind of neo-theological universe in which all our sins will come back to haunt us, and the only hope for freedom is never to take an action worthy of criticism.

Of course, the optimistic view is that this kind of all-consuming openness will create a society with much greater tolerance and less need to judge. What do you think? Share your views in the comments.

Labels: anonymity, CCTV, Facebook, freedom of information, Human rights, Information wants to be free, Police, privacy, rights, Security, Stewart Brand, surveillance, Whole Earth Catalog