Note: The blogster considered changing the display name of the Twitter account to "Aristrottel"** to signal some awareness of excessive basement philosophy but then figured why do today what you can do tomorrow.
What little thinking underlies this post was spurred by the fact that Whistleblower Edward Snowden has taken to Twitter and caused quite a splash.
The blogster decided to regard this act as establishing normality, as further confirmation that the sky does not fall. The metaphor is a bit tired, but since it appears that astrophysicist Neil Tyson encouraged Mr. Snowden to take to Twitter, "the sky does not fall" seems a good choice.
Whenever someone blows the whistle, the world inevitably gets flooded with doomsday scenarios, and, just as inevitably, they don't materialize.
Of course, reputations get damaged, relationships may suffer, citizens may realize they have been duped by government, by corporations, by institutions.
But the sky stays up there [apology for using "up"].
Even if the sun no longer rotates around the earth, even if The Daily Show quietly fixes the incorrect rotation of the earth.
Whistleblowers show us that we live in a narrative, in a set of stories and rules, by breaking or at least piercing a narrative.
All whistleblowers do this, for example, the internationally unknown German jobcenter/EDD worker who showed Germans that the labor market and benefits reforms sold under the narrative of "assist and assert" (our translation of "fördern und fordern"), is a suboptimal, punishing system, or - in the words of the grumpy K-Landnews TheEditor - "a subsidy to business with a maximum time of one month between releasing the money to its arrival in business cash registers, but with the side benefit of feeding and housing the disadvantaged".
So, yes, whistleblowers generally cause trouble for those invested in the smooth and profitable running of a government or a corporation.
And the sky does not fall.
Except for those who are challenged and those who feel challenged.
Take Mr. Snowden as an example this time. We all know the names of some very powerful people who felt challenged by him. But, as regular readers of this blog may expect, the powerful folks are not our main concern - they get and create all the media coverage they can want.
We prefer to talk about the others, the citizens behind the statistics, because that's where it gets interesting. Reactions to whistleblowing are multifaceted, so we'll talk about two groups of citizens only: co-workers and the man in the street.
Co-workers, the immediate ones as well as the generic "people working in the field" always produce some of the most ferocious critics of a whistleblower. Naturally, co-workers have expertise in processes and procedures, making them well placed to point out slants or errors on the part of the whistleblower or, more to the point, on the part of the intermediaries who present documents and issues to the public.
But there is a well documented phenomenon, which the blogster last read about with regard to a doctor in the British NHS who alerted the public to avoidable deaths in the facility.
Co-workers, equally unhappy in private, not only remained silent but in some cases turned against him.
Again, there are many reasons for this, from the need to feed a family to simply not wanting to pick a fight, from the fear of ending up on a blacklist - like British construction workers - to the sense that replacing one talking head with another won't fundamentally change the environment.
But in the case of huge leaks, like Daniel Ellsberg or Edward Snowden, another group becomes visible: the envious co-workers somewhere in lower to middle management, the ones who buy into "going through channels", who see what goes wrong yet who feel good about their competitive power - only to find their egos bruised by "some analyst" or a "29 year old system administrator".
They are relentless, half Superman, half Walter Mitty, driven as much by the shame of not speaking out as by the frustration that the world doesn't appreciate them pointing out a missing comma or a badly explained Powerpoint slide.
In the context of the Snowden revelations, it's largely those people who point at the "man in the street" and repeat the mantra of "look, no big privacy demonstrations" and "people give their data away to the Googles and the Facebooks" in the most arrogant way.
You can refute these arguments in various ways, just search the internet for pros and cons.
But above all: ignore the polls that purport to tell you citizens don't value privacy. Feel free to attack me as resistant to facts or as a wing nut, if it makes you feel better.
To make a long story short, normal people do care about privacy.
Talk to them, and listen to them. And what you will find is that even the most prolific Facebook users have significant areas in their lives they would rather remain private. Watch John Oliver's Moscow interview with Edward Snowden, if you need a reminder of one of the common boundaries most people draw.
Or look at our "elites" - their desire for privacy has actually never been greater in all of history. While your average French nobleman around the time of the French revolution would happily sit and shit next to fellow nobles in the hallways of the palace of Versailles, even today's smallest public events in the West feature few such acts as long as enough port-a-potties are around. Your run of the mill millionaire generally spends good money on private living quarters. If you read the glossy marketing brochures for luxury accommodation, you will find ample praise for "privacy and security", and no mention of a "balance between privacy and security".
At the most fundamental level, privacy is safety and security, as the cat people among you may have noticed. Have you ever had an indoor cat that asks you loudly, clearly and repeatedly to vacate the bathroom so she can use the litter box?
Everything else around "privacy" has, if you will, evolved as legal clutter, as some humans insisted they could barge in on others, or spread the latest confession booth news without accountability, or started to use the telephone.
When you listen to "normal" people beyond the fatalistic "not worried about privacy", you are pretty much guaranteed to find, in the words of the great Quinn Norton, not apathy but helplessness. But as individuals, our need for privacy tends to be lower in situations that pose little to no threat or provide rewards. Thus, to use imagery inspired by John Oliver, it is no contradiction that the gated community millionaire will only let select people enter this space but happily attend an orgy at a swingers' club full of strangers and perform acts that tend to rank high on the privacy scale.
By the same token, it is easy to see that citizens will "give data" if they feel reasonably safe or have no other choice. If you tell someone they will have to bring their complete resume and the last two years' of their internet browsing history to the bar next time they want to have a quiet drink in a dimly lit setting, you should expect some push back. If you tell them they will have to leave a copy with the bar tender, your bar will go broke unless you make it next to impossible to get booze and socialize elsewhere.
** Fusion of Aristotle and the German word "Trottel", halfwit, plus all of these meanings.
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