A science fiction and tech-vision anthology “about the coming era of transparency in the information age” edited by David Brin & Stephen W. Potts: “Young people log their lives with hourly True Confessions. Cops wear lapel-cams and spy agencies peer at us — and face defections and whistle blowers. Bank records leak and “uncrackable” firewalls topple. As we debate internet privacy, revenge porn, the NSA, and Edward Snowden, cameras get smaller, faster, and more numerous.
Has Orwell’s Big Brother finally come to pass? Or have we become a global society of thousands of Little Brothers — watching, judging, and reporting on one another?
Partnering with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, and inspired by Brin’s nonfiction book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, noted author and futurist David Brin and scholar Stephen W. Potts have compiled essays and short stories from writers such as Robert J. Sawyer, James Morrow, William Gibson, Damon Knight, Jack McDevitt, and many others to examine the benefits and pitfalls of technological transparency in all its permutations.
Among the many questions…
- Do we answer surveillance with sousveillance, shining accountability upward?
- Will we spiral into busybody judgmentalism? Or might people choose to leave each other alone?
- Will empathy increase or decrease in a more transparent world?
- What if we could own our information, and buy and sell it in a web bazaar?…(More)”