Future Here Now

Coming Soon: Victoria has a secret, and now everyone knows it.

It’s incredibly hard sometimes for us to see the ramifications of something we’ve gotten completely used to. I’ve talked more than once here about how our nearly universal access to immediate information promises to transform, well, everything — business, education, school, government, social policy, you name it. And yeah, we get that… in our heads.

We are so used to Googling literally any random question we can think of that even us old-timers, who remember encyclopedias and atlases and the like, take the fact that we can get the answer to almost anything, from anywhere, as a given. Duh. Even when I write about that here, it feels all Captain Obvious.

But we seldom think through to the next step:

What does it mean to live in a world where there are no secrets?

Even information that is supposed to be protected — your password, a private business’s revenue history, a presidential Chief of Staff’s text messages — can be uncovered with enough persistence and skill (and in the case of …