Future Here Now: All the Panopticoms
Signals
In this issue:
Big cracks in the AI Black Box
New power: Loud budgeting
Resilience = measuring and monitoring
If you’ve been reading FHN for a while, you might remember when my inner music geek crawled out of the shadows and proclaimed Peter Gabriel the great futurist of this generation. The song that I wrote about from his latest album, Panopticom, continues to roll around in my head more than a year after its release. His theme: access to information has made us less able to be controlled, a la the Panopticon thought experiment of the 1700s. And more able to fight back.
Life in the Panopticom holds the promise of flipping old power structures on their head, because we all have access to all the information. If nothing can be successfully hidden, and moderate internet skills can bring anything hidden into the light, then one of the biggest levers of traditional power — control over information — has lost its ability to compel.
That should change everything, but so far, only in part. The problem at the moment is that too many traditional power-holders are trying, irrationally, to pretend nothing has changed. And in a prime example of an extinction event, they’re responding to the pressure by doubling down.
But, just like in the Wizard of Oz, the curtain is far too easy to pull open. You might be able to bluster people into ignoring the little man behind it for a minute, but before long there is nowhere to hide.
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Production Note: the links to the original articles are in the headlines of each article.
The AI Secret-Breaker
We tend to think of AI as this opaque black box, but as the tech advances, so does the tech that pulls back the blackout curtain and shows us what went inside. The Powers that Be may want AI to be opaque to us, the supposedly mindless followers, but that opaqueness is due to the fact that it’s new, not that we can’t blow it open.
Algorithm manipulation, in social media and AI and lots of parts of our contemporary society, is a problem, no doubt. But it’s a problem today, because it’s new and we haven’t had time to break it yet. We’ve never had more power to undo efforts to control us, because we’ve never had more ability to access information and see behind the curtain. And I think we will be ripping down more and more of those curtains, as we learn how to. Because we can.
And to mix my story lines, we will find that once we pull down the curtain, the Emperors will be feeling a draft.
Loud budgeting
Your finances used to be private, something polite people didn’t talk about, even when it was killing you. Not any more.
I wrote about the new networks for discovering whether you are underpaid at your job a few weeks back – another indicator of the massive power shift that happens when you can’t gatekeep information anymore. The same here with spending choices — with “loud budgeting,” something historically very quiet goes very public…and those who do this gain benefits from doing so.
Pretty much everyone has seen the Wizard of Oz – and knows that scene where Dorothy and Co. pull back the curtain to see the scrawny little guy pretending to be the Mighty and Powerful. We all know what happened to him when the illusion was revealed. And yet, here we have businesses of all types trying to ignore the fact that the curtain hiding their dirty hiring practices has been pulled back, and the value of spending on their products publicly undermined, leaving their weakness and ugliness hanging out for all to see.
You see now how stubbornly we hang on to our belief that nothing has changed, even when we know that’s a lie?
Resilience and risk
Resilience sounds like magic or some innate gift, but it’s not. Resilience – whether a transportation network, or an organization, or your own life – depends on two simple things, seeing what’s happening clearly and acting prudently on that information.
The problem is that we inherently suck at that. Our ancestors lived in a pretty predictable world, up until just a couple of generations ago. We evolved with a tendency to assume that what happens tomorrow will be basically like what happens today. And we do that in damn near everything, from projecting population and land demand to business operations to planning our kid’s post-high school education based on what we experienced. It’s pervasive in us. And it’s more and more wrong.
This article gives us a nice insight into how we can consciously plan for the unexpected. And that requires more than just good intentions. It requires systems for measuring and monitoring, and for responding to the data in a way that (hopefully) takes our assumption of continuity out of the picture.
What do you think? What changes in our communities, our businesses, our organizations, ourselves, whenwe finally come to terms with this sea change in who has power?