I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I was going to do a series on two ways of framing up the fundamental changes that are driving so much of our sense that the methods that we learned coming up are no longer working. This is the first of the first framing — the Sea Changes, which are basic conditions underlying everything else we will talk about. I think of Sea Changes as wind or water. None of us control them, but they have a tendency to push us in a particular direction. If we are looking act effectively in our communities, our work and our own lives, we need to understand where the wind and the waves and the currents are pushing us. And where they are pushing us is not in the same direction as it was when many of our assumptions and expectations were formed.
This piece attempts to explain the first Sea Change: near-frictionless access to information, which is something that has never happened before in human history. I don’t use this one in my talks because it’s a little too obscure, but it’s one of my personal favorite ways of showing one of the most crucial impacts of frictionless information: the Panopticom.
This is the most technology-driven of the sea changes, and I’m shamelessly borrowing this term from the great sage Peter Gabriel. Yes, this guy. Don’t let the goofiness fool you. This guy has been one of the best futurists I know of for more than 20 years. Do a YouTube dive on him post -2000 sometime, and you’ll see what I mean.
Gabriel put out a song last year called “Panopticom.” It’s a play on a thought experiment from an 18th-century philosopher. In that thought experiment, the philosopher theorized that you could control a whole prison worth of people with one guard – IF that guard could see you, and you couldn’t tell whether the guard was looking at you or not. This idea was used in the twentieth century to explore authoritarianism - thing Big Brother and Orwell’s 1984.
Gabriel turns that idea on its head. He writes that
We pour the medicine down
While we watch the world around us
We got witness on the ground taking in the evidence
And we reach across the globe
We got all the information flowing
You face the mother lode tentacles around you
We see video of cities on the other side of the world bis being bombed, in real time, and the person who is being hurt in that moment looks us in the eyes through the camera. We search millions of words of text messages to find the smoking gun that proves a politician’s corruption. We can read a hundred individuals explaining how structural racism hurts them, personally, and we can never claim again that we didn’t know.
We have immediate information, directly from the source, with next to no effort on our part as viewers and readers. That has never, never happened in all of human civilization’s history.
All of a sudden, there are no gatekeepers.
Um, duh. We know that. We’re living that.
But how does that change us?
There are about a hundred different directions I could go with that. But I’m going to stick to one.
Soon, there will be no successful coverups. One direct impact of the Panopticom.
We are seeing the Panopticom, that near-frictionless view of everything, with conspirators who are convicted on the basis of their text messages. We see this when a company tries to “greenwash” its products, and that gets exposed. We see that when a citizen sleuth writes a macro in 10 minutes to search a CSV download of the city’s payments to find the details on a questionable contractor.
And we see it most of all when someone takes the advice of an attorney or a PR agent and tries to hide or sidestep the truth. More often than not, that backfires worse than a simple admission.
Pundits question whether we can handle all of this, whether we get information overload and stop caring, or whether we will not be able to tell the real thing from the deep fakes. And as Gabriel indicates, that near-frictionless information raises some risks, too. This is a real and serious problem, and one that is hurting individuals right now. But I also think this is a relatively short term problem - one that we have no choice but to address in the next 5-10 years.
And based on what we are seeing from our youngest digital natives, who already manage massive information streams and spot “sus,” even with completely inadequate formal training, I think that will ultimately figure it out.
The existence of eddiesmaatters to the sailor, but they also don’t change the tide.
Here’s Peter Gabriel’s song, “Panopticom.”