Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

by Hal Abelson

Technology changes and social changes reinforce each other. Another way of looking at the technological reasons for our privacy loss is to recognize that the social institutions enabled by the technology are now more important than the practical uses for which the technology was originally conceived. Once a lifestyle change catches on, we don't even think about what it depends on.

More than being taken, personal privacy has been given away quite freely, because everyone else is doing it—the surrender of privacy is more than a way to social connectedness, it is a social institution in its own right.

Our traditions of hierarchical classification are evident everywhere. We just love outline structures.

we are likely to think of our search engine as something like a public utility—a combination of an encyclopedia and a streetlamp, a single source supplying endless amounts of information to anyone. In economic terms, that is a poor analogy. Utilities charge for whatever they provide—water, gas, or electricity—and search firms don't. Utilities typically don't have much competition, and search firms do. Yet we trust search engines as though they were public utilities because their results just flow to us, and because the results seem consistent with our expectations.

When we search for something, we have an unconfirmed confidence that what the search engine returns is what exists.

c.f. Kahneman: What You See Is What There Is

Technological inventions, no matter how solid in theory, will not be used for everyday purposes if they are inconvenient or expensive. The risks of weak systems are often rationalized in attempts to avoid the trouble of switching to more secure alternatives.

The universality of bits gives mankind a rare opportunity. We are in a position to decide on an overarching view of information. We can be bound in the future by first principles, not historical contingencies. In the U.S., the digital explosion has blown away much of the technological wrapping obscuring the First Amendment. Knowing that information is just bits, all societies will be faced with stark questions about where information should be open, where it should be controlled, and where it should be banned.

The dramatic pluralism of our information sources threatens to create a society where no one learns anything from people with whom they disagree.

The threat has become concrete in 2016, with the electorate inhabiting disjunct, non-consensual realities.

Claude Shannon was the bits Prometheus.