To Look or Not to Look?

The Question

What would happen if all of sudden you could see right through the facade of everyone and everything? Would you feel empathy and relate to some of what you saw? Would you shun other aspects of humanity less agreeable to your own perspective? What if at the same time that you saw through everyone and everything, they saw right back through you? Everyone would be naked (metaphorically speaking) and humanity would have to let it all hangout. If we lived in a world where secrets could not exists, would we all have to be 100% accountable for our actions? Would morality have a new compass and would liberty have a new meaning?

Early Transparency Model

In Peter Singer's Visible Man: Ethics in a World without Secrets, readers are introduced to the idea of the Panopticon as defined by Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon being a large circular room ringed with smaller cellular rooms and having an elevated pedestal in the middle of it from which a watcher would stand. The idea being that the people in the cells would never know when they were being watched by the watcher because of a series of blinds and walls. Because they never know when someone is watching them, the people in the cells are pressured into acting in a more moral or agreeable way. The problem with this design it that the watcher is not held accountable and he is in no way pressured to act as morally or agreeably as the people in the cells.

Today's Transparency Conflict

After watching Erasing David and reading Singer's essay, it becomes easy to say that many modern governments and corporations have positioned themselves as watchers stationed at the center of their own Panopticons. What that means for the average person is that their lives are becoming more and more transparent and their governments are becoming less and less transparent or at least remaining only semi-transparent. As viewers are shown when watching Erasing David, the increasing amount of information that the average person leaves behind is becoming easier and easier for governments and corporations to collect and use as tools to invade the little privacy people have left. At the same time that our own privacy is shrinking, people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are trying force more transparency from governments and corporations in order to shrink the privacy barrier at the cost of their own well-being.

Transparent Solution?

In order for any solution to the privacy problems of the new age to work, a level of respect and trust needs to be established between all parties. World peace would definitely help the current situation, but that seems more like a dream than anything right now. The fact is both governments and people alike have to stop doing things that make them feel like they need to hide their actions. The paranoia that a majority of the world carries around from worrying about who is going to attack them next creates a need be secretive. Until we can all trust each other and accept many of the qualities that make us different, we will hide in shame and live in paranoia. The idea of trust seem so simple in theory, but the reality of it appears to be more complicated. Maybe we could all get behind the idea of lets be good to each other, but dreams are pure things and reality can feel so dirty.