As the silly season comes to a close with today’s election (at least for, like, a week or so) there’s a change to the political process I’ve been thinking about a lot. And it’s not e-voting, election fraud, or other issues we’ve occasionally discussed.
On this site (and others) we’ve discussed the ongoing erosion of personal privacy. More of our personal information is publicly available, or stored in private databases unlocked with a $ shaped key, than society has ever experienced before. This combines with a phenomena I call “The Long Archive”- where every piece of data, of value or not, is essentially stored for eternity (unless, of course, you’re in a disaster recovery situation). Archived web pages, blog posts, emails, newsgroup posts, MySpace profiles, FaceBook pages, school papers, phone calls, calendar entries, credit card purchases, Amazon orders, Google searches, and …
Think about it. If only 2% of our online lives actually survives indefinitely, the mass of data is astounding.
What does this have to do with politics?
The current election climate could be described as mass media shit-slinging. Our current crop of elected officials, of either party, survives mostly on their ability to find crap on their opponent while hiding their own stinkers. Historically, positive electioneering is a relative rarity in the American political system. We, as a voting public, seem to desire pristine Ken dolls we can relate to over issues-focused candidates. No, not all the time, but often enough that negative campaigning shows real returns.
But the next generation of politicians are growing up online, with their entire lives stored on hard drives. From school papers, to medical records, to personal communications, to web activity, chat logs (kept by a “trusted” friend) and personal blogs filled with previously private musings. It’s all there. And no one knows for how long; not really. No one knows what will survive, what will fade, but all of it has the potential to be available for future opponent research.
I’m a bit older, but there’s still an incredible archive of information out there on me, including some old newsgroup posts I’m not all that proud of (nothing crazy, but I am a bit of a geek). Maybe even remnants of ugly breakups with ex-girlfriends or rants never meant for public daylight. Never mind my financial records (missed taxes one year, but did make up for it) and such. In short, there’s no way I could run for any significant office without an incredibly thick skin.
Anyone who started high school after, say, 1997 is probably in an even more compromising position. Anyone in the MySpace/FaceBook groups are even worse off.
With so much information, on so many people, there’s no way it won’t change politics. I see three main options:
- We continue to look for “clean” candidates- thus those with limited to no online records. Only those who have disengaged from modern society, and are thus probably not fit for public leadership, will run for public office. The “Barbie and Ken” option.
- We, as society, accept that everyone has skeletons, everyone makes mistakes, and begin to judge candidates on their progression through those mistakes or ability to spin them in the media of the day. We still judge on personality over issues. The “Oprah/Dr. Phil” option.
- We focus on candidate’s articulations of the issues, and place less of an emphasis on a perfect past or personality. The “Issues-oriented” option.
- We weigh all the crap on two big scales. Whoever comes out slightly lighter, perhaps with a sprinkling of issues, wins. The “Scales of Shit” option.
Realistically we’ll see a combination of all the above, but my biggest concern is how will this affect the quality of candidates? We, as a society, already complain over a lack of good options. We’re limited to those with either a drive for power, or a desire for public good, so strong that they’re willing to peel open their lives in a public vivisection every election cycle.
When every purchase you’re ever made, email, IM or SMS, blog post, blog comment, social bookmark, WhateverSpace page, public record, and medical record becomes open season, who will be willing to undergo such embarrassing scrutiny?
Will anyone run for office for anything other than raw greed? Or will we, as a society, change the standards by which we judge our elected officials.
I don’t know. But I do know society, and politics, will experience a painful transition as we truly enter the information society.
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Here again, for your reading pleasure, is the text of the original post:
Read it. At Securosis.
People who anticipate a career in the public eye are more careful than those who don’‘t, which means people who are surprised by an unanticipated desire to enter public roles may have already disqualified themselves.
Similarly, what is now handled as a “youthful indiscretion” will now be permanently on the record. If you beat up another kid, or set an accidental fire, and your records are sealed as a minor, the newspaper headlines will still be online for the rest of your life. What if an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend posts bad things about you on the web, and a recruiter finds them in Google years later? Does anyone expect recruiters to call a job prospect and ask for an explanation (thus opening themselves up to liability if they aren’‘t completely convinced, or if they are convinced but are later demonstrated to be wrong)??
There will be a lot more ways to expose yourself to negativity. What if you have an Amazon buddy, and that person positively reviews a Holocaust denier’s book? What if you link to a band on MySpace, and one of their members later becomes a Klan member? Anyone who doesn’‘t like you (or the band member), or just does a thorough search (which is increasingly automatable) will find the connection This kind of stuff is anonymizable, at least at the per-incident level, although the whole gestalt may be unavoidable.
Today, pregnant women with more money or help from others are more able to reach abortion clinics than poor isolated women without cars. In the future, will rich kids get better advice on how to keep their profiles clean, and anonymous cash cards?
David Brin has been saying for years (before McNealy, and before Google existed) that we will have to give up our ideas of privacy because there will be none. I don’‘t like this idea, but privacy is certainly in the middle of a long-term decline.