This week's issue of my free weekly newsletter, A-Clue.Com, dealt with issues of copyright and intellectual property. (Subscribe here.)
It is the central issue of our time. Information isn't what it was. But what it was isn't what you were taught it was.
Information doesn't want to be free. It wants to be translucent. (Zach's Magic Rock, courtesy of Texasarrowheads.com, is translucent.)
I have been learning about translucence in my new hobby of bread-making. You know you're done kneading when you can take a piece of dough, pull it apart with your fingers, and see light shining through it before it breaks apart.
Information is like that. It wants to be given to those who will pay for it, in a coin selected by those who hold it.
It has been this way for all of man's history, until the 21st century. You chose your knowledge by aligning your life with those who had both information and a compelling attitude you then took on for yourself. Benjamin Franklin was a Freemason, just as Newton was attached to his Royal Academy, Pasteur to the Ecole, Patton to the Army and George H.W. Bush to the CIA and Yale's Skull & Bones.
Even late in the 20th century, knowledge was only available to those who would pay for it. It was translucent.
In some business models, you paid for information with money. In others, like a university, it also meant work. Sometimes the currency was power. In still others it was faith.
Thus, you could know how much that house around the corner sold for, but it was going to cost you. You could know how to do that operation, but your education will take 10 years and cost a half-million. We'll let you find out about Niger, Ambasssador Wilson, but you must obey the Administration's orders on what you say about it. We're all descended from aliens, Mr. Cruise. Believe it, after you pay to become a clear.
What has happened in our time is that translucense can't work anymore. In the Age of Google everything is transparent. Or, if the hammer comes down, opaque.
Everyone who believes in translucent power has problems with this. Business models are failing, experts are being challenged by amateurs, power is threatened, and the Scientologists are really, really pissed.
The choice being made by most holders of information is to make it opaque, at the same time technology and popular desires increase to make it transparent.
Most of today's controversies involve people who hold information, who are trying to secure it, trying to keep others from getting it, trying to make it opaque.
The point here is that we're not always on the same side of the transparency vs. opacity debate. We want information on our leaders to be transparent, we want the fruits of art to be transparently available, but when it comes to our own trips and dramas, there we want a wall.
We're all analog creatures in a binary world.
The Internet doesn't allow information to be translucent. It's either available or it is not. If it's online it's transparent. If it's not it's opaque.
Newspapers have tried to make data translucent by hiding old stories behind pay gates, or by requiring registrations. What they've created is a lot of false identities. The news still gets out.
Music and movie companies have tried to make data translucent by charging big bucks for it on the one hand, and sending government as well as lawyers after users on the other hand. They have succeeded, so far, mainly in cutting the size of their own markets, making it even more hit-driven (transparent songs and movies succeed), and the data gets out anyway.
Government has moved to make more data opaque, hiding even non-secret stuff in fear "the terrorists" will get it. What they've done is to antagonize their own voters.
The world is moving toward transparency. Even good universities are having to offer online degrees. I've gone way ahead of many newspaper stories I read by just spending 10 minutes on Google.
And this is where the rubber meets the road. Some like to say "there's no longer any privacy - get over it." In many ways they're right. As soon as you do something publicly, anything, you go from being opaque (like my sainted wife) to being transparent (as I am). Don't believe me? Google her. Now Google me.
This is the choice we all face, when we go out in the world. We can be opaque or transparent. It's not that privacy doesn't exist. It's translucense that doesn't exist. You can't bake bread in an Internet world.