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 Bush Administration wanted to control information so it could control the story of Iraq.
- The copyright industries wants to control information so they can keep getting paid for their product.
- Whenever anyone installs a camera, or a database, you probably scream privacy.
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.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Greg on July 30, 2005 12:31 PM writes...
Hi Dana;
I read your translucency story and thoroughly dug it - it put its finger on a trend in a way I hadn't seen elsewhere.
My best friend owns a site promoting bodybuilding products. He originally started off with a copyrighted book about bodybuilding, but had to expand his offering into tangibles and online retail because of this trend.
One thing I'd like to add though: I've been a Scientologist for over two decades. The Church of Scientology has a bit of a unique situation when it comes to translucence, shared actually by other models such as martial arts instructors and the teaching of any skilled, delicate and potentially life-changing technology: In this model, translucence is used to obtain correct application.
The great majority of data in Scientology is accessible to the public. But the exact processes that are applied in an exacting manner to bring about an increated level of awareness in a human being - those are guarded with degrees of translucence. For example, a Scientologist can do any service he wants up to Clear (as long as prereq courses are already completed) - but to do levels above Clear, one must be invited. This invitation usually comes after one has proven his contribution to society, through community service and charitable work. Thus the Church encourages a charitalbe mindset in its members.
Furthermore, the training levels above Clear involve rigorously exacting procedures which, done wrong, could affect someone negatively. (Thus my comparison to surgery, though I realize it's a flawed analogy.)
Anyway, my point is that copyright holders don't only use copyrights to make a buck - the Church of Scientology provides an interesting case study of an organization that uses copyrights to preserve orthodoxy of application - a first in religion's history, but imagine if previous religious teachers could have enforced standard application this way? Instead of a million branches of any ideology each insisting on one interpretation, we could have a unified, standard and accurate portrayal of the Founder's original vision. (An example I can think of outside religion is Montessori, a great teaching method. It has already split up into two or three branches due to non-standard application.)
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