BigHook2013: Who's Watching.

September 4-6, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

The theme for BigHook2013, "Who's Watching," could be a question but it isn't.

Back in 1995-6, the Opportunity Discovery Department at AT&T Bell Labs Research, working with Peter Schwartz, Napier Collyns, Stewart Brand, and other Global Business Network folks, put together a set of scenarios for the future of the Internet. One of those was a future in which the Internet had become so surveilled and censored -- and everybody knew it -- that it had become a hostile place for dissident, creative, artistic and other non-main-stream activities. This network was literally degenerate. It had lost its generativity. It was no longer a platform for anything other than the most mundane kinds of innovation and the most mainstream kinds of expression. It was still indispensable for such activities of daily life as banking, shopping, getting the weather forecast and reading the official version of the news, but playfulness had been replaced by fear, and the net's chaotic nature and disruptive potential had given way to regimented politeness with an underlay of vandalism, griefing and petty crime. The Internet wasn't cool anymore. Young people wouldn't go there to play. Innovation stalled. Disruption stopped. Nothing to see here, move along.

On June 23, @dymaxion tweeted "Info disclosure, like humor, is a social weapon. Using it up a power gradient is good, but down one is violent." In humor, it's why telling jokes about political leaders, or the super-rich, or your boss is OK, while telling sexist/racist jokes, jokes about the disabled, etc., is not OK.

For information disclosure, let's state explicitly that "Who's Watching" is potentially symmetrical -- it could mean we're watching them or they're watching us. The Internet allows both. In my opinion, it's good when we know what our government is doing and it's not so good when they know what we're doing. Unfortunately, the balance of power tilts more towards them watching us, whereas when we watch them such watching is framed as law breaking, aiding the enemy, and theft of intellectual property.

Now, of course there's limits. Some of the things that the government does should properly be secret, and some of the things we do the government should know about -- but in both cases, in my opinion, the scope should be rigorously and explicitly specified and tightly circumscribed.

We're also talking about commercial activity when we talk about Who's Watching. Here again watching is, at first examination, symmetrical. The Internet expands what a customer can know about a vendor and its products and also what a vendor can know about its customers. Of course it is to a buyer's advantage to know as much as possible about vendors and products. As Andrew Odlyzko has pointed out (e.g., in Privacy, Economics and Price Discrimination on the Internet [.pdf]) knowing your customer is the key to charging what the market will bear. Do economies of scale and the frictionless nature of the net tilt the customer-vendor symmetry?

Many other watching relationships (parents/children, spouses, teachers/students, business competitors, other ("foreign") governments, etc.) are changed by the Internet -- it might be worthwhile for us to understand the implications of these changes too.

In closing, let me remind returning BigHook participants and explain to new ones that the annual theme is not designed to constrain the conversation! Anything related to the network we want to leave to our grandchildren is fair game. The theme is simply to give the discussion a central tendency. This year, though, Who's Watching gives us much to discuss.

Agenda

Wednesday, September 4

Noon to 1:30 PM: Check in, lunch, swimming, meet fellow participants
1:30 to 3:30 PM: Session 1a: Extended Personal Introductions
3:30 to 4:00 PM: Break
4:00 to 5:30 PM, Session 1b: More Intros, Intro to Who's Watching
5:30 to 8:00 PM: Dinner
8:00 to 9:30 PM, Session 2: Spectacular Music, "A completely different take on visibility and security," by Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory
9:30 to Whenever: Whatever