WR1 Paper Three
In his epilogue to The Attention Merchants, Wu argues that the practices of the attention-capture
industry have profound effects on culture, on society, and on the daily lives of individuals.
Therefore, he claims, we must cultivate a critical awareness of these practices and adjust our own
actions and policies accordingly:
If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the
narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness
of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have.
And we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so
reclaim ownership of the very experience of living (344).
Take a position on the following question: Has the development of digital “New Media” – the
personal computer, the internet, the web, social media, and the smartphone – increased or
decreased the control we, as individuals, have over our lives? Use at least two of the
following readings – Wu, Boyd, Orenstein, Turow, or Singer – for support for your own position
or for counter-arguments. In addition, you should use at least one source that you find through
research.
Support your argument with examples and with clear reasoning. You must also acknowledge
potential objections or arguments opposed to your position, and refute them or appropriately
qualify your own argument.
Essays should be a minimum of four full pages in length, double-spaced, in 12-point Times New
Roman font, and MLA format. Make sure to remove extra spaces between paragraphs.
Important dates:
A 4 page draft is due by the start of class on Tuesday, July 17. Please upload to Canvas and bring
three copies for peer review.
The 4-page final version is due at 11:59 pm on Friday, July 20. Please upload to Canvas.
E
ssay
visible man
Ethics in a world without secrets
By Peter Singer
I
n 1787, the philosopher Jeremy
Bentham proposed the construction
of a “Panopticon,” a circular building
with cells along the outer walls and, at
could also be applied to factories, hospitals, mental asylums, and schools.
Not only would prisoners, workers, the
ill, the insane, and students be subject
quire the threat of an inspector’s presence to be effective. Technological
breakthroughs have made it easy to
collect, store, and disseminate data on
the center, a watchtower or “inspector’s lodge” from which all the cells
could be seen but no one would know,
at any given moment, due to a system
of blinds and partitions, whether he
was actually being observed. Bentham
thought this design would be particularly suited to prisons but suggested it
to observation, but also—if the person
in charge of the facility visited the inspector’s area—the warders, supervisors, caregivers, and teachers. The
gradual adoption of this “inspection
principle,” would, Bentham predicted,
create “a new scene of things,” transforming the world into a place with
“morals reformed, health preserved,
industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burdens lightened.”
The modern Panopticon is not a
physical building, and it doesn’t re-
individuals, corporations, and even
the government. With surveillance
technology like closed-circuit television cameras and digital cameras now
linked to the Internet, we have the
means to implement Bentham’s inspection principle on a much vaster
scale. What’s more, we have helped
construct this new Panopticon, voluntarily giving up troves of personal information. We blog, tweet, and post
what we are doing, thinking, and feeling. We allow friends and contacts,
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at
Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His
books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and The Life You Can Save.
Photographs by Michael Wolf from the Google Street View Portraits series.
Courtesy the artist and Bruce Silverstein, New York City
(31-36) Essay-Singer Final3.indd_0624 31
ESSAY 31
6/24/11 10:48 AM
and even strangers, to know where we
are at any time. We sign away our
privacy in exchange for the conveniences of modern living, giving corporations access to information about
our financial circumstances and our
spending habits, which will then be
used to target us for ads or to analyze
our consumer habits.
Then there is the information collected without our consent. Since
founder Julian Assange, has released
more classified documents than the
rest of the world’s media combined,
to keep tabs on governments and
corporations. When Assange gave
the Guardian 250,000 confidential
cables, he did so on a USB drive the
size of your little finger. Efforts to
close down the WikiLeaks website
have proven futile, because the files
are mirrored on hundreds of other
scrutiny. In other words, will this
technology be a form of tyranny or
will it free us from tyranny? Will
it upend democracy or
strengthen it?
2001, the number of U.S. government organizations involved in spying on our own citizens, both at
home and abroad, has grown rapidly.
Every day, the National Security
Agency intercepts 1.7 billion emails,
phone calls, instant messages,
bulletin-b oard postings, and other
communications. This system houses
information on thousands of U.S.
citizens, many of them not accused
of any wrongdoing. Not long ago,
when traffic police stopped a driver
they had to radio the station and
wait while someone checked records.
Now, handheld devices instantly call
up a person’s Social Security number
and license status, records of outstanding warrants, and even mug
shots. The FBI can also cross-check
your fingerprints against its digital
archive of 96 million sets.
Yet the guarded have also struck
back, in a sense, against their
guardians, using organizations like
WikiLeaks, which, according to its
sites. And in any case, WikiLeaks
isn’t the only site revealing private
information. An array of groups are
able to release information anonymously. Governments, corporations,
and other organizations interested
in protecting privacy will strive to
increase security, but they will also
have to reckon with the likelihood
that such measures are sometimes
going to fail.
New technology has made greater
openness possible, but has this openness made us better off? For those
who think privacy is an inalienable
right, the modern surveillance culture is a means of controlling behavior and stifling dissent. But perhaps
the inspection principle, universally
applied, could also be the perfection
of democracy, the device that allows
us to know what our governments
are really doing, that keeps tabs on
corporate abuses, and that protects
our individual freedoms just as it
subjects our personal lives to public
for more privacy, quite possibly as a
status symbol, since an impoverished peasant could not afford a
house with separate rooms. Today’s
aff luent Americans display their
status not only by having a bedroom for each member of the family, plus one for guests, but also by
having a bathroom for every bedroom, plus one for visitors so that
they do not have to see the family’s
personal effects. It wasn’t always
this way. A seventeenth-c entury
Japanese shunga depicts a man
making love with his wife while
their daughter kneels on the floor
nearby, practicing calligraphy. The
people of Tikopia, a Pacific island
inhabited by Polynesians, “find it
good to sleep side by side crowding
each other, next to their children
or their parents or their brothers
and sisters, mixing sexes and generations,” according to the anthropologist Dorothy Lee. “[A]nd if a
widow finds herself alone in her
32 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2011
T
he standards of what we want
to keep private and what we want to
make public are constantly evolving. Over the course of Western
history, we’ve developed a desire
one-room house, she may adopt a
child or a brother to allay her intolerable privacy.” The Gebusi people in New Guinea live in communal longhouses and are said to
“shun privacy,” even showing reluctance to look at photos in which
they are on their own.
With some social standards, the
more people do something, the less
risky it becomes for each individual.
half a billion are now on Facebook
suggests that people believe the
benefits of connecting with others,
sharing information, networking,
self-promoting, flirting, and bragging outweigh breaches of privacy
that accompany such behavior.
More difficult questions arise
when the loss of privacy is not in
any sense a choice. Bentham’s
Panopticon has become a symbol of
as the state’s erroneous interpretation of the information it uncovers
and the unwarranted detentions
that come about as a result. If those
same powers were used to foil another 9/11, most Americans would
likely applaud.
There is always a danger that the
i n for mation collected will be
misused—whether by regimes seeking to silence opposition or by cor-
The first women to wear dresses
that did not reach their knees were
no doubt looked upon with disapproval, and may have risked unwanted sexual attention; but once
many women were revealing more
of their legs, the risks dissipated. So
too with privacy: when millions of
people are prepared to post personal
information, doing so becomes less
risky for everyone. And those collective, large-scale forfeitures of personal privacy have other benefits as
well, as tens of thousands of Egyptians showed when they openly became fans of the Facebook page
“We are all Khaled Said,” named after a young man who was beaten to
death by police in Alexandria. The
page became the online hub for the
protests that forced the ouster of
President Hosni Mubarak.
Whether Facebook and similar
sites are reflecting a change in social norms about privacy or are actually driving that change, that
totalitarian intrusion. Michel Foucault described it as “the perfection
of power.” We all know that the police can obtain phone records when
seeking evidence of involvement in
a crime, but most of us would be
surprised by the frequency of such
requests. Verizon alone receives
90,000 demands for information
from law-enforcement agencies annually. Abuses have undoubtedly
accompanied the recent increase in
government surveillance. One glaring example is the case of Brandon
Mayfield, an Oregon attorney and
convert to Islam who was jailed on
suspicion of involvement in the
2004 Madrid train bombings. After
his arrest, Mayfield sued the government and persuaded a federal
judge to declare the provision of
the Patriot Act that the FBI used in
investigating him unconstitutional.
But as with most excesses of state
power, the cause is not so much the
investigative authority of the state
porations seeking to profit from
more detailed knowledge of their
potential customers. The scale and
technological sophistication of this
data-gathering enterprise allow the
government to intercept and store
far more information than was possible for secret police of even the
most totalitarian states of an earlier
era, and the large number of people
who have access to sensitive information increases the potential for
misuse.1 As with any large-scale human activity, if enough people are
involved eventually someone will do
something corrupt or malicious.
That’s a drawback to having more
data gathered, but one that may
well be outweighed by the benefits.
We don’t really know how many terrorist plots have been foiled because
Including those involved in international
operations relating to homeland security
and intelligence, 854,000 people currently
hold top-secret security clearances, according to the Washington Post.
1
ESSAY 33
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of all this data-gathering.2 We have
even less idea how many innocent
Americans were initially suspected
of terrorism but not arrested because
the enhanced data-gathering permitted under the Patriot Act convinced law-enforcement agents of
their innocence.
The degree to which a government is repressive does not turn on
the methods by which it acquires information about its citizens, or the
amount of data it retains. When regimes want to harass their opponents or suppress opposition, they
find ways to do it, with or without
electronic data. Under President
Nixon, the administration used tax
audits to harass those on his “enemies list.” That was mild compared
with how “enemies” were handled
during the dirty wars in Argentina,
Guatemala, and Chile, and by the
Stasi in East Germany. These repressive governments “disappeared” tens
of thousands of dissidents, and they
targeted their political enemies with
what now seem impossibly cumbersome methods of collecting, storing,
and sorting data. If such forms of
abuse are rare in the United States,
it is not because we have prevented
the state from gathering electronic
data about us. The crucial step in
preventing a repressive government
from misusing information is to have
alert and well-informed citizens with
a strong sense of right and wrong
who work to keep the government
democratic, open, just, and under
the rule of law. The technological
innovations used by governments
and corporations to monitor citizens
must be har nessed to monitor
those very governments
and corporations.
O
ne of the first victories for
citizen surveillance came in 1991,
when George Holliday videotaped
Los Angeles police officers beating
Rodney King. Without that video,
yet another LAPD assault on a
black man would have passed unnoticed. Instead, racism and violence
in police departments became a national issue, two officers went to
2
In 2003, FBI director Robert Mueller
claimed that the number of thwarted plots
was more than one hundred.
www.nyupress.org
34
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2011
prison, and King received $3.8 million in civil damages. Since then,
videos and photographs, many of
them taken on mobile phones, have
captured innumerable crimes and
injustices. Inverse surveillance—
what Steve Mann, professor of computer engineering and proponent of
wearing imaging devices, terms
“sousveillance”—has become an effective way of informing the world
of abuses of power.
We have seen the usefulness of
sousveillance again this year in the
Middle East, where the disclosure
of thousands of diplomatic cables
by WikiLeaks helped encourage the
Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions,
as well as the protest movements
that spread to neighboring countries. Yet most government officials
vehemently condemned the disclosure of state secrets. Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton claimed that
WikiLeaks’ revelations “tear at the
fabric of the proper function of responsible government.” In February
of this year, at George Washington
University, she went further, saying
that WikiLeaks had endangered
human rights activists who had
been in contact with U.S. diplomats, and rejecting the view that
governments should conduct their
work in full view of their citizens.
As a counterexample, she pointed
to U.S. efforts to secure nuclear
material in the former Soviet states.
Here, she claimed, confidentiality
was necessary in order to avoid
making it easier for terrorists or
criminals to find the materials and
steal them.
Clinton is right that it is not a
good idea to make public the location of insecurely stored nuclear materials, but how much of diplomacy
is like that? There may be some justifiable state secrets, but they certainly are few. For nearly all other
dealings between nations, openness
should be the norm. In any case,
Clinton’s claim that WikiLeaks releases documents “without regard
for the consequences” is, if not deliberately misleading, woefully ignorant. Assange and his colleagues
have consistently stated that they
are motivated by a belief that a
more transparent government will
bring better consequences for all,
and that leaking information has an
inherent tendency toward greater
justice, a view Assange laid out on
his blog in December 2006, the
month in which WikiLeaks published its first document:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear
and paranoia in its leadership and
planning coterie. . . . Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have
the upper hand, leaking leaves them
exquisitely vulnerable to those who
seek to replace them with more open
forms of governance.3
Assange could now claim that
WikiLeaks’ disclosures have confirmed his theory. For instance, in
2007, months before a national
election, WikiLeaks posted a report
on corruption commissioned but
not released by the Kenyan government. According to Assange, a
Kenyan intelligence official found
that the leaked report changed the
minds of 10 percent of Kenyan voters, enough to shift the outcome of
the election.
Two years later, in the aftermath
of t he global fina ncial crisis,
WikiLeaks released documents on
dealings by Iceland’s Kaupthing
Bank, showing that the institution
made multibillion-dollar loans, in
some cases unsecured, to its major
shareholders shortly before it collapsed. Kaupthing’s successor, then
known as New Kaupthing, obtained
an injunction to prevent Iceland’s
national television network from reporting on the leaked documents
but failed to prevent their dissemination. WikiLeaks’ revelations
stirred an uproar in the Icelandic
parliament, which then voted unanimously to strengthen free speech
and establish an international prize
for freedom of expression. Senior officials of the bank are now facing
criminal charges.
Robert Manne, a professor of politics at
Australia’s La Trobe University and the
author of a detailed examination of Assange’s writings that appeared recently in
The Monthly, comments: “There are few
original ideas in politics. In the creation of
WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was responsible
for one.”
3
And of course, in April 2010,
WikiLeaks released thirty-eight minutes of classified cockpit-video footage of two U.S. Army helicopters
over a Baghdad suburb. The video
showed the helicopter crews engaging in an attack on civilians that
killed eighteen people, including two
Reuters journalists, and wounded
two children. Ever since the attack
took place, in 2007, Reuters had unsuccessfully sought a U.S. military
inquiry into the deaths of its two
employees, as well as access to the
cockpit video under the Freedom of
Information Act. The United States
had claimed that the two journalists
were killed during a firefight. Although no action has been taken
against the soldiers involved, if the
military is ever going to exercise
greater restraint when civilian lives
are at risk, it will have been compelled to do so through the release of
material like this.
Months before the Arab Spring
began, Assange was asked whether
he would release the trove of secret
diplomatic cables that he was rumored to have obtained. Assange
said he would, and gave this reason:
“These sort of things reveal what the
true state of, say, Arab governments
are like, the true human rights abuses in those governments.” As one
young Tunisian wrote to the Guardian, his countrymen had known for
many years that their leaders were
corrupt, but that was not the same as
reading the full details of particular
incidents, rounded off with statements by American diplomats that
corruption was keeping domestic investment low and unemployment
high. The success of Tunisia’s revolution undoubtedly influenced the rest
of the Arab world, putting U.S. diplomats in an uncomfortable predicament. A mere three months after
condemning WikiLeaks for releasing
stolen documents “without regard to
the consequences,” Secretary Clinton found herself speaking warmly
about one of those outcomes: the
movement for reform in
the Middle East.
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ikiLeaks’ revelations have
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ESSAY
35
easy to judge whether those conse
quences are, on the whole, desir
able. Assange himself admitted to
the Guardian that as a result of the
leaked corruption report in Kenya,
and the violence that swept the
country during its elections, 1,300
people were killed and 350,000 dis
placed; but, he added, 40,000 Ken
yan children die every year from
malaria, and these and many more
are dying because of the role cor
ruption plays in keeping Kenyans
poor.4 The Kenyan people, Assange
believes, had a right to the informa
tion in the leaked report because
“decision-making that is based upon
lies or ignorance can’t lead to a
good conclusion.”
In making that claim, Assange
aligned himself with a widely held
view in democratic theory, and a
standard argument for freedom of
speech: elections can express the
will of the people only if the people
are reasonably well informed about
the issues on which they base their
votes. That does not mean that
decision-making based on the truth
always leads to better outcomes
than decision-making based on ig
norance. There is no reason for As
sange to be committed to that
claim, any more than a supporter of
democracy must be committed to
the claim that democratic forms of
government always reach better de
cisions than authoritarian regimes.
Nor does a belief in the benefits of
transparency imply that people
must know the truth about every
thing; but it does suggest that more
information is generally better, and
so provides grounds for a presump
tion against withholding the truth.
What of Clinton’s claims that the
leaks have enda ngered huma n
rights activists who gave informa
tion to American diplomats? When
WikiLeaks released 70,000 docu
ments about the war in Afghani
stan, in July 2010, Admiral Mike
Mullen, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, said that Assange
had blood on his hands, yet no ca
sualties resulting from the leaks
have been reported—u nless you
4
The United Nations claimed that as many
as 600,000 Kenyans were displaced after
the election.
36 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2011
count the ambassadors forced to
step down due to embarrassing reve
lations. Four months after the docu
ment s were relea sed, a senior
NATO official told CNN that there
had not been a single case of an Af
ghan needing protection because of
the leaks. Of course, that may have
been “just pure luck,” as Daniel
Domscheit-Berg, a WikiLeaks defec
tor, told the New York Times in Feb
ruary. Assange himself has admitted
that he cannot guarantee that the
leaks will not cost lives, but in his
view the likelihood that they will
save lives justifies the risk.
WikiLeaks has never released the
kind of information that Clinton
pointed to in defending the need for
secrecy. Still, there are other groups
out there, such as the Russian anti
corruption site Rospil.info, the Eu
ropean Union site BrusselsLeaks,
the Czech PirateLeaks, Anonymous,
and so on, that release leaked mate
rials with less scrupulousness. It is
entirely possible that there will be
leaks that everyone will regret. Yet
given that the leaked materials on
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
show tens of thousands of civilian
lives lost due to the needless, reck
less, and even callous actions of
members of the U.S. military, it is
impossible to listen to U.S. leaders
blame WikiLeaks for endangering
innocent lives without hearing
the tinkle of shattering
glass houses.
I
n the Panopticon, of course,
transparency would not be limited to
governments. Animal rights advo
cates have long said that if slaughter
houses had glass walls, more people
would become vegetarian, and seeing
the factory farms in which most of
the meat, eggs, and milk we consume
are produced would be more shock
ing even than the slaughterhouses.
And why should restaurant custom
ers have to rely on occasional visits
by health inspectors? Webcams in
food-preparation areas could provide
additional opportunities for checking
on the sanitary conditions of the
food we are about to eat.
Bentham may have been right
when he suggested that if we all
knew that we were, at any time, lia
ble to be observed, our morals
would be reformed. Melissa Bateson
and her colleagues at England’s
Newcastle University tested this
theory when they put a poster with
a pair of eyes above a canteen hon
esty box. People taking a hot drink
put almost three times as much
money in the box with the eyes
present as they did when the eyes
were replaced by a poster of flowers.
The mere suggestion that someone
was watching encouraged greater
honesty. (Assuming that the eyes
did not lead people to overpay, the
study also implies a disturbing level
of routine dishonesty.)
We might also become more al
truistic. Dale Miller, a professor of
organizational behavior at Stanford
University, has pointed out that
Americans assume a “norm of selfinterest” that makes acting altruisti
cally seem odd or even irrational.
Yet Americans perform altruistic
acts all the time, and bringing those
acts to light might break down the
norm that curtails our generosity.
Consistent with that hypothesis, re
searchers at the University of Penn
sylvania found that people are likely
to give more to listener-sponsored
radio stations when they are told
that other callers are giving aboveaverage donations. Similarly, when
utility companies send customers a
comparison of their energy use with
the average in their neighborhood,
customers with above-average use
reduce their consumption.
The world before WikiLeaks and
Facebook may have seemed a more
secure place, but to say whether it
was a better world is much more dif
ficult. Will fewer children ultimately
die from poverty in Kenya because
WikiLeaks released the report on
corruption? Will life in the Middle
East improve as a result of the revo
lutions to which WikiLeaks and so
cial media contributed? As the Chi
nese communist leader Zhou Enlai
responded when asked his opinion of
the French Revolution of 1789, it is
too soon to say. The way we answer
the question will depend on whether
we share Assange’s belief that deci
sion-making leads to better outcomes
when based on the truth than when
based on lies and ignorance.
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