No secret is safe in the digital age, and this has direct effects on the evolution of our institutions
More than half a billion years ago, a spectacular burst of biological innovation took place, an event known as the Cambrian explosion. In a few million years, "the blink of an eye" on a geological scale, completely new body structures, new organs and new strategies of predation and defense have evolved in organisms. Evolutionary biologists disagree about what drove this massive wave of innovation, but a particularly compelling hypothesis proposed by Andrew Parker, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, holds that the critical factor was light. Parker proposed that about 543 million years ago, the chemistry of the shallow oceans and the atmosphere suddenly changed, and they became much more transparent. In those times, animals were found only in the oceans. From the moment they were flooded with sunlight, creatures that could see received a tremendous survival advantage, and this resulted in the rapid evolutionary development of eyes. In response to the emergence of the sense of sight, biological structures and behavior patterns developed that did not exist before.
If until that time all forms of sensory perception depended on physical proximity, whether through contact or through sensing pressure waves or differences in chemical concentrations, now the animals could distinguish objects and follow them from a distance. Predators could home in on their prey, while the prey could see the predator approaching and take evasive actions. Movement is a slow and cumbersome business as long as you don't have eyes to guide you, and eyes are worthless if you can't move from place to place. Therefore, visual perception and the ability to move developed side by side in a sort of arms race. This arms race caused many of the branches that occurred in the tree of life that we see today.
Parker's hypothesis of the Cambrian explosion provides an excellent analogy to help understand a new, seemingly unrelated phenomenon: the spread of digital technology. Although developments in communication technology have caused changes in our world many times in the past, the invention of writing marked the end of prehistory, and the printing press caused changes that shook all the central institutions of society, digital technology may have a much greater impact than anything that came before it. It will enhance the power of certain individuals and organizations while at the same time undermining the power of others, thus creating opportunities and risks that were hard to imagine just a generation ago.
Social networks on the Internet provide individuals with communication tools on a global scale. In doing so, a border was crossed into an unknown and wild land. Social services such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat are creating new communication options that are equal to the telephone and television, and the speed with which these services appear is a real destabilizing force. Engineers needed decades to develop and deploy telephone and television networks, and so organizations had time to adapt to these means of communication. Today, however, a social media service can be developed in a matter of weeks, and hundreds of millions of people may be using it within months. This accelerated pace of innovation leaves no time for organizations to adapt to a new social media before the next one arrives.
The enormous change in our world that took place due to this flood of means of communication can be summed up in one word: transparency. We can now see to a greater distance, more quickly and easily and at a lower price than ever before - but we can also be seen. You and I can see that everyone can see what we see, in a sort of hall of mirrors that creates endless reflections of mutual knowledge. The ancient game of hide-and-seek that shaped the forms of life on earth suddenly moved the playing field on which it is played, changed the game tools and changed the rules. Players who don't adapt won't survive long.
The impact on our organizations and institutions will be profound. Governments, armies, churches, universities, banks, and commercial firms all developed in a way that allowed them to thrive in a murky epistemological environment: one in which most knowledge was local, secrets were easily kept, and the people who lived in it, even if they weren't blind, were short-sighted. When these organizations find themselves suddenly exposed to the light of day, they quickly discover that they cannot rely on old methods. They must respond to this new transparency, otherwise they will become extinct. Just as a living cell needs an efficient cell membrane to protect its internal mechanisms from the vicissitudes of the outside world, so human organizations need a protective interface between their internal components and the public sphere, and the old interfaces lose their effectiveness.
claws, jaws and shells
In his 2003 book, In the Blink of an Eye, Parker argues that animals' rigid external body parts were the most direct response to the tumultuous natural selection pressures created by the Cambrian explosion. The sudden transparency of ocean water led to the development of camera-like retinas, and these caused rapid adaptations of claws, jaws, shells, and other body parts used for protection. The nervous systems also became more complex and allowed the development of new predatory behaviors. In response to these, new methods of evasion and camouflage were developed.
In comparison, we can expect organizations to respond to the pressures created by the transparency brought by digital technology through changes in their external body parts that will increase their adaptation to the new environment. In addition to the arms used to supply services and goods, these body parts include organs for handling information for control and self-presentation: legal departments, public relations departments and marketing departments. In these parts of the organizations we see the effect of transparency in the most direct way. Through the social networks, rumors and opinions spread today all over the world within days and even hours. In order to be able to "join these conversations" on social networks, PR and marketing departments must learn to respond to individuals on the terms that the individuals determine, honestly and in understandable and fluent language. Organizations that take weeks or months to develop communications strategies, held back by slow-to-react legal departments, will quickly find themselves out of business. If the old habits are not updated, the entire organization will fail.
Easier accessibility to data allows the emergence of new forms of news interpretation, one anchored in comprehensive empirical observations. Statistical journalist Nate Silver demonstrated this brilliantly during the 2012 US presidential election. While some news networks concocted a why-our-candidate-will-win explanation based on data from selectively chosen polls, Silver provided explanations based on all data from all polls. Silver predicted the election results with incredible accuracy, and not only that, but he also revealed his methodology and thus made it clear that his accuracy was not an issue As poll results become more and more available, news outlets and political commentators who spin stories based on selective data are likely to encounter increasing difficulties.
Consumer goods manufacturers face a similar challenge. Reviews of products and services posted by consumers change the balance of power between customers and companies. Brand marketing efforts lose their impact as consumer opinions gain strength. Attentive companies learn to respond quickly and publicly to complaints and negative reviews. And if the reviews are overwhelmingly negative, the product must be changed or removed from the market. Pouring money on marketing mediocre products is no longer helpful.
Small groups of people who share common values, beliefs and goals, and especially those who can quickly coordinate moves during a crisis using internal communication channels chosen ad hoc, i.e. those that are precisely suited to the crisis in question, will especially excel in the kind of fast, open and one-response communication that the new transparency requires. As opposed to large bureaucratic bodies organized in a hierarchical structure, the new organizations must be flexible. As the pressure for mutual transparency increases, we will witness the evolution of organizational structures, which will be much more decentralized than the large organizations of today, or we will discover that Darwinian pressures select smaller organizations and herald a time when the large organizations are simply "too big to succeed."
Secrets of half a life
US Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, one of the first to advocate transparency, is often quoted in this regard. He was famous for writing: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." The sentence is true, of course, in both its literal and metaphorical sense. However, the sunlight may also be dangerous if in the heat of purification we kill too many friendly cells or The effectiveness of organizations through excessive exposure of their internal working mechanisms for all to see?
Brandeis was the enemy of secrecy. He seems to have thought that the more transparent organizations are, the better they will be. More than a hundred years later, we see that the journey he started has had many successes. But despite the abundance of political rhetoric thanks to the virtues of transparency, there is still secrecy in the halls of power, and for good reasons.
A biological perspective helps us see that, along with its many advantages, transparency also has disadvantages. Animals, and even plants, can be described as factors acting to achieve a goal. These factors, draw information from their sense organs, and they work through it to improve their well-being. In this sense, a human organization is similar to an animal. It is a factor composed of masses of living parts working together: human beings. But unlike the cells that make up plants and animals, humans have broad interests and a wide range of perceptual abilities. A plant or an animal is not bothered by the fear that some of their cells will abandon the organization or rebel. Except in cancer, the cells that make up a multicellular organism are submissive and obedient slaves. Humans, on the other hand, are powerful as individuals, and are very curious about the wider world.
Things were not always like this. In the old days, dictators could rule while hiding behind high walls, based on hierarchical organizations staffed by bureaucrats with limited knowledge of the organization in which they operate and even less knowledge of the state of the outside world. Churches were particularly adept at curbing the curiosity of their believers, withholding knowledge from them or dressing them with misinformation regarding the rest of the world. They did this while spreading a fog of mystery around their activities, their history, their financial situation and their goals. Armies have always benefited from keeping their strategies secret, not only from the enemy but also from their own soldiers. Soldiers who knew the expected casualty rate in a military operation would not be as effective as those who had no idea of their expected fate. Furthermore, if a clueless soldier is captured, he has nothing of value to pass on to his interrogators.
One of the fundamental insights of game theory is that agents must keep secrets. An agent who reveals a "situation" to another agent loses part of his precious autonomy and is exposed to the danger of manipulation. To compete fairly in an open market manufacturers need to protect the methods of producing their products, their expansion plans and any other information they own. Schools and universities are required to keep their tests secret until students access them. President Barack Obama promised a new era of governmental transparency, but despite considerable improvements, there are extensive areas where secrecy still rules and the granting of access rights to information only to the senior level. And so it should be. Financial data, for example, must be kept secret until it is officially disclosed to prevent the exploitation of insider information. A government must maintain a poker face to manage its operations, but the new transparency makes that task more difficult than ever.
Edward Snowden's revelations, which revealed the internal workings of the National Security Agency (NSA), illustrate how in the age of transparency, it is enough for an individual who decides to reveal information to harm a huge organization. Although Snowden used traditional media organizations to leak the information, social media's reaction to the leaks and the massive amplification they provided ensured that the story was not known and thus exerted widespread and sustained pressure on the NSA and the federal government to take action.
The outer "skin" of the NSA is undergoing a dramatic adaptation in response to the leaks. The very fact that the agency publicly defended itself against Snowden's accusations was unprecedented for an organization that had been hiding for so long behind a veil of absolute secrecy. Big changes in the organization are inevitable, and now he is trying to test what kinds of secrets he can keep in the more transparent world. Joel Brenner, formerly a senior adviser to the NSA, spoke about the sudden change in the agency's operating environment at a panel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in December 2013, saying: "Very few things will remain secret, and these kept secret won't stay that way for long... today the real goal of information security is to slow down the half-life of secrets They're like radioactive isotopes."
As optimists we would like to believe that the current revolutionary period will lead us to establish organizations that are better adapted to the moral codes of civil society and to find new and powerful ways to correct improper organizational behavior. But we cannot rule out the possibility of a constant weakening of our intelligence organizations, which would impair their ability to detect threats.
to separate the chaff from the bar
During their evolutionary arms race, the animals in the Cambrian invented a multitude of means of attack and means of evasion against them. Since then this pool of stunts has only grown. The animals have developed camouflage, warning calls against imminent threats, and bright color markings that advertise them as apparently poisonous to potential predators. The new transparency will bring about a similar expansion of tools and methods in the information war: operations to discredit sources, preemptive strikes, sting exercises and more.
Nature has provided inspiration for deceptively conductive means of warfare in the past as well. The ink cloud released by squid escaping from a madman has been reinvented in aerial warfare in the form of chaff clouds: deceptive clouds of tiny metal chips that reflect radar beams or of mock warheads aimed at misleading interceptor missiles. One can foresee the introduction of chaff that has no substance and is all megabytes of wrong information. Eventually this misleading chaff will be hacked by more sophisticated search engines, which will stimulate the production of more convincing chaff. The development of encryption and decryption methods will also continue to thrive as organizations and individuals struggle to maintain their privacy and reputation.
The diversity of organizations
The last thing implied by the Cambrian analogy is a prediction that we will soon see a tremendous diversity in the types of organizations. It hasn't happened yet, but there are already early signs of it. In the USA, a new type of commercial corporation, the B Corp, was recently created, which arose from the recognition of the need for commercial companies with two overarching goals: the first, the traditional one, is to obtain profits, while the second, the new one, is related to a social purpose. Google and Facebook broke away from The tradition is that they left their founders with greater voting rights than usual, so these companies are publicly traded but their control is private. This is how they allowed the founders to steer the companies The basis of their long-term plans and relative indifference to the quarterly whims of Wall Street. The protests organized in the days of the Arab Spring, which were made possible by social networks and were unprecedented in their size and speed of formation, may also be a new type of human organization (passing time), but it seems that we are here At the growth apex of a new branch in the evolutionary tree of organizations.
The speed with which an organization will shape itself according to the new transparency depends on its competitive niche. Commercial companies are the most exposed to the effects of public opinion because their customers can easily switch to another company. If not paid attention to, a consumer brand built over decades can fall apart in months. Churches and sports leagues are somewhat more protected thanks to the depth of cultural habits and social ties among believers and sports fans. But when phenomena like child sexual exploitation or head injuries, which were hidden from view in the pre-Internet era, float to the surface and are exposed in the light of mutual transparency, even the most powerful churches and sports leagues realize that if they don't adapt, they will become extinct.
Those who are more protected than others from the immediate evolutionary pressures are the government systems. Protests fueled by social networks can topple rulers and ruling parties, but the mechanisms in the state's infrastructure tend to continue operating almost without real shocks even after changes in political leadership. The state apparatus is almost never exposed to competitive pressure, so its evolution is the slowest. And yet, even here we can expect considerable changes, because the power of individuals and external factors that follow organizations will only grow. In response to public pressure, governments are now beginning to allow access to the vast amounts of raw data produced in the course of their operations. The free access to this data and the advances in pattern analysis and data visualization methods that will enable the development of professional and citizen journalism based on data will create powerful social feedback loops that will accelerate the processes for increasing transparency in organizations.
The growing new human order must be accompanied by a factor of self-restraint. Just as a colony of ants can do things that are beyond the capabilities of individual ants, so too human organizations can exceed the capabilities of individuals and grow memories, beliefs, plans, actions, and perhaps even values, that are superhuman. But we are now on an evolutionary path that is supposed to restrain our superhuman organizations by demanding that they meet the standards of humans as individuals. This dynamic of self-control, which will be made possible thanks to the acceleration of human-machine communication capabilities, is unique to the human race just like human language.
About the authors
Daniel K. Dennett is a professor and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His most recent books are Intuition Pumps and other Tools for Thinking and Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind, which he co-wrote with Linda Laszkoula.
Deb Roy (Roy) is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), director of the Social Machines Lab (which belongs to the Institute's Media Lab) and chief media scientist at Twitter. He also serves on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Social Media.
in brief
About 540 million years ago, the variety of organisms that lived in the ancient days grew at a tremendous speed. One hypothesis holds that it was a sudden transparency of ocean water that drove this evolutionary rampage.
This explosion of the Cambrian era provides an analogy that helps to understand how digital technology is going to change society. Information transparency will exert pressures that will force organizations to develop in an evolutionary process.
During the Cambrian explosion, the animals developed adaptations such as exoskeletons, camouflage and methods to deceive the opponent. Since keeping secrets becomes more and more difficult, countries and corporations will be forced to develop weapons similar to those developed by animals.
The new transparency will eventually lead to the creation of new types of organizations. Natural selection will favor the fastest and most flexible of them.
More on the subject
In the Blink of an Eye: How Vision Sparked the Big Bang of Evolution. Andrew Parker. Basic Books, 2003.
The Social Cell: What Do Debutante Balls, the Japanese Tea Ceremony, Ponzi Schemes and Doubting Clergy All Have in Common? Daniel Dennett in New Statesman, Vol. 140, no. 5084, pages 48–53; December 19, 2011.
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State. Glenn Greenwald. Metropolitan Books, 2014.
The Coming Entanglement: Bill Joy and Danny Hillis. Interview by Steve Mirsky in ScientificAmerican.com; February 15, 2012. www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-coming-entanglement-bill-joy-an-12-02-15
The article was published with the permission of Scientific American Israel
