Others believed that recalibrated social contracts would be a more likely avenue of privacy protection. There is an expectation in this group that governments and corporations will continue to escalate surveillance and “own” access to information; while they do that, the powerful and privileged will find growing transparency more to their advantage than others in society. In short, there is a cynical sense in this group that the flow of information will trend more heavily in the direction of average people becoming more “transparent” (and less private), while those who have power will find ways to protect their privacy at the same time that they exploit their new insights into others who are less powerful. Some believed technology could help re-right that imbalance and allow individual citizens to become watchdogs in a kind of system of distributed vigilance of the powerful. Still, the pushback against this benign vision of greater transparency was heated and heartfelt.
In the most fundamental sense, these respondents made clear that key elements of the future are up in the air. One way to read into this mixture of hopes and fears is to highlight the critical uncertainties these respondents addressed that hover over the development of digital technologies. The way these uncertainties are handled will determine how technology affects people in the future.
The first uncertainty involves the nature of the Internet itself. The current architecture is seen as inadequate and dangerously vulnerable. When MIT’s David Clark, a giant among those who created the first version of the Internet and a leading proponent of building a do-over version, worries about the security and interoperability of the network as he does here, it is important to take note. A related issue involves the struggle for control over the flow of information on the current Internet. Many of the respondents here said they were unsure that the policy climate will be favorable for the kind of improvements Clark is seeking or even for maintenance of the current mechanisms of how material passes its way through the existing Internet. These respondents were anxious about those who build the pipes and control the information spigots and whether they will hurt the way the Internet is, in principle, supposed to work as an equitable end-to-end system.