A mile down the road from my home there is an organic farm, along with a
dairy, bakery, and farm store. The store and the Waldorf school across the
street are the social center of the community. Because the cow pastures extend
along the road as far as our house, my wife and I often go to sleep on summer
evenings to the sound of a bell around the neck of one of the heifers.
The farm sells part of its produce through an organization known as a CSA
(Community Supported Agriculture). At the beginning of the season families
sign up for "shares" in the farm, based on which they pick up weekly baskets
of produce between June and February. The share purchases give the farm a more
stable cash flow and are also a kind of insurance against the sort of natural
calamity that farms are always subject to. It is understood that if some of
the crops fail, the shareholders will receive less -- perhaps to be
compensated by other crops. That is, they share in the risks as well as the
benefits of the farm.
About 55 local families held shares this past year. In addition, there are
two groups of shareholders in New York City (about two and a half hours south)
and one in a city between -- altogether 175 families or so. There are a few
other CSAs in the area, and despite their naturally competitive situation,
they have taken to cooperating with each other. For example, they help to make
up each other's shortages. During the winter the farmers participate in a
study group together, partly in order to assess the values and economic
principles underlying their activity.
CSAs, as they have developed in this country, were conceived at a village
for the mentally handicapped about twenty miles away from here. The first
actual CSA was formed a half hour away in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in
1985. By 1990 there were 37 of them in North America. Today there are about
600. There is a toll-free hotline (800-516-7797) for people who want to locate
a nearby CSA.
About a mile further on -- through a cow pasture and up a hill -- there is
a modest financial institution called the Rudolf Steiner Foundation (named
after the originator of Waldorf education). It brings lenders together with
borrowers. What distinguishes it from other lending institutions is the fact
that the connection between lender and borrower is a principled one,
and is not completely depersonalized. Lenders choose what sort of enterprise
their funds will support. The lender and borrower are put directly in touch
with each other, while the Foundation provides the necessary financial
expertise and mediation. The money becomes an expression of conscious human
intentions at both ends of the deal.
The Foundation typically looks for a group of responsible individuals who
can help to "carry" the organization receiving a loan. These individuals may
also be asked to guarantee the loan. Of the more than $8 million loaned from
the beginning of lending in 1985 through 1995, only $4,400 has had to be
written off -- this despite the virtual absence of legal action.
Loan recipients range from Waldorf schools to organic farms to publishing
ventures to health care facilities to scientific research organizations -- all
broadly sharing certain values and understandings. They all seek to fill some
urgent need in society.
I have selected these particular organizations for description only because
they are close at hand and I can speak about them with some knowledge. While
they share certain convictions that have taken root in the community where I
live, the relevant point here is not so much the particular convictions as the
fact that the two organizations are conviction-driven. More than that, they
fly straight in the face of the larger trend toward anonymous, data-driven
social transactions.
The farm's shareholders buy their food this way because it makes a
difference to them how the food is grown, what is done to the land in order to
grow it, how the animals are treated, and what principles are followed in
dealings with farmhands, store clerks, and distributors. This is not to inject
"foreign" values into economic activities. Rather, it is to alter the
essential economics. It's a simple matter of understanding: if you see that
your health is related to the quality of the food you eat, and if the health
of the land and social organization around you counts for something, then you
will be willing to pay for what you get.
Prices in the farm store -- which carries many non-local goods -- tend to
be 50 - 100% higher than the "same" goods in a supermarket. But, then, the
goods are not really the same. This qualitative difference is exactly what so
easily falls out of the picture in the "information-rich, frictionless
marketplace" so many Net enthusiasts now envision. Yes, it is easy enough to
compare prices between amazon.com and books.com. But the willingness to
conduct a transaction on this basis alone is a willingness to say that none of
the qualities of the society in which you participate makes any difference.
It is easy to manipulate clean numbers without friction, but not so easy to
build a livable society.
Gary Lamb, a neighbor of mine, has done a lot of work on the economics of
CSAs. He comments that the first CSAs "introduced a primitive form of economy
within the complex, modern economy." One has to start somewhere. But as the
CSA movement grows, "it becomes ever more complex and substantial."
Relationships and interactions multiply. But through it all there remains the
opportunity -- it is being fiercely grasped -- to preserve a balance between
local community involvement on the one hand, and all the sophisticated
mechanisms of a global economy on the other.
This balance is critical for the functioning of the entire system. When I
managed an organic farm in the late seventies, I once spoke to the dispatcher
for a group of independent semi-trailer owners. Not knowing I was an organic
farmer, he casually remarked that "when we have a load of produce go bad on
us, we take it to the health food market and sell it as organic."
There is, of course, a somewhat more disciplined certification system
today. But official, bureaucratic certification programs are not something you
will ever want to entrust your life to. How, then, can confidence
arise? Only when the entire, global system is rooted in myriad local
communities, each visibly driven by conviction and each establishing its own
context of trust. If the local consumers, farmers, and store staff know each
other, if they also know the local distributors, if the local distributors
know the long-distance haulers, and if the same, purposeful, conviction-based
transactions are conducted throughout the system -- even if the nature of the
convictions varies from place to place -- then it becomes very difficult for
fraudulent operators to insinuate themselves into the network.
The opposite is true as personal interactions throughout the system
evaporate into data and information flows. Trust becomes an ever more
uncertain thing. It is amazing how many people today are capable of believing
that technical mechanisms can fill the void left when the complex and
intricate contexts of community and trust have disappeared. Such a belief
indicates how hard it is for the technologically entranced segments of society
to distinguish between technical and human exchange.
So, what does all this have to do with privacy? In the first two parts of
this article I tried to show that a healthy public life is essential to a
healthy privacy. I also suggested that if we let ourselves become little more
than bodies of data engaged in informational transactions, the public milieu
within which privacy can be defined and protected will wither away, leaving
only a paranoid and half-justified quest for anonymity. The two examples above
illustrate the kind of personalized engagement that must take place in an
untold variety of ways throughout all of society if we are to cultivate
complementary public and private spaces.
The farm store does not use barcode readers or credit cards, but even if it
did, it could not sell information about its customers to other businesses.
This is not because it is a cooperative or because it operates under bylaws
preventing such behavior. Neither of those conditions happens to be true, and
the store is structured as a profit-making corporation. The simple fact is
that it would destroy itself by controverting the broad wishes of its
clientele -- and its clientele would violently oppose any sale of personal
information. (Recognizing its dependence upon the surrounding community, the
store formed a consumer advisory board through which community concerns are
channeled directly to store management.)
The problem in society at large is that, for the most part, our notions of
life and business have come to exclude any consideration of human qualities.
We are increasingly an ATM society. Whenever I engage in a financial
transaction about which the numbers are the only thing that counts for me --
whenever the numbers do not express my sense for a whole set of social values
whose implications reach into every corner of society -- to that degree I
choose to forsake society and act as an automaton. The sphere within which a
public/private balance can be fashioned shrinks accordingly.
I am unhappily aware that this will strike many readers as an intolerably
radical proposition, and that a good number of you will conclude that I have
lost my grip on the topic at hand. But my primary aim has been to point out
how social questions require us to think organically and ecologically. Despite
all the talk about holism and such, this is something we have a hard time
doing. That is, we have a hard time seeing how the whole of society comes to
expression in each individual, and just as hard a time seeing how your and my
individual actions color the whole.
This difficulty explains why the rhetoric of Net activists is rife with
accusations about the privacy transgressions of powerful corporations, but
silent about our nearly universal complicity in those transgressions. Who,
after all, buys the tainted products and services? Who works for these
corporations if not people like you and me? And what do they do, if not the
things you and I do at our jobs: namely, pursue "objective" business
opportunities simply because "they are there."
The entire high-tech industry is driven by little more than the logic of
technical feasibility, unleavened by any historical or humane inquiry on the
part of engineers and marketers. We do not ask how this new device will play
into the social organism, or whether it represents the best use of our
resources. We just produce it and then begin looking for the yet-unknown
"killer apps" that will sell it. Yet we turn around and point judgmental
fingers at our compatriots in other companies who commercially employ all
available data because "it is there," and we whine about their disregard for
the health of the social organism -- or at least about their disregard for
our rights.
The fact is that for both groups of employees the social organism has been
lost from view. It scarcely exists. We have adapted to our businesses as if
they were machines and we were cogs. That is why we are content to check our
social and ethical concerns at the door when we go to work. That is also why
the work can be so easily distributed across the Net: it had already become
little more than an aggregate of data transactions. Building a society of
human beings -- a society marked by particular qualities -- simply doesn't
figure in the business.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
*
My message, then, is that privacy is not a simple right that can be
considered in a social vacuum. It lives in delicate balance with the public
qualities of our dealings with each other. A private space can only be carved
out within a public sphere and requires this surrounding sphere for its
protection. The first line of defense for privacy is the kind of
public, social interaction that incorporates a deeply felt respect for the
sovereignty and needs of the other person.
Finally, a word to those who find my two little examples hopelessly
insignificant and quixotic. So they must seem -- rather as in the 1950s those
few who began to worry about their personal contributions of candy wrappers
and bottles to the city dump looked insignificant and quixotic. But the
cultural context does change with time -- or can change -- and the dismissal
of small efforts as quixotic is itself one of the symptoms that we have given
up on a society of people, preferring a society of automatons. What
distinguishes humans is that we can decide for a different future --
especially when the symptoms all around us suggest that something is wrong.
Actually, the two examples I gave can be scaled up with wonderful ease. The
only requirement is for ultimate grounding in local contexts where people have
directly to do with each other and care about the shape of their life
together. That grounding is why I don't have to worry about what the farm
store folks -- who know more about me than I might want you to know --
will do with their knowledge. I've never lost a wink of sleep over it.
That damned cowbell is another matter.
Go to part 1 of
privacy article
Go to part 2 of privacy
article
Goto table of
contents
NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility for the
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#30 Copyright 1996 O'Reilly &
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1996
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Editor: Stephen L. Talbott
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