During the L.A riots in 1992 I was working in an office tower in midtown Manhattan. At noon that Friday, two days into the meltdown on the West Coast, rumors flew from building to building that blacks were rioting in New York City. There was a rush hour at lunch time; Manhattan emptied out. Before leaving, people in my office peered down 30 stories to make sure a wave of angry, rock-throwing people hadn’t stormed down from Harlem.
They never came, of course. But that same gut-level fear of the African-American community persists. And it is that same fear that fueled most of the hype coming out of New York’s City Hall and the news media leading up to the “Million Youth March” in Harlem last weekend. Its chief organizer, a venom-spewing, anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan protigi named Khallid Abdul Muhammad, provided a boogeyman from central casting. Something told me that in the rigorous tug of war between Muhammad and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the kids would be the big losers.
What many press accounts left out of the day-after coverage of the event was that all but the last five minutes of the afternoon were perfectly congenial for those who attended. Raised fists and chants of “black power” were as threatening as it got. I, mild-mannered white guy, didn’t sense a single moment of racial animosity. Groups of 10 and 12 young people in matching T-shirts, printed with the names of their youth organizations, had come in from as far as Oakland, Calif. There were strollers and parents, bold haircuts and in-your-face T-shirts, dreadlocks and incense, fliers about lectures and socialism and unjustly imprisoned individuals — the sort of countercultural patina that typically surfaces whenever there’s a gathering of people who aren’t totally down with the wonderful world of Disney.
The controversy over the event stretched all the way back to January and grew louder and louder over the summer. The problem, ostensibly, was that it was spearheaded by Muhammad, a man famous for his invective against whites, Jews, Catholics, gays and others. Muhammad originally applied for parade permits at the heavily orthodox Jewish Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn — just to cause trouble, apparently — and Central Park, as well as his preferred location on Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem. Mayor Giuliani publicly wrote off the event as a “hate march” and tried to deny Muhammad a permit for Harlem. Mohammad’s lawyers took the city to court and won on First Amendment grounds from, ironically enough, a Jewish judge. Giuliani then whittled the permit down to four hours on six blocks of Malcolm X Boulevard, rather than the 12 hours and 29 blocks originally requested. Meanwhile, the Harlem political establishment got pissed at both the mayor for his big mouth and Khallid Muhammad for being an arriviste who failed to notify them of his plans.
As it was, six blocks were more than enough. The rear block was almost empty save for some cops manning a vacant crowd-control pen. Police officially estimated that 6,000 people showed up; so even if you apply the standard protesters’ algorithm to determine actual attendance at a rally — quite a bit more than the police estimate, but nowhere near double — at most, 10,000 people were there.
And 2,500 blue suits.
Hundreds of cops lined up behind layers of barricades, designed to ensure that people trickled in and out slowly. Dozens occupied the fenced-off center of each intersection. Pairs and threes peered down from every other rooftop. A set of police officials in white shirts looked like they were surveying Red Square, with their motionless heads protruding from the roof lip of a six-story corner building. A couple of helicopters hovered high above at all times.
The march was billed as a chance for black youth to be empowered in their struggles for quality education, jobs and self-sufficiency. Instead, it was the police, and Mayor Giuliani, who became the focus of the protest. Speaker after speaker drew cheers talking about police abuses, mandatory-minimum drug sentences that disproportionately net people of color, the one-third of young African-American men who are in prison or on parole. Giuliani drew loud boos whenever his name was mentioned, which was often. Other speakers called for reparations from slavery. A Native American condemned the white man, while another speaker called for the United States government to be “taken down.” He tried to get the crowd to cheer, “Down with the USA,” but it didn’t take.
“Slave labor workfare + attacks on immigrants + racist police terror + prison labor = fascism U.S.-style — right here, right now,” read a sign held by a white attorney from Newark.
“When the ruling class gets desperate,” he told me, “it usually turns to an authoritarian form of government.”
Great, I thought. I’m with you. But what about the kids? The Million Youth March had a lot of confrontational, highly political ranting but not a whole lot about education, teen pregnancy, poverty and street violence — issues that urban kids deal with daily. The positive intentions of this event seemed to be struggling to breathe amid all the anti-authority tension.
I asked a fine-featured, spectacled black man in a gold-patterned dashiki that sloped around his ample belly what the young kids must think about the swarms of cops.
“I imagine the kids don’t believe this is a free country,” he said.
I met a burly, kindly Nigerian man named Sam Chetwas on 125th Street before the rally. He was selling little motivational books out of his Jeep Cherokee that he had written and published himself: “The 100 Steps Necessary for Survival in America for a Person of Color” was one title.
“I think the young black youth has so much work to do in the classroom, more than marching on the street,” he said. “After the march, what next? The youths are not challenged, not preoccupied with things that empower them in the real sense. They’re preoccupied with destruction.”
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PHOTO: AP/WIDE WORLD
Top: Khallid Abdul Muhammad, an organizer of the Million Youth March, punches his fist into the air during his speech at the march in Harlem Saturday.
As the afternoon wore on, and the shadows lengthened on the stately brownstones of Harlem, the tame crowd began petering out. A few people sat on the shady stretches of curb eating ice cream, or strolled along wearily trying to hawk Million Youth March T-shirts and key chains. Just then, Khallid Muhammad took the mike for the second time that day. His earlier speech had been very short and pretty tame. He had urged everyone to finish school, stay away from drugs and be good to the black woman. Nothing he said couldn’t have been said by anyone else on the rostrum, which included the dependably voluble Al Sharpton.
But now, with the 4 p.m. closing bell specified on the city permit approaching, Muhammad was back. He had fought City Hall and won his day in the sun. And as his shrill staccato bounced down the avenue, it quickly became clear that he was going to end the show his way.
“We say to you today, you filthy bastards!” he hissed at the cops. “You no-good, filthy BASTARDS!”
A semi-enthusiastic wave of “yeahs” rolled down the avenue.
“We want you to be steadfast against these BASTARDS! … Disconnect the railing and beat the hell out of them with the railing if they so much as touch you!”
More faint cheers.
“If anyone attacks you, take their goddamn guns and use them! If they take up their nightsticks take it out of their hands and ram it up their ass like they did with Abner Louima!” he shrieked, in reference to a Haitian man whom New York City police officers sodomized with a toilet plunger in a Brooklyn precinct house last summer.
Two young black men standing near me turned to each other and laughed — the sort of cynical, somewhat incredulous, crinkled-eyed laughter that people break into when confronted with absurdity. But they weren’t laughing at the absurdity that this march, intended to show young people that their numbers and comment could rise above the odds and turn back the tide of violence and despair, was itself ending with a call to violence. No, they were probably laughing from the tension of it all — Muhammad was saying what many people had been thinking, and on one level they were glad he was giving voice to their thoughts; on another, there was something nerve-racking about these words as they came screeching down this high-security prison of an avenue, past the sea of blue suits.
Before he was done, Muhammad made sure to slur Jews as the “bloodsuckers of the black community,” sucking the last dregs of positive energy right out of the air (dishearteningly, people raised their hands and cheered when he said this). The police command decided not to give Muhammad an extra millisecond of time — a move that has become the focus of more grandstanding and indignant calls for investigation and lawsuits in the last few days — and stormed the stage promptly at four, while Muhammad was still ranting. People began to throw bottles and garbage cans.
Sixteen cops and several spectators suffered minor injuries. The papers the next day would report this as “violence,” and TV news would be filled with footage of the melee. The substance of the march — a youth-empowerment message and anti-police-state overtones — would be drowned out by the spectacle of a racist charlatan’s 15 minutes of fame.
Which is too bad, because a lot of moms in that audience came with the best intentions. “People have to learn to love themselves, to respect themselves,” said Sherry Rich, her 8-year-old son Earnest wearing an oversize Million Youth March T-shirt that stretched down to his knees.
Clearly, as with Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C., people were willing to overlook Khallid Muhammad’s racist views because he went ahead and put together a gathering they felt was more important than him. “I think we’ve gotten to the point where we have to look beyond it,” said Kathy Lindor, a counselor to troubled children from Elizabeth, N. J., when asked about Muhammad’s vitriol.
She had bought her year-old son, Jimmy, a white Million Youth March T-shirt and asked other children to sign their names to it. Chazz from Yonkers and Shakeer from Queens, both 8, were among the dozens who had scrawled and circled their names. Although her son didn’t know what the speakers were saying, Lindor said, with the T-shirt as a souvenir, “I figure at some future time Jimmy will remember this, and it’ll make a little change in his life.”
But after Khallid Muhammad’s second speech, I had to wonder: What form would that change take?
To the still-unfolding Atomic Age, Space Age, Information Age and American Century, we can now add the Biotech Century. For those of us still clinging desperately to the Age of Aquarius, it’s hard to trust proclamations of new epochs — especially with so many people on the city streets seemingly stuck in the Middle Ages. Any writer who uses such terms seriously is bound to get caught in hyperbole.
But if it’s the title of a book, look out.
As a longtime activist and author of 14 books on the impacts of science and technology on society, real or speculative, Rifkin’s reputation as the great naysayer of genetics greatly precedes him. Recently he made headlines with a bid to patent a human-animal hybrid — in order to prevent one from ever being created. His skill at firing a meme across the mediascape is indisputable. But the market for Frankenstein monsters is still looking pretty soft, news reports of headless human organ factories notwithstanding.
In “The Biotech Century,” Rifkin sets out to combine all the most troublesome aspects of the genetics revolution into a cohesive analysis of their impact on our assumptions about nature and life itself. His historical backgrounds and social commentaries are often lucid and thought-provoking. But he too often parlays isolated, incremental laboratory successes — such as the cloning of Dolly or the genetic engineering of frost-free plants — into soaring proclamations of a portentous future.
This saps the reader’s trust almost all the way through an otherwise well-conceived book. Rifkin does confront his reputation head-on in the last chapter, and acknowledges the more noble and beneficial aspects of genetic science and the biotechnology business. But it’s unfortunate that he isn’t more evenhanded from the beginning, because the more troublesome genetics issues definitely warrant the kind of public awareness and discussion he urges.
Human genetic material is being “prospected” from blood samples of indigenous groups in rainforest regions who receive no compensation for what amounts to a natural resource and have objected to the practice on religious grounds. A cancer patient in California sought royalties on pharmaceutical products derived from his spleen tissue, patented by his surgeon and licensed to the Sandoz Corporation; a court ruled against him in 1990.
“Transgenic” plants and animals, engineered with genes from other species to create pest-resistant crops, disease-prone research mice and microbes that clean up oil spills, may be going into production with only cursory studies of their ecological impacts, Rifkin reports. (If a mouse that’s twice as big as it’s supposed to be ever scurries under your sofa, perhaps its forefathers escaped from a lab that bred rodents with a human growth hormone gene.)
Genetic engineering of human embryos may be decades away (or maybe not). But Rifkin notes that dubious notions of human perfection have already produced an episode of government-sanctioned “treatment” of short children with human growth hormone in 1992 — even though shortness has no bearing on health. The power to insert or remove genetic traits in the womb, he argues, promises an insidious slide toward a new eugenics, consecrated on the altar of consumer choice.
Rifkin sets out his chapters as “strands in an operational matrix for the Biotech Century.” They’re actually just competent compilations of reasons to worry about where genetics is taking us. The facts by themselves are compelling enough, but Rifkin smothers them with an incessant chime of throwaway alarm bells.
“Vanilla is the most popular flavor in America,” he warns at one point while dramatizing the danger of genetically manipulating vanilla-bean crops. We’re given repeated roundups of biotech companies’ net worths but little word on their actual profits — which in many cases, as for Internet start-ups, are nonexistent. “How can any living thing be deemed sacred when it is just a pattern of information?” he asks — though later in the book he compares his role in the bioethics debate to that of a heretic challenging the Vatican at the dawn of the modern era.
Only in the penultimate chapter, “Reinventing Nature,” does Rifkin’s gift for intriguing social commentary shine through. In an economy increasingly driven by biotechnology and information science, he writes, survival of the fittest is giving way to “survival of the best informed” — with genes the biological equivalent of computer processors, their worth (and ours) judged by the quality of their programming and life itself increasingly viewed as an ever-morphing message, a work in progress: art.
This new paradigm, he argues chillingly, will suit the masters of the new economy as snugly as Darwin’s theories did those of Victorian Britain’s: “Now that we can begin reengineering ourselves, we mistakenly think of the new technological manipulation as a creative act, when in reality it is merely a set of choices purchased in the marketplace.”
We’d all like to believe that lofty goals of progress and human advancement will guide our expanding power to tamper with nature’s blueprints. Rifkin, though, warns that the irreparable changes we make to nature and our own species may instead be presented to us as “the greatest shopping experience of all time.”
It’s time for every member of Congress, plus President Clinton and Al Gore, to go in for genetic testing. There’s got to be a mutation or two that predisposes one to being a politician: an extra strand or two of particularly peppy nucleotides on the 21st century boosterism gene? A crippling gap in the sequence that codes for scientific understanding?
Two months ago, Vice President Gore put out a new proposal to keep employee genetic-test information from employers. It follows on the heels of last summer’s wave of bills to keep the same information from health insurers.
“The fear of genetic discrimination is prompting Americans to avoid those genetic tests that are now available that could literally save their lives,” Gore said in an address to the Genome Action Coalition, which promotes public support of genetic research.
Now, opposition to genetic discrimination is an easy political flag to wave, and frustrating the work of health-insurance bureaucrats is always a crowd-pleaser. But Gore’s enthusiasm for genetic testing betrays the other motive in Washington for “genetic discrimination” laws: a blind belief in the manifold benefits genetic testing can confer. From this perspective, anything that prevents Americans from lining up to get genetically tested, to consume the as-yet-unproven biomedical products of our rush to decipher the human genome, is unconscionable — deadly, even.
Which is nonsense. In fact, in these early days of genetic testing, a blood report that says you’re at unknown risk of getting an incurable disease at an unknown time is as likely to take the hope and joy out of your life as to “save” it.
Admittedly, people have already lost health insurance or jobs because tests have shown they have “bad” genes. Legislation to keep the information private might not be a bad idea. But there’s an even better reason to protect people from discrimination based on genetic test results: The “information” itself is often so vague as to be worthless.
If a genetic test shows you have a dangerous genetic mutation, you’ll only know that you may get the disease, or maybe not — and you won’t know when. Until a test has been put through years of studies, the risk estimate it offers will typically be based on studies of small populations that took the test right after its release. And these particular groups are often more likely than most to have the disease, regardless of their genes — that’s why they’re in the study in the first place.
A perfect illustration is “the” breast cancer gene, BRCA-1. The first year after it was identified in 1994, women with a certain mutation to that gene were told they had an 85 percent chance of getting cancer. But within a year, new studies lowered that to 50 percent. Last May, a study came out in the New England Journal of Medicine with a 16 percent figure. Finally, last week, two more studies came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association saying that the BRCA-1 mutation is so rare that it’s “premature” for most women to take the test at all.
Many women with family histories of breast cancer leapt at BRCA-1 testing, thinking it a miraculous gaze into a crystal ball. For those confronting the terrible decision whether to remove their breasts, the test seemed to offer an extra bit of helpful evidence. But as time went on, the BRCA-1 test turned out to be less like a crystal ball and more like a weather report.
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Like the weather, a gene mutation expresses itself depending on unpredictable, uncontrollable things — environment, daily lives, the presence of other genes, all of the above, two out of three. That’s why all of our genes that have complicated relationships to disease, as well as personality and behavior, will speak to us like weathermen. We’ll know the genes, like the clouds, are there. We’ll know they’re probably storm cloud genes or just light-sprinkle genes. But we’re many years from using genetic information to make solid predictions or tough medical decisions with any certainty.
To understand why genes will cling tenaciously to their unfathomably complex secrets, it helps to understand how scientists link them to specific traits. Naturally they don’t get to watch a gene in action as it fails to produce the enzyme that unclogs the lungs of a child with cystic fibrosis. Instead, they go after genes the way special prosecutors go after politicians: from afar, piecing together evidence that connects the gene to its effect. It’s easier to trace a gene that has an obvious effect on lots of people, for the same reason that serial offenders are easier to convict in court — because their modus operandi is the same throughout many crimes.
Science has long since identified genes for diseases with clear genetic roots like Huntington’s, but it stumbles over genes with murkier roles in illness. It may be feasible to study 1,000 married, nonsmoking Jewish men with family histories of colon cancer to see which gene they might have in common. But cancer, like diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and most other common diseases, is only partly caused by genes — and then, often by 10 or more genes working in concert. So once all those genes have been staked out and the statisticians have read the nonsmoking Jewish men’s DNA prints, they’ll have to follow them around for 20 years and see who got the illness, when and from which of the five or 10 suspect genes.
Even then, the statistics will still be pretty shaky — researchers will never get all those men to follow similar diets or be exposed to the same environmental toxins. This is why most genetic tests will never give much more than vague indications of susceptibility: The gene may be discrete and locatable, but the number of variables acting on it, and on one another, pushes an individual’s possibilities off into unchartable complexity. Would a police detective spend quite so much time looking for the smoking gun if he knew it had 1,000 different fingerprints on it?
In spite of all this, biomedical companies are apparently pushing doctors to prescribe tests to patients before anyone has any idea how accurate they are, fueling unnecessary treatments, stress and family tensions. They’re getting help from the National Institutes of Health, which has been pushing to have all pregnant women offered a genetic test for cystic fibrosis — a test that is only 70 percent conclusive for Caucasians and 30 percent for Asians, with Hispanics and African-Americans in between. Many health professionals resent government pressure to offer dubious, and costly, genetic tests. Yet more such population-screening pushes are on the way.
The NIH is trying to establish the cystic fibrosis test as “standard of care,” meaning it’s commonly accepted medical practice. Once that happens,
doctors have a legal incentive to err on the side of more genetic testing, rather than less. “Wrongful birth” suits are already being launched by new parents furious that a genetic test referral might have spared them from having to raise a child with a birth defect.
“The companies push like mad because they want to make money, and they insinuate to the doctors that it’ll be malpractice if they don’t give these tests,” says Nancy Wexler, a Columbia University professor who heads the Hereditary Disease Foundation and led the effort to isolate the gene for Huntington’s disease. “The physicians are trying to figure out when a test is ready for prime time, and a lot of the companies don’t care.”
Were biomedical companies to go searching for “the” gene that keeps you healthy, or sane, or long-lived, they’d never sell the test to anyone. This is why genetic testing promises only bad news: Healthy people don’t need explanations; sick people, however, are a recession-proof market.
Commercial pressure to implement genetic testing flourishes in today’s media climate. Careers are being made convincing the public that in a very few years we’ll all carry around scanning cards with our genetic future mapped out in magnetic bits. Book contracts are flying in all directions to scientists and bioethicists who indulge in speculative moralizing about supposed genetic possibilities. With “Gattaca,” even Hollywood has carved out a stake in the gene myth.
They’re catering to a popular concept of genes-as-destiny that stretches way back in our culture — Shakespeare’s plays are filled with blood-as-fate references, and Oliver Twist, child of nobles raised among orphans, instinctively knows how to use the subjunctive even though he’s never heard it in his life. Our own hot pursuit of genetic-health predictors comes at a time of increasing comfort with scientific justifications for growing chasms between class divisions, and of shrill political hostility to the “liberal” notion that behavior and destiny are partly a product of the environment.
But if we seek answers in genetic testing, we’ll merely be escorted to the hazy, ever-shifting border between nature and nurture — a territory full of statistical black holes where no study can squeeze the complexities and variety of human lifestyles into definitive and reliable “facts” about what genes really do. Most genetics researchers will tell you all that if you just ask them — especially if they’re not trying to sell gee-whiz books about a wondrous future of cloning and designer personalities.
The truth is that relatively few of our genes are ever going to give us a clear indication of our “fate.” One geneticist told me point-blank, ” It’s how we live our lives that determines what our risks really are.”
The real long-term value of all this genetic research will be to uncover the biochemical pathways by which things go wrong in the body, so that treatments, genetic and otherwise, can be perfected. But that, geneticists say, is many years down the road. Considering that every single human being carries seven mutations that make them susceptible to fatal diseases — or 30, or 100, depending on who’s talking — people should ask whether there is any point in identifying these mutations before treatments are available to prevent or cure the disease.
Unfortunately, the world of managed care has increasingly viewed genetic counselors, the folks who ask you if you really want or need a test, as a luxury. The master’s degree programs that provide this unique combination of family psychology and molecular biology suffer from a dearth of jobs for their graduates. One hears a nationwide sigh of resignation that there will never be enough genetic counselors — from federal health agencies, the health-care system and even most academic “bioethicists” who get grants from the Human Genome Project’s generous ethics budget to mind social policy on genetics. This, at a time when more and more patients have to make life-changing decisions based on vague clinical risk estimates, even if their knowledge of math goes no further than balancing a checkbook.
“Americans are terrible with probability theory,” says Boston University bioethicist George Annas. “That’s why Las Vegas does so well.”
Instead, genetic counseling is to be turned over to doctors, nurses, Internet sites, interactive computer programs and — how’s this for objective health information? — toll-free numbers set up by companies that offer genetic tests.
Considering the average doctor’s visit lasts seven minutes, computer programs and Internet sites might be more practical and thorough. But at a Stanford University conference on expanding genetic testing for Alzheimer’s last October, Henry Greeley, co-director of the university’s genetic-ethics program, noted, “Humans don’t perceive risk the way computers would like them to.” Even the most levelheaded, he said, often suffer emotional breakdowns when they get scary test results.
At the same conference, Dr. Paul Berg, a Stanford professor in cancer research, called the genetics community’s intentions to educate the broad public about testing issues “pie in the sky.”
“If you make the case that your genes are telling you something,” Berg said, “you need to have someone telling you that in a way that is personal. The question is this: Is the health-care system going to pay for this thing? Perhaps, but it’s not on the horizon.”
That’s why we need to genetically test all the politicians as soon as possible. If we could screen them better for the 21st century boosterism gene, we might end up with leaders who are less infatuated with biomedical science. Maybe then they’d take a more sober look at its impact on real people — who encounter it far from the droning rhetoric of progress and economic growth, in little white rooms, by the ticking of a clock.
I wonder what Richard Nixon would have thought of the recently concluded Federal Trade Commission hearings on privacy in the datasphere. After all, Nixon suffered the most humiliating privacy loss ever. Surely he could empathize with all the people who are upset that strangers can find dossiers about them on the Web, or that their personal information has become an unregulated commodity floating through distant databases. He was as shocked and confused as we are that a convenient new communications technology — in his case, audiotape — would turn around and tattle on him. And, just like us, he reacted by demanding more privacy.
It mystifies us that the man thought he could have it both ways — record everything, and get away with everything. But curiously, it mystifies nobody that we all expect to talk freely and shop with convenience through electronic networks without establishing some sort of reputation for ourselves. In conditions of the utmost anonymity, living in “communities” where neighbors don’t talk to one another, we expect, as Nixon did, to be trusted. And we are outraged to find that it’s not possible, and they’re subpoenaing our tapes on Capitol Hill. Why, we ask, does anyone need to know all this stuff about me?
The exploitation of personal data that the FTC hearings took up is plainly a serious problem. But nobody wants to admit that privacy itself may really be that problem’s root cause rather than its antidote.
Modern life allows us an unprecedented level of physical privacy in real time and space. This isolated existence not only feeds our paranoia but necessitates the electronic record keeping that enables us to deal all day with total strangers. As the scale of interactions and commerce broadens across the Web, the complexity of that record keeping promises only to deepen.
Want to buy gas on credit? Easy! Even easier than the times when the mechanic down the street knew you personally. The difference is that now, the pump will know your name, a distant computer will make a record and the fellow behind the bulletproof glass won’t give a damn. He has privacy, you have privacy. Everyone happy?
It’s no coincidence that the jurist Louis Brandeis wrote his often-cited, groundbreaking “right to be let alone” privacy screed in 1890, just when the close-knit scrutiny of real villages began to give way to the anonymity of urban life. People took privacy for granted until then; in the days before databases, it was not an abstract quality. One’s bedroom or backyard were either private or they weren’t — and one’s reputation was rarely more permanent or widespread than the memory banks of the people one dealt with personally.
Over the last 50 years, our journey into suburbs and cars and flickering TV nighttimes behind barred windows has given us extraordinary seclusion in our personal and home lives. And yet we’ve only felt more insecure. Only 34 percent of Americans polled by the Louis Harris firm expressed concern about personal privacy in 1970. By 1995, the figure was up to 80 percent.
What happened? This growing concern doesn’t indicate a simple increase in how much we value privacy, any more than the soaring number of lawyers in the U.S. means we value justice more. Instead, it’s a fearful reaction to the collapse of trust in our culture.
In “The Naked Society” (1964), Vance Packard trembled at the 20th century innovations that were draining American life of privacy and autonomy: social control by large, impersonal employers; pressure on companies to scrutinize customer choices in a sophisticated manner in order to compete for market share; galloping advances in electronic technology; and the McCarthy-era adoption of a pervasive top-security mentality in both government and business.
Nearly a decade later, at the dawn of computerized record keeping, James B. Rule pointed out in “Private Lives and Public Surveillance” (1973) that the transition to a society of mobile strangers didn’t necessarily increase surveillance — the prying eyes of small-town neighbors are, he felt, in most cases worse. But it did lead to more centralized surveillance — out of sight and, for practical purposes, beyond the control of the individual.
By 1993, in the book “The Costs of Privacy,” Steven L. Nock attacked privacy itself as the problematic result of systemic social separation. “Privacy grows as the number of strangers grows,” Nock wrote. “And since strangers tend to not have reputations, there will be more surveillance when there are more strangers. Privacy is one consequence, or cost, of growing numbers of strangers. Surveillance is one consequence, or cost, of privacy.”
Nock called credit cards, those handy generators of much of the personal data we’ve lost control over, “portable reputations.” In the era of the Internet, cheap computing and an increasingly global economy, those portable reputations record more and more of our activities, and more and more strangers and institutions demand them from us. The trends toward economic consolidation, less face-to-face accountability in our public lives and faster computing will exert great pressure for ever more elaborate identification and credentialing schemes. The spread of the use of the social security number to 60 government agencies is one result of this pressure. Retina and thumbprint scans, already in pilot testing, will be the next.
We can complain all we want about Big Brother, but when we wrested our reputations from human memory and turned them over to far less judgmental computer circuits and phone lines — vanquishing those nasty old village snoops who might keep us from living out our hearts’ desires — reputation remained as important as ever. The difference is that even as we have downplayed its significance — whether out of honest egalitarianism or excessive individualism — we have consigned it to the banal, impersonal testing ground of supermarket checkout stands and pre-employment background checks.
The only thing a computer ever asks is: Are you approved, or not? And everyone from medical insurers to prospective employers to creditors views us as a potential threat until our data prove otherwise. Setting up new privacy regulations isn’t going to alleviate this pressure; it may only lead to more elaborate credentials and invasive identifiers for individuals, and increased secrecy for the institutions that manage our reputations.
Privacy, particularly when enshrined in law, can protect the corrupt and malign as well as the good and upstanding. But the bulk of breathless newspaper reports issuing forth on this issue since last year have almost universally ignored this, instead focusing on the hypothetical risks of baddies out there finding out where Joe Consumer lives and (gasp!) what his children’s names are. Most have taken the same grave, utterly simplistic angle: Privacy good. Stalkers bad. Internet dangerous. Call Congressman. All have invariably repeated the same shopworn Top 10 privacy-violation horror stories, mostly hypothetical and mostly based on the absurdity of having to hide out from one’s HMO, spoon-fed to hungry reporters by a small group of widely quoted privacy activists. James Wheaton, senior counsel of the First Amendment Project, an Oakland, Calif., group trying to protect and expand the Freedom of Information Act, laments “enormous imprecision” in the concerns raised by some of these activists.
By giving government officials the power to deny public-records access to anyone without credentials (i.e. the little guy), Wheaton says, “the privacy activists may inadvertently be helping the moneyed interests and doing nothing for greater security.” Even with their good intentions and a laudable commitment to civil liberties, the professional privacy advocates have little besides fear as a selling point — fear of the stalker, the fraud perpetrator, the government agency run amok . But the fear and paranoia that have become so entrenched in the public mind are the primary cause of all this high-tech surveillance in the first place, because nobody wants to deal with anybody in person any more.
Sure, there are legitimate issues of informational privacy, and at their best, the FTC hearings constructively aired them. Businesses that collect personal information from Web browsing should have some regulation against selling it, and anyone can see that companies compiling dossiers on every American are a threat to — well, let’s not bring up Hitler again. But the drumbeat of scare stories has focused too much attention on the Internet, even though nobody has explained how the Internet causes the problems in any direct or unique way. Credit-card fraud, costing literally billions of dollars in losses in recent years, was a problem as soon as credit cards were invented — and the Secret Service, which investigates computer crime, has no evidence to date that the resourceful credit-fraud rings have sought or needed help from the Internet.
It’s ironic that Americans are asking for privacy protection from the same government that has in the last few years expanded electronic surveillance beyond Richard Nixon’s wildest dreams — always with an appeal to public fear and mistrust. Federal agencies are creating centralized databases to track every new job hire in the country (to catch illegal immigrants and deadbeat dads), to make sure that welfare recipients don’t overstay their five years by changing states and to provide instant “terrorist” profiling to airport security agents. The country has not hesitated in the last few years to wipe out the civil liberties of whole swaths of the population in futile gropes for greater public security that’s never attained.
But as soon as the most minute interest of upper-income people is threatened, Congress is shut down with phone calls, as it was during the Lexis-Nexis fiasco last summer and the Social Security Web site controversy this April. Privacy is a vastly different issue to those whose names aren’t on anyone’s direct-mail list. Ask a homeless person what “privacy” means and the answer might involve a large appliance box. Once you’re on the street, you’re a reputation refugee — and no computer is ever going to approve your e-cash transaction.
Simple loss of privacy is not the real problem underlying all the tossing and turning we’re going through over the openness the Internet has thrust upon us. The entire experience of Internet use has total privacy as its point of departure — “meatspace” privacy, real-time anonymity, the kind that keeps anyone from knowing you’re surfing the Web in your partner’s underwear.
No, privacy is only part of the equation. The other part is the basic question of trust, that elusive property that we’ve all, in our hearts, given up on. This wide-ranging loss of our electronic virginity was well under way 20 years ago, but remained invisible until the Web forced us to confront it. We should be grateful for that. The arrival of the Global Village could be an opportunity to reevaluate our notions of trust and strangerhood. Maybe it will force us to.
Nixon’s demands for privacy were ultimately fruitless and pathetic because there was no longer any trust to base that privacy on. He never understood that — and as privacy-loss hysteria begins to push laws through Congress that may do more harm than good, sadly, neither do we.
