Alex Muller

Jeff Jarvis was on an absolute roll during the latest episode of This Week in Google, “A World of Gibbons” (#53, Huffduff). Some quotes, emphasis mine, with MP3 timecodes [in square brackets]:

[25:21] If you’re sitting in any organisation, and let’s not forget this is not just going to be governments, it’s also companies. At some point, as I said earlier on, and it’s a glib line, but the only sure cure for leaks is transparency. At some point you’re gonna realise that you’re better off releasing more information. That the more you hold secret, the more risk you have of leaks, and anything that looks like a leak looks like an expose. Now that’s going to be a very hard lesson to get across to controlling institutions, but I think if we’re looking at a long term impact here on the culture. I’m writing about this obviously, so it’s on the top of my brain. But I think that this default of publicness versus a default of privacy and secrecy is what we’re grappling with here, and we get to a point where there is no mediator.

[33:26] So what the fear was, that they put forward is someone would come and scan your garbage. So what, they find out I’m 33 now, not 32? Then what? What does that do? We don’t look at the implications, but technology yields change and change yields fright and fright yields protection. And that’s a very small example of what Jay just said. Whether you’re a big institution, or whether you’re a survivalist, or whoever you are, there’s two responses to this world coming up: to embrace the change, or to try to fear it.

And the killer…

[34:22] Yes, we need secrets. But first you have to have the trust to know that those who are holding secrets are holding them for a reason.