A decade of reckoning

There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known

Prince Harry has been photographed in the naughty naked nude. I suppose I shouldn't be shocked. I mean, I shouldn't be shocked that some weasly, slimebag of a hanger-on has ratted him out for a few dollars or a momentary feeling of empowerment.

All we do these days can be laid bare in an instant. (If you will forgive the pun). The decade of reckoning began with the MPs and their expenses. Then it was the turn of the press. What was hitherto done in secret is now vulnerable to the white heat of technology. More often than not, some petty, or not so petty, thief is captured on one of the 1.85 million CCTV cameras in the UK. The first thing the cops do in certain types of investigation is to look at computer history and mobile phone records. In my lifetime it took a man at the Post Office who had to run up and down banks of switching terminals, merely in order to trace a call in real time. If the perp hung up, it could not be traced. When Watergate broke, it was down to a lot of very non-technical detective work by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. There was no electronic trail, it was a paper-trail. Maybe the famous tapes were an early indication of just how important electronic media was going to be in exposing misdeeds.

There is a race, from both sides of the spectrum: governments are implementing more measures to enable them to access private data and at the same time, hackers and whistle-blowers are running rings around them by publishing the very types of data that your government wants to hide.

Neither will win. What has been entered on the keyboard may as well have been carved in stone on Mount Rushmore.

The question is, how to live with it, for surely you cannot hold back the tide? My guess is that we are experiencing a revolution that affects us in much the same way that the industrial revolution affected people in the 18th century. It is massive change at a rate which is impossible to assimilate in real time.

Presently, we are not dealing with this very well. The police are running around the place arresting 17 year-olds who get a bit mouthy on Twitter. For some reason, people are shocked that Prince Harry is a bit of a lad. The Americans want Julian Assange's head on a plate because he has published stuff that makes them uncomfortable. Celebrities are using their money to get super-injunctions, just so that we will continue to believe in their god-like purity. It is not as if any of the revelations, insults or secrets should be shocking or surprising. Real people in real life can be shits. If you lock up everyone who is a shit the streets will be very quiet indeed.

The technology will not go away, the genii is out of the bottle. Somehow, we need to learn how to deal with the information overkill and the rather glib reaction to it. Society has to become, either more tolerant, or more self-censoring.  I think we should embrace the monastic tradition and declare little to the outside world but a benificent smile and a desire to serve without earthly reward.