Words&Dirt

“‘He will be a great empiricist.  He will, perhaps, be the one to accomplish some great thing we have never imagined.’

‘Enoch, what can you possibly be talking about?’

It made his head ache.  How was he able to explain it without making Clarke out to be a fool, and himself a swindler?  ‘Something is happening.’

Clarke pursed his lips and waited for something a little more specific.

‘Galileo and Descartes were only harbingers.  Something is happening now––the mercury is rising in the ground, like water climbing up the bore of a well.'”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 32

“It was fun while it lasted, living on these city streets amid countless, nameless fellow beings, not knowing any of them unless you chose to, being able to walk away from any embarrassment or petty discourtesy, just another forgotten face in the crowd.

It was also lonely.

Today, you read about old folks found dead in their apartments months after anyone last saw them alive, and about children who were abused for years without the neighbors suspecting, or doing a thing about it.  That won’t happen anymore when the village returns.  Busybodies will gossip, but you’ll know their secrets––and you’ll be able to leave your doors unlocked.  Your bedroom will be protected from snoops by electronic guardians, but most of all by the fact that voyeurs and snoops will fear being caught.  Your taxes may be public knowledge, but so will every suspicious deal made by any politician or captain of finance.  Anyone will be able to find out how much you paid for your nose job, or what salad dressing you buy; and your reactions will be, ‘Who cares?’  It will be like having people know what color sweater you are wearing.

Courtesy, at first enforced by a mutual deterrence of vision, may become a simple, comfortable habit.  One that respects a world of wildly varied eccentrics.  One that gives each person a little more space than he or she would have inside a mask.

Meanwhile, you and your kids will have friends in every part of the world, whom you met through shared interests on the Net.  And when you travel, those friends will pick you up at the airport with open arms, as familiar as any member of your family, even though you never met in person till that very moment.

Perhaps, after all is said and done, most of us will even decide it’s better that way.  Better to know our neighbors (in their multitudes) than to live a fiction of splendid, lonely isolation.

Assuming we have the slightest choice in the matter.”

––The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, by David Brin, pg. 334-5