Transparency and Clout on the Internet and in the City

Transparency: "open, truthful, unreserved communication" - my mom


Clout: "A heavy blow with the hand or a hard object. / Influence or power, especially in politics or business." - the internet




Privacy is a constructed phenomenon/emotion/experience constructed by capitalism to associate fear to anything but proprietary ownership. Gaston Bachelard suggests that having space between domestic, suburban houses increases the fear of the wilderness, and an increased sense of isolation - this places greater emphasis on the house, and is what created the Three Little Pigs who need a house of brick. In New York City (the only city I have lived in which possesses the following sensation), privacy is less important: people chill on their fire escapes, walk half-nude with the blinds open, and engage in conversation on the sidewalk as they walk to the subway or the coffee place or the gym. Actions which, to the suburban mind, demand privacy can exist in a public sphere, because what the city lacks in privacy it gains in anonymity. With anonymity, each person contributes to the texture of the city, the cigarette smokers on the stoops, the clusters of really annoying teenagers who walk so slow you wanna push them away but you loop around them and then cut them off, and each anonymous face contributes to the personal experience of the city, because each inter-personal relationship is so ephemeral and inconsequential that walking down the street becomes an intra-personal investigation into oneself: do I look fat, or do I feel fat?

Humor me: The internet is a city. You must have your feet in here first (either buy a train ticket into the city/have a computer with internet access). You must have some sense of how to move about the city (you can navigate New York by walking, car, or subway/the Internet is navigated by search engines which bring you to locations). You must have a reason to be here (you are being a tourist, have business here, or live here/you have to gather information, communicate with others, or be entertained [others things too]).

Each agent on the internet can be traced and their digital presence traced to a physical computer and the agent in front of it, but so too can strangers standing on a city street be communicated with, gotten to know, understood to some extent. But anonymity preserves transparency (you wouldn't share your personal information with a stranger on the street [unless/especially if they're from PETA/the ASPCA/Sierra Club/etc]).

We would hand over our information to a person/place with a reputation of transparency, which are often places with many locations and recognition - enter clout.

Why the fruit of the loom is there a Starbucks on every damn corner?????? And why is there a Whole Foods opening on the corner of 125th (YES I KNOW) and Lenox??????? RIGHT IN THE SHADOW OF THE APOLLO. Because of clout. Because of power, and privilege, and in the City these translate into gentrification and geographic displacement. On the internet... the sale of individual user's browsing data?

- In response to the "Wealth of Nations" by Yochai Benkler