Change Agent - Issue 51

Could you imagine a workplace where everyone came in wearing a mask? People would sit wherever they wanted to, take anything that interested them, say whatever they felt like saying -- and then they'd disappear, possibly forever. Nothing would get done.

Here's a humble suggestion: Let's build a parallel Internet, a Net where no one is welcome unless they have a verifiable identity. Let's require everyone to take responsibility for their actions if they want to participate in our new online society.

Will privacy go out the window in a world with no anonymity?

Well, in the old days we had far less anonymity and far more privacy. As the Internet and the shields of large corporations have increased anonymity, it doesn't seem as if privacy is increasing. And by the way, is privacy necessarily such a good thing?

I recently did some work with a moderately well-known author. He explained to me the steps that he takes to avoid being contacted. He has no email address, he said. If you want to contact him, you need to send a note to a friend of his, who screens his messages. He has no business card, no mailing address, and no phone in his office. He has never bought anything online, and when he flies, he buys his tickets with cash. After considering that this was sort of bizarre behavior (he's a little bit of a bizarre personality to begin with), I felt sad for him. In order to save himself 20 or 30 minutes a day screening email messages from folks he doesn't know, he's decided to remove himself from the world. As a result, as an anonymous, private person, he's under a lot less pressure to be civil and to be a productive member of our society.

What if there were no privacy? What if everyone knew how much money you made, what you paid in taxes, what you gave to charity, and how many dogs you had? And let's add just two more assumptions to the mix:

One, the government doesn't get overthrown and replaced with blue-helmeted thought-controlling soldiers enforcing a new world order. And two, we're all equally exposed. You have no anonymity and no privacy -- but no one else gets any either.

What would happen? I'm not proposing that I want a world like that -- but I do think that the idea is worth discussing. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have come to the conclusion that rampant chaos, aided and abetted by tiny circles of privacy, is the best way to ensure our future as a civil society. I think that if I had my choice, I'd vote for the village where everyone knew my name.

At least we'd all drive better.

Seth Godin (sgodin@fastcompany.com) is the author of Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends, and Friends Into Customers (Simon & Schuster, 1999) and Unleashing the Ideavirus (Do You Zoom Inc., 2000). Get his latest book for free on the Web (www.ideavirus.com).