Between 2007 and 2010, I lived in New York and worked on a startup called drop.io, whose goal was to make it easy to privately share files and content across platforms. Given what I was working on in that period, I spent a lot of time talking about privacy.
One theme—which I would highlight over and over in presentations—was that the only possible future of privacy was to generate lots of disinformation rather than try to prevent information from being exposed in the first place. In other words, bury the truth in a sea of lies.
It dawned on me last week that perhaps the greatest modern practitioner of this new form of privacy is Donald Trump. Perhaps because of his decades of public “celebrity” life, he seems to intuitively understand modern privacy better than almost everyone. He seems to really get that privacy isn’t about hiding, it is about speaking constantly.
The key is not to try to prevent things from coming out. The key is to put out so much chaff along with the truth that it is impossible to know what is real and what is fake—and eventually everyone gives up trying to separate the two.
The New Yorker recently ran a column comparing a recent Trump admission—about meeting with Russians to learn about Hillary Clinton—to the Watergate “smoking gun” tape. But the column made the point that whereas Nixon admitted the meaning of what he was heard saying on the tape and that it would lead to his impeachment, Trump’s alternative strategy is to try to bend reality.
Whether or not you agree with the New Yorker’s example, there are other instances of the Trump strategy. For example, there is his recent meeting with Putin where he decided to say one thing on stage, and then days later have his team claim he meant to say the exact opposite.
That is what is so ironic about his claims that serious publications are “fake news.” His core strategy is to himself generate enough fake news in other channels and then try to create an equivalence between all information sources.
It seems like, so far, this is a very successful strategy for the president—at least so far as his goals are purely privacy.
By being insanely active on Twitter and other channels, and—in effect—saying all things, whether contradictory or not, he simultaneously says nothing. And he is able to achieve his goal of keeping reality private—known only to himself.
As I was preaching 10 years ago, this is a strategy in general that we should all expect to see more and more in the world. It is, I would argue, the aggressively technologically correct strategy to run for the future. Don’t prevent leaks or try to lock down everything. Just build self-serving networks of people or bots to put out enough false information to obscure reality.
If you are a private person, don’t try to avoid having a social media profile. Instead try to have many fake ones, all sharing contradictory information about “you.”
As technologically correct as this strategy will be in the short term for individuals and organizations looking to protect themselves, it has two really fundamental long-term flaws.
The first flaw is that it is broadly terrible for humanity overall. It is effectively pollution in our shared pool of knowledge and understanding of the world. Such is the tragedy of any commons. The individual incentive is to pollute, and over time the entire space becomes unusable.
I worry that that is precisely what is happening to our current public discourse. The commons is actively being polluted, so different groups are retreating to private spaces for real discussion.
The second flaw, which perhaps the president will care more about, is that it is very, very difficult to control. In traditional access-based privacy control models, the goal is to keep some people out but let other people “in” to know a fact.
The problem with the strategy of flooding the information zone is that it is very hard to keep certain people out and other people in. The strategy effectively requires you to be tricking and creating confusion for everyone, not just certain people.
So, the Faustian bargain of the disinformation game becomes that you can have privacy, but you have privacy from everyone—not just some people.
Just like the old simple tale of the boy who cried wolf, at some point the disinformation strategy means that your voice loses all meaning—and you lose the ability to communicate with others, even when you want to.
Some people like to pretend that no one saw this coming. But for what it’s worth, I think many people understood that this was a logical step that would happen as the internet developed.
The question, of course, is what to do about it and how to fix it—and that will be my next column.