Rekonism

I have always been surprised by the attitude of many towards anonymity and cryptography, as a universal means of combating world evil. It is necessary to receive news that somewhere the government is tightening the screws, or the copywriters are pushing another idiotic bill, a comment in the spirit of “Ha! Here we are right now, I2P and Truerypt will get out of wide trousers, and they will be lost ... ”No, of course, in certain situations it is possible and necessary to encrypt. Anonymity can save lives in a country where it is customary to execute people who disagree with the fact that the current ever-living leader wisely leads his people to prosperity, and temporary interruptions in food supplies are just an annoying trifle. But going underground is the last hope, a respirator for dying freedom, not a weapon of victory.

Once I stumbled on a web on a wiki project with the strange name “Reconstruction”. Something about the new social system and a bright future. But, after talking with the author of the project and delving into reading, I became convinced that Roma Petrov (@ rpetrov) is a completely normal and sane person, and not a graphomaniac maniac who knows “ how to arrange Russia ” and draws inspiration from intimate conversations with aliens. His attitude to privacy and anonymity almost coincided with mine, and many articles on his wiki looked like the embodiment of my ideas and drafts. Word for word, we have come to the point that we have written a whole book about mutual transparency, decentralization and wikification of society. Perhaps one of the strongest incentives for writing a book was that we never managed to find publications in Russian that reveal the theme of information transparency.

There is “ Wikinomics ” by Tapscott and Williams, dedicated to mass cooperation and decentralization, there is “ Cloud Democracy ” by Volkov and Krasheninnikov, where a couple of pages are devoted to openness and transparency. But the Russian-speaking audience is virtually unknown to the book “The Transparent Society ” by David Brin or the concepts of “Reverse” ( sousveillance ) and “equilibrium” ( equiveillance ) observation.

Meanwhile, information transparency is the key to the success of any decentralized projects. The more information about each other available to members of horizontal, networked communities, the more efficiently self-organization can work, the more reliably and more accurately one can judge the reputation of each member of the community, and the greater the responsibility of each. And the less centralization and inequality in access to information, the safer it becomes openness and transparency. If “Big Brother” is not so big and omnipotent, then you can fear it a lot less. Transparency and decentralization complement and reinforce each other.
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We are already firmly on the hook of information transparency. But for now, this transparency is one-sided. We cannot and do not want to abandon the convenience, simplicity and new opportunities that we receive in exchange for disclosing a part of our personal data. Banking and discount cards, social networks and communities, cloud services - it is already difficult to imagine our life without a lot of these small and not so much things. An indefinitely wide circle of people has access to databases with our personal information, the overwhelming majority of whom are not familiar to us, and whom we have to trust simply because we have nowhere to go. Employees of banks, shops, Internet companies, officials, special services and all those who are willing to spend a moderate amount on a bribe or purchase of a stolen base. At the same time, neither our friends, nor relatives, nor even we ourselves have access to most of this information and do not control it. And nothing. We live somehow ...

At the same time, real, and not toy anonymity and conspiracy remains a complex art, which is fully owned only by those whose life depends on the ability to hide. Spies, dissidents, criminals. The more perfect and affordable the anonymization and encryption methods become, the faster the reverse technologies develop. Armor and projectile, lock and master key - the eternal confrontation. Is the game worth the candle? For the vast majority - no. Instead of artificially limiting the capabilities of computers and networks, hiding information, it is better to learn how to derive maximum benefit from openness.

The book "Rekonizm" is available and will always be available on the website reckonism.org for free download and read online. You can also buy a hardcover book there or support us by paying for the electronic version and donating money for the development of the project. We welcome your ideas, questions and feedback on the wiki and Facebook page . Enjoy reading!