An age of transparency looms, and people and institutions everywhere are terrified. Private citizens have only as much privacy as may survive the efforts of hucksters and bureaucrats to collect every trace of information abroad in the world. Closet miscreants, secret philanderers, solitary onanists are in constant danger of exposure by wire and camera. Corporations and government agencies are outed as criminal enterprises. No practitioner of human activity traditionally done behind a veil can be certain any longer of concealment.
I find I couldn't be more pleased. I was tired of the bullshit.
But the full disclosure of everything, and the accountability that follows, threatens doom to the oldest, most widespread, most frequently charged and invariably denied human appurtenance of them all: hypocrisy.
We're all going to have to come to grips with this problem, and soon.
Accordingly, I'd like to propose that all of us cut all of the others a break. If the default answer to the charge "You're a hypocrite!" necessarily becomes "Well, duh!", then the charge loses its currency, and we can hope it'll go away. Once our hypocrisies are a matter of public record, we'll all feel obliged to do better. Just imagine the benefits!
Unfortunately, the cognitive dissonance that will prompt potential saints like you and me to reform, will not do so with corporations, which, while persons under the law, by their fiduciary duty to maximize profit for their shareholders are of necessity sociopathic persons. In their case, coercion will be required.
As for governments, we'll have to take those back. That's what the whistleblowers are for.
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*Gender-neutral yet grammatical pronoun.
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