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whimsical invention to take place and become mainstream. This generativity
has occurred in part because the ancillary costs to experiment—both for software
authors and software users—have been so low.
The most recent technological shift has been the availability of cheap sensors.
Sensors that are small, accurate, and inexpensive are now found in cameras,
microphones, scanners, and global positioning systems. These characteristics
have made sensors much easier to deploy—and then network—in places
where previously it would have been impractical to have them.
The proliferation of cheap surveillance cameras has empowered the central
authorities found within the traditional privacy equation. A 2002 working paper
estimated that the British government had spent several hundred million
dollars on closed-circuit television systems, with many networked to central
law enforcement stations for monitoring. 24 Such advances, and the analysis
that follows them, fit the template of Privacy 1.0: governments have access to
more information thanks to more widely deployed monitoring technologies,
and rules and practices are suggested to prevent whatever our notions might be
of abuse. 25 To see how cheap processors, networks, and sensors create an entirely
new form of the problem, we must look to the excitement surrounding the
participatory technologies suggested by one meaning of “Web 2.0.” In academic
circles, this meaning of Web 2.0 has become known as “peer production.”
The Dynamics of Peer Production
The aggregation of small contributions of individual work can make oncedifficult
tasks seem easy. For example, Yochai Benkler has approvingly described
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) use of
public volunteers, or “clickworkers.” 26 NASA had a tedious job involving pictures
of craters from the moon and Mars. These were standard bitmap images,
and they wanted the craters to be vectorized: in other words, they wanted people
to draw circles around the circles they saw in the photos. Writing some custom
software and deploying it online, NASA asked Internet users at large to
undertake the task. Much to NASA’s pleasant surprise, the clickworkers accomplished
in a week what a single graduate student would have needed a year
to complete. 27 Cheap networks and PCs, coupled with the generative ability to
costlessly offer new code for others to run, meant that those who wanted to
pitch in to help NASA could do so.
The near-costless aggregation of far-flung work can be applied in contexts
other than the drawing of circles around craters—or the production of a free
encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Computer scientist Luis von Ahn, after noting