Radical Transparency

My training as a historian means that I am often on the alert for discourse that pitches a view of the present based on a paradigmatic vision of the future. Chris Anderson's post In Praise of Radical Transparency is certainly informative and is supported by some interesting links, but as with much of this kind of material, you get sense that a fully-formed new set of "default modes" is assumed to have taken shape and emerged explosively from within the dried husk of the old. In practice however, history is rarely as discontinuous as its mouthpieces would have us believe. Personally, what interests me more are the rather jumbled pyschologies that are in fact the usual end product of rapid, self-conscious change.