For about the fourth time, I have put together a PGP arrangement. As usual, I wonder if there is anything at all that I know which is worth protecting and communicating. I know that there is, the problem is that there is nobody worth communicating it to.
Not long ago I wrote in my Normblog interview:
I confess that I am drawn to spies and, to a lesser extent, priests. They hold in their heads ideas that are worth killing and dying for, and yet unlike writers and intellectuals of other sorts, they are restrained by ethical virtues from gaining any notoriety, wealth or respect from the dissemination of said ideas. Anyone can blurt the beautiful and be blessed, but there is nothing so frighteningly powerful, I think, as an idea whose time may very well never come. They are the reverse of us who clamour for glory and vindication.
The other day, NPR was interviewing a physicist who had recently become curator of the LA Natural History Museum. I think she is bound to turn that stately place into another popular, bright something-a-torium with a McDonalds. But I tend to think she is not the proper physicist. That is to say, nuclear secrets are the most haunting creation of the last 100 years. They are obscured by their own inherent complexity and by extraordinarily well-funded aparatuses of security. I would think that a proper physicist would spend as much time as possible in close proximity to those touchstones. But she struck me as a pure scientist in search of order and wonder and discovery. I might be defective in my attraction to the forbidden fruits of the world's most highly guarded mysteries.
In my own profession I have been astounded by the lack of security. I basically have had access to the financial data for every company I've worked for for the past 20 years. None of them have ever employed a system to keep that data out of the hands of IT personnel. It's a strange thing when you think about it, you trust the implementation of security to people who should actually never have access to the thing which you are securing. It's a small problem that might have been addressed somewhere but not often, and maybe not well.
So I conclude that I don't know jack.
There is no inherent value in anything. Somebody has to desire it. Then that means somebody has to be aware of it. Part of the difficulty in security is that people have to recognize that something is of value to someone else before it is secured. And unless there is some kind of healthy market for contraband, most valuables are not really valuable. It's the old paradox which is that it's much harder to get 50K in cash than it is to get 5 million in bonds, because everybody knows what to do with 50k in cash but only a few know what to do with 5 million in bonds. The bond market may have high barriers to entry, but I seriously doubt that bond traders are scrutinized as thoroughly as people asking for a second on their house. But what do I know, I can't get either. The point stands however, I'll use a different example. It's easier for me to bum 20 for lunch off a colleague than for an actual bum to get spare change. It's all about the exchange.
So what might be secured is not secured because nobody understands the value. Conversely some things that are obviously valuable and secured are difficult to sell because markets are small and illicit. How might one go about selling corporate secrets, for example? I think it's something that perhaps only attorneys understand, living as closely as they do to what is and is not prosecutable.
There's another interesting twist on this subject which is the value of knowledge. That has to do with the ability of a resume to convey what is true about one's experience and knowledge, versus what is valuable about one's experience and knowledge. My current resume only goes back to 1988, but it could go back to 78. I can't know what I might gain or lose by exposing that part of my life. Indeed how much of one's life is for sale in a resume? I think I lack the one thing that would make some of the details irrelevant, which is a Summa from an Ivy League. That kind of BA would be just fine for my temperament.
There's a fundamental aspect of intelligence and privilege which defines our meritocracy and corrupts it. That is that smart people get to do what they want to do. They don't get proper scrutiny. And yet when they do, we kind of hate it don't we? It didn't matter how qualified Paul Wolfowitz' girlfriend was, nor how much money she could have objectively made with her skills anywhere in the world. Everybody got to have a turn at bat when she became a political pinata.
They say it's not what you know but who you know. The problem is that when you get to know a lot about something, there are fewer and fewer 'whos' to know. It's easy to get trapped in a hierarchy of knowledge that restricts your ability to cash in on your knowledge. Often it's necessary. You must build value into something by keeping everybody in the loop at a low cost with low liquidity until it's time to sell.
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