Private & Confidential

Just the mention of the words sends shivers down most backs. We anticipate trouble, because, just as porno mags arrive in plain brown envelopes (or used to), any letter marked “Private & Confidential” has got to be bad news.

If it comes from your bank, it must mean you owe them money. If it comes from Sars, it must mean you owe them money.

If it comes from a law firm, it must mean someone is suing the pants off you. If it comes from your wife, she wants a divorce.

If it comes from your landlord, he wants to kick you out. Or wants more money. If it comes from your boss, you can bet you’re in the shit.

That’s because only bad news is ever “Private & Confidential”. You never get a letter from the Lotto marked “Private & Confidential”. A bundle of bank notes never has “Private & Confidential” written on the wrapper. The phrases “It is with great pleasure that I …” and “Private & Confidential” just don’t go together, do they?

Hey, I’m not suggesting there is not a need now & then to keep certain exceptional things secret, but nowadays the private, confidential and secret things seem to be proliferating worse than during the Cold War. It’s almost as if there’s an undeclared war on transparency, openness and honesty.

Granted that knowledge must sometimes be restricted; methinks this sensible precaution has long passed into that sinister senseless realm of pure expediency. Every damned thing these days is on a need-to-know basis. Transparency and candour have become as rare as functioning brain cells in the ANC Youth League.

And our society, every one of us, is suffering for and because of it.

Closed-door discussions have become so invidious and cancerous that any company with more than half a dozen people spends more time in hushed bullshit than in frank debate. And they do. Just look around you.

This has been at the core of the ANC meltdown. It screwed Enron, Lehman Bros. and AIG. It’s at the core of why we don’t trust banks or judges or cops or churches anymore. It has become the waving wand, the swirling cloak and the flash of light that hides every festering chawb of an organisation we would rather not see. What people call “their dirty laundry”.

I don’t understand it and it pisses me off because 99% of it is totally unnecessary.

It breeds this otiose culture to which we have all become slaves; a putrid netherworld in which condescension has replaced trust.

Think of that awesome scene in The Departed where Jack Nicholson hovers menacingly behind Leonardo DiCaprio spitting out his hatred of “rats; fucking, stinking, snivelling rats”. And you realise they are all that Frank Costello professes to hate the most — products of their environment, of their secrets and their sins.

And we worship secrecy, we sacrifice our ideals and our integrity, our dreams and values on the visceral high altar of secrecy. Secrecy is power. Secrecy gives us the false belief that we have control and that others are somehow at our mercy. They exist only at our behest.

Secrets give us the delusion of divinity.

What a load of Luke puke!

That’s why I adore the internet. That’s why dictators hate it. The internet is estimated to contain about 500 terabytes of information, but is multiplying exponentially moment by moment. Incidentally, for all you greenies, one terabyte is the equivalent of 50 000 trees made into paper and printed.

Everything that is, is said to equal one yottabyte of data. But who the fuck knows anyhow?

Back to “Home” page — despite it being limited by the limitations of human knowledge (estimated to be about 200-300 petabytes or 2-3-million terabytes of data), it is conceivable that one person could (and I emphasise “could”) use the information on the internet to destroy Earth.

Say that single person was little old me. Or it just as easily could be you. No secret meetings behind closed doors. No private. No confidential. No God delusion. Just the internet. It’s all there; we just have to find the necessary information — how to make the WMD, where to place them, how to maxmise the global impact to unleash a chain of events, which would turn this third rock from the sun into Krypton.

I hear strains of Pinky & The Brain music playing in the background. So as I luxuriate in my grand fantasy of the great anti-secret, dear readers, let me leave you with this thought: this is possible thanks to something that was developed to link US military computers together. What splendid irony!

Why not come back to this blog in, oh say, five years’ time and reread it. And assess our world then?

Or maybe two years … or one. Aah, but that’s the unknown factor isn’t it? That’s the mystery. I won’t tell you yet. You see, it’s my little dirty secret — private & confidential.