Digital legibility and incentives towards moral behaviors

Two points. The internet increases legibility. Moral behaviors require incentives, positive and negative.

I have long prodded friends and family to think of the legibility of the internet as a functional equivalent of the religious concept of omnipotence.

If you are of a religious persuasion, there is a strong incentive for you to do the right thing because God, the omnipotent and omniscient being, knows your sin as it is committed. In Europe especially, but around the world, there has been an observable linkage between rising prosperity and declining religion. I view this with alarm because I suspect that religions in general provide an inducement to behaviors which are themselves predicate requirements for productivity in complex systems. My concern is that the freedom for deviance from norms which prosperity provides, without some counterbalancing constraint such as religion, will ultimately be divisive and self-defeating.

The internet, with its absence of real privacy and/or security, and with ever greater legibility to third parties, whether commercial or governmental, might end up being a de facto substitute for the self-discipline and self-control otherwise encouraged by religion. Not a great substitute but still functionally similar.

From The effects of DNA databases on the deterrence and detection of offenders by Anne Sofie Tegner Anker, Jennifer L. Doleac, and Rasmus Landersø. The Abstract:

This paper studies the effects of adding criminal offenders to a DNA database. Using a large expansion of Denmark’s DNA database, we find that DNA registration reduces recidivism within the following year by as much as 43% and it also increases the probability that offenders are identified. We thereby estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to the detection probability to be -2.7, implying that a 1% higher detection probability reduces crime by more than 2%. We also find that DNA registration makes offenders more likely to find employment, enroll in education, and live in a more stable family environment.

If the methodology and analysis are well-founded, this would be interesting and supports my thesis - digital legibility provides moral suasion and improves self-control and self-discipline behaviors.

Not my chosen means to do so. I support people engaging with religion by preference. But an interesting finding.