> David Brooks made a case for why he thought Snowden was wrong to leak information about the Prism surveillance program ... “For society to function well,” he wrote, “there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.” The complaint is eerily parallel to one from a case discussed in “Moral Mazes,” where ... the complaint against the accountant by the other managers of his company was that “by insisting on his own moral purity … he eroded the fundamental trust and understanding that makes cooperative managerial work possible.”
Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that fails such scrutiny will receive anyone's respect. Gone are the days when "institutions", "common procedures" and "cooperative managerial work", for example, were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they need to prove their own worth, or else. Because if they have no intrinsic moral worth, you can't blame others for eroding them.
I don't know whether there really is such a thing as Generation W, but if Snowden and Swartz are its holotypes, then I have rather high hopes for it. Not because I expect a whole lot of whistleblowing in the foreseeable future, nor because I think they're particularly interested in politics (they probably aren't), but because they're probably the first generation to ascribe absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the "System" in "Systemic Evil".
The System, whether it's a corrupt industry, a corrupt three-letter agency, or your country, has finally lost the romantic halo ascribed to it by traditional assumptions. It has revealed itself to be just another social convention with some (in fact, lots of) instrumental value but zero intrinsic value. The baby boomers, of course, also had their moment of subversiveness in the form of the civil rights movement. But the U.S. in the 60s and 70s was affluent and egalitarian enough to leave them with lifetime jobs, nice suburban homes, and enough money to watch Fox News on their four-foot TVs for the remainder of their retirement. Those perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the System's romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure with questionable instrumental value at best.
So perhaps for the first time in human history, a large number of people are now mentally prepared to judge the "System" solely on its instrumental value. Instead of asking whether or not their actions will help preserve the System, people can now honestly ask whether certain portions of the System are worth preserving in the first place. Gen W is like the theoretical physicist in that famous story who, when asked how his research contributes to national defense, replies that his research makes the nation worth defending. Only sometimes, it might not be worth defending. Or perhaps even worth destroying.
It is no surprise that the Obama administration has a reputation for prosecuting more whistleblowers than (nearly?) every other administration before it. Previous administrations had no need for massive prosecutions, the population behaved itself. But the population won't behave anymore. The only psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away, and I suspect that it's gone for good.
And like a lot of people who have warm fuzzy feelings about Snowden, I think that this quiet but irreversible change in humanity's sociopolitical lookout will turn out to be a Very Good Thing (tm) in the long term. Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.
There is nothing new under the sun. Your grand kids will be writing similar screeds in whatever forum is popular with them about more or less the same subject, just as the hippie generation did in the 1960's.
Society vacillates between rejecting institutions and embracing them, for a basic reason: you really don't want to go too far in any direction.
On one hand, you obviously don't want to become slaves to the status quo. Injustice exists, and it must be fought. On one hand, there is intrinsic value in having issues be settled. At a point, a final disposition is better than the "right" disposition. It is difficult for society to function productively without broadly shared values, purposes, and coordinating institutions.
The idea of a "hyper-individualistic" "post-communitarian" world is absolutely at odds with the direction of social change to date. Our societies become ever more interdependent, a phenomenon that has accelerated greatly since the industrial revolution and the resulting trend towards specialization and division of labor. Which is really the more "hyper-individualistic" world? The world circa 1750 where everyone was a farmer and grew their own food and sewed their own clothes and generally did 95% of the activities necessary to sustain their lives, or the world circa 2013 where everyone does a hyper-specialized job and depends on the labor of thousands of other people doing hyper-specialized jobs to maintain their lifestyle? Shared values, shared purpose, and common institutions are far more important today than they were a couple of hundred years ago.
Sadly, point 2 is really not new in the US. The amount of data might be but some pretty ugly examples can be found in every decade of the 1900s (maybe not so much in the first two but the 30's were fun).
Sure, we've got the j. edgar hoover era and everything going along with that, but that's a case of individualized, nominally illegal wiretapping. Now we're talking about broad-based wiretapping with entire buildings dedicated to it, operating practically in the open compared to the cloak-and-dagger stuff of yore.
The US government's assertion that it has the right to do this.
What are you referring to, exactly? I thought the scandal was the dubious distinctions being made to specifically avoid "monitoring an entire population", and the lack of oversight to prove it.
Yea, we are smaller parts of a larger whole, but the nature of our interaction is completely different. We have replaced relationships with contracts, traditions with EULAs. And while individuals used to be relatively self-reliant in normal conditions, they had the backing of the community. There's no modern equivalent of barn-raising. This is the real problem: modern institutions don't give individuals any stability, but still demand compliance, if not loyalty.
We're not anarchists. Well, ok, most of us will claim to be anarchists of some sort. But what's really going on is that we almost all, to a man, feel hugely betrayed by society's institutions.
That doesn't mean we hate institutions and all want to move to the desert and become survivalist maniacs. It means we want institutions that actually do their job of making society run well.
The next generation will replace the institutions of the generation that came before, just as the baby boomers replaced the institutions of the World War II generation.
Whether it will be better is an open question. I don't think the baby boomers did a great job with their renovation.
I like to have romanticized views about the potential for a critical intellectuals review of our social strata and peaceful transition into whatever we deem more effective, but then I step outside my home and talk to anyone in my age group (I'm 22, so 18 - 26) and I am not conversing with enlightened anti-establishment intellectuals, I am conversing with zombies glued to smartphones chugging Starbucks.
We criticize the baby boomers for being distracted by TV, but I think gen Y is going to prove themselves even more easily distracted, especially considering how shitty their outlook is if they have a whole-scope outlook on the world they live in. It sucks, it has very limited avenues for improvement, and all angles point towards further problems. Why worry when you can distract yourself with trite banality?
Intellectual ability and political interest probably follow a normal distribution, so it's not surprising that the majority of any age group prefers distraction to active political engagement. Intellectuals complain about "sheeple" in every time and place, after all. For every Snowden, a million young people happily divulge their entire lives on Facebook and don't care whether NSA is reading it. Doesn't matter, because we don't need a million Snowdens. The only thing that matters is a statistical anomaly that distinguishes the next generation from the last on election day.
Every kid who tweets about her 9th-grade teacher's inappropriate joke is a whistleblower in the making. 0.001% of them might go on to work for a three-letter agency, and 0.001% of those who do might eventually leak something incriminating. Then some men in black will go through her school records and find that she's had a long-standing "problem with authority". Who knows? Even Snowden, until 2009, believed that whistleblowers should be shot in the balls [1].
Subtle, deeply ingrained assumptions like "the Government says so, so it must be true" or "white men are more trustworthy than blacks" only show up in large-scale aggregate data. It might be so un-obvious that a whole generation of sociologists could make a living studying the tip of the mysterious iceberg. But that's how societies change all the time, it will have tangible political consequences in the long term, and that's all I'm hoping for.
> I step outside my home and talk to anyone in my age group (I'm 22, so 18 - 26) and I am not conversing with enlightened anti-establishment intellectuals, I am conversing with zombies glued to smartphones chugging Starbucks.
I'm sure you're wonderful to be around at parties!
I meant capital-B BELIEVE. The point being that just because some forces you artificially walk in and deem "natural forces" have brought us to a certain situation doesn't mean that situation is "perfect" or "optimal". To the extent that evolution and market forces are actually real forces and not political constructs (coughcoughcoughSocialDarwinismcoughcoughFreeTradecoughcoughcough), they are merely forces, not criteria.
In fact, a fairly good definition of "civilization" would be "a bloc of people who have organized themselves so as to overpower natural forces and configure their lives in accordance with their own preferences/values/criteria".
TL;DR: I don't go around claiming hurricanes are "optimal", so neither are market crashes.
> “there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.”
It's funny that he can't see he's arguing against himself. Snownden would've never done this if it wasn't the NSA that was breaching everyone's trust. Manning also wouldn't have leaked those documents, if he didn't think war crimes were being committed.
Why should we be the ones to trust the government, when the government has zero trust in us, and therefore wants to spy on everyone, when it really should be the other way around. Privacy for citizens, total transparency for the government.
You know, I know and the governments know that somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population is a danger to the rest because of our fanatically held opinions.
(Considering my jokes regarding nuclear weapons etc, I'm probably in a few registers myself and continuously checked. I just hope I won't be sued for mental damage caused by being so boring. :-) )
The main problem is not that there is a lot of spying, the problem is that there is no one verifying and controlling the watchers.
It seems to be the only solution to have watchers and someone verifying what the watchers do. To e.g. avoid blackmail of politicians etc. (This has happened before in USA.)
Edit: True, drenei/conanite. You'd want the creativity used in complaining instead used in finding ways to make good controls of the watchers. How to select them democratically while still making certain they are silent/competent.
Edit 2: This seems to jump up/down with votes. :-) My point is not that internal spying is good, just that it is needed. The only solution is to make it work without risking a 1984 situation, since the internal spying is potentially as dangerous as terrorists.
It's nice how the ancient Romans had an appreciation of the problem of infinite recursion. Suppose there was an independent institution overseeing the US FISC. Who would watch that? And so on. Is there a solution to Quis custodiet ...? Perhaps a multi-pronged separation-of-powers approach, but that hasn't worked out in practice, either.
On the one hand, spying on everyone is definitely not a power the State should have in a non-militarized situation.
On the other hand, the world simply isn't working right if I personally am not on a few watchlists for the stuff I've read and written on the Internet.
Your writing style is kind of grandiose and off-putting, and detracts from the point you are trying to make. And your point is also a bit historically melodramatic. The French and American revolutions were both much more socially disruptive than current events, as were the 1930s and the 1960s/70s. This is not close to the "the first time in human history" that social change on the order your are predicting has occurred.
Sorry about the writing style. I've been reading a rather grandiose novel lately and it probably affected my writing. I learned English in 4 different countries, so I don't have a consistent style that I can call mine.
As for your second point, of course there have been much more disruptive changes in the past. But I wasn't talking about the scale of disruption, only about the cultural backgrounds that underlie social change. Nowadays, there are much fewer common backgrounds (religious, ideological or cultural) to bind people together than ever before. Most people who are affected by your political action will not share your faith, your ancestry, or even your language. They won't even identify you as a compatriot, and you don't care for their traditions and emotional attachments, either. How do you act under such circumstances? I find this question both thrilling and worrying.
Yes, I think the current trend is a continuation of what has been happening since the Enlightenment, and especially since the 60s.
First they rejected religious authority, then they rejected a lot of the "accepted wisdom" about preordained social roles for women and visible minorities, then they began to reject the rest of traditional moral teachings regarding marriage, homosexuality, the value of a tight-knit rural community, etc.
Now I think the authority-rejecting spree has reached the state as well. The state has been secularized, but it continues to reserve for itself many of the powers that medieval monarchs claimed to have been granted by God -- and more. A ripe target indeed.
Unlike racism and sexism, I'm pretty sure the state will survive the scrutiny in some form or another. We can't afford anarchy. The question is, what will it look like when it re-emerges on the other side of the century?
Bigotry aren't institutions to themselves, though. They're traits of society, of the state, of culture. However, maybe cultures in of itself are being rejected alongside traits such as bigotry. The baby with the bathwater.
Tribalism will always exist, though it may resolve around other things than religion, skin color or national allegiance.
Life happens on the boundaries between chaos and stasis (what rayiner says in another comment in different words). It's not a coincidence that life depends on liquid water, the boundary between chaotic water vapor and static ice. It's not a coincidence that either too low or too high a mutation rate would break evolution.
This same holds true for all other life-like complex systems such as human culture and society.
> a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures.
Hope I'm not referencing Godwin's law so soon in the discussion, but this quote makes me think about the deference most of the German intellectuals had for "Der Staat", starting with Hegel. There are countless examples, but a quick search brought me to this (which is actually a book written from an "individualist" POV, as far as I can tell):
> Oppenheimer's view of the state is profoundly opposed to the then dominant characterisation propounded by G. W. F. Hegel of the state as an admirable achievement of modern civilisation.[1] Proponents of this view tend to accept the social contract view that the State came about as every larger groups of people agreed to subordinate their private interests for the common good.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_%28book%29)
As an outsider, I always regarded the Anglo-Saxon system (meaning the United States and Britain) as an antidote to the views expressed by Continental Europe, seems things have changed.
> Hope I'm not referencing Godwin's law so soon in the discussion, but this quote makes me think about the deference most of the German intellectuals had for "Der Staat", starting with Hegel.
There is a lot more to take away from the history of Germany than "respect for the state allowed the Nazis to rise."
For hundreds of years, "Germany" was composed of bickering territories that were kept divided by the continual intervention of the major European powers. Unification and the rise of the German state brought tremendous prosperity and economic progress to Germans. Modern Germany still draws tremendous benefit from that unification.
The United States is a unique country in the sense that it was carefully designed from the ground up, in accordance with the latest scientific and philosophical theories of the time, in opposition to the political systems of the old world, and most importantly with a healthy dose of skepticism about all those romantic ideals of the state. See Thomas Paine's Common Sense [1] for a good example.
> The United States is a unique country in the sense that it was carefully designed from the ground up, in accordance with the latest scientific and philosophical theories of the time, in opposition to the political systems of the old world, and most importantly with a healthy dose of skepticism about all those romantic ideals of the state.
This is wrong on a number of levels; the US wasn't designed from the ground up -- at the ground level, and the whole way up to the level of the States, it was a pretty direct carry over from the pre-revolutionary structure under British colonial rule, with the "colonies" renamed "states". And, while it certainly was inspired by a particular strain of philosophy, this was neither scientific (empirical political/social science, wasn't even a thing) nor is it even remotely unique for revolutionary regimes to create regimes based on currently-popular trends in political philosophy in opposition to the contemporary dominant models, its also not uncommon for them to fall apart rather quickly, as the US revolutionary regime under the Articles of Confederation did, and be replaced by one that (while it may retain some of its revolutionary flavor) hews a lot closer to the previously dominant models (as the US system under the Constitution -- which borrowed heavily from the system in Britain and those in many of the colonies-that-became-states -- did.)
"As an outsider, I always regarded the Anglo-Saxon system (meaning the United States and Britain) as an antidote to the views expressed by Continental Europe, seems things have changed."
On one hand, I believe the British Empire was built on "a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures". That's just the way it's done, after all.
On the other, I suspect the United States is becoming a civilized country.
> David Brooks made a case for why he thought Snowden was wrong to leak information about the Prism surveillance program ... “For society to function well,” he wrote, “there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.”
What gets me about this quote is complete lack of introspection as to who exactly lacks respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. Snowden revealed a lack of respect for institutions in those very institutions. The hypocrisy is thick.
But we all know this. And we all know that this is spin. And it's this lack of self-respect the institutions have for themselves and their own actions that fosters questioning the moral stance, value, and intrinsic worth of the "System" by those brought up on messages of double-standards, question authority, and buck the status quo. The emperor has no clothes, and comes right out and says it.
I agree that "the system" has no intrinsic value, and is purely an engineering problem. This is obvious. But this sentiment is often erroneously taken as an argument for naively re-architecting the current system.
Us engineer/programmer types know that the last thing you want to do is a total rewrite of a working system, because its precise setup often contains domain knowledge that we don't have. "I don't know what this piece does, but it's ugly and seems problematic" does not necessarily imply "this piece should be removed or changed using my current level of expertise".
The analogy is not perfect, because civilizations are not really intelligently designed, so they can often contain crud that's just crud, but the same goes for you own body. Do you have the domain knowledge to determine that the appendix does nothing, the little finger is noncritical, and the liver is critical? Do Snowden or Swartz have the domain knowledge of the workings of civilization to make a decision like that for everybody?
It's that kind of naive wholesale re-architecting that dropped the ball on the Congo, Zimbabwe, etc, and caused a hundred million to die by communism.
As much as I think Swartz was right to challenge the rent seekers in science publication, and Snowden was right to undermine the NSA, I think there's really something to be said for being careful with this stuff.
Sure there's a lot of apparent problems in our current civilization, but please consider that we might occupy a relatively optimized position in a sea of dysfunctional possible societies, and that the exact mechanics of that may be nontrivial and beyond the understanding of you or me or any of these other "Generation W" troublemakers (of which I am one). The stakes are high enough that we really ought to be careful.
>Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.
This doesn't seem like rational thought, it seems like endorsement of destructive mob behavior backed by quasi-religious ideals.
Would you recognize naive problematic restructuring when you saw it, or are you just using this sentiment as another soldier in the war against some fixed enemy?
> Do Snowden or Swartz have the domain knowledge of the workings of civilization to make a decision like that for everybody?
They didn't make a decision "for everybody", they just made a decision that happened to affect a lot of people. It is part of the romanticism that surrounds the modern state to assume that every action with implications for a Government must be a decision for everybody. No it isn't. The NSA isn't "everybody". The Obama administration isn't "everybody". The fate of human civilization does not depend, and has never depended, on the actions of one Swartz and one Snowden.
The good thing about changes that take place over generations, like what I was trying to describe above, is that they take a long time. We're talking about 30-50 years here, if not longer. The boomers won't be dead until the 2050s, and it will probably take just as long for someone who grew up worshiping Swartz and Snowden to occupy the White House. As Max Planck said, progress happens one funeral at a time. Guess what, modern medical technology has made funerals rarer than ever before.
One Swartz and one Snowden won't change the world. I'm not even sure whether the kind of behavior they exemplify should be encouraged at all. But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the USA. Rather, they are symptoms of a wider political and psychological change that has been going on for a couple of decades already, and will likely accelerate whether we like it or not. This is not about some violent revolution, it's about social progress, and progress takes a long time.
Patches are coming. The pull requests won't be as polite as they used to be. Not a single line of code will be taken for granted, not even those written by the BDFL himself. But none of this needs to involve a complete rewrite. Just a series of incremental improvements.
>But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the US
This is a good point.
The same applies to many other things in history; communism wasn't some kid who thought up a new ideology in his basement and pushed it on everyone else; it took the endorsement of the intellectual elite and a broad movement to make it happen. Still it went badly for billions of people.
Your implication is that this stuff is happening whether we like it or not, and that that somehow invalidates criticism of the naivety of it all. But then you side with it. If it is an inevitable march of history, surely it is as reasonable to criticize it as it is to endorse it, or as futile to endorse as it is to criticize?
The thing is that these broad movements are made up of people like Snowden and Swartz and so on who make things happen because they believe in it, and we do have some control over that. For example, if the international intellectual community had been less naively infatuated with democracy and independence movements, perhaps they would not have pushed so hard on Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo, Zimbabwe and the DRC would be first-world countries instead of hellholes.
If you make the inevitable march of progress cool, it will happen faster, whether it's a good thing or not. If we make reasoned caution and sanity cool, we might get a better outcome for the future of humanity.
This is a good description of the conservative vs liberal mindset, at least one way of looking at it (there are many others, of course).
Conservatives tend to err on the side of caution, aware that many things work well for reasons we're not aware of, so you should respect institutions because they've got experience and longetivity on their side, and the consequences of changing/dismantling them may be far worse than you'd imagine. Humility is good, and don't mess with what works.
Liberals tend to err on the side of improvement, with a belief that we can understand things, and then intelligently change them to make the world a better place. Obviously, this can produce much more positive change, and make the world a far better place... but can also lead to the kind of societal breakdown that conservatives fear.
But don't try mapping this to political parties... they're organizations with agendas, not so philosophical.
> ... neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted.
I have a different view. Mostly unsubstantiated.
Every system becomes calcified. Every system will be exploited (broken) by insiders. That the rich get richer is math, not morality. Ditto power.
There is no perfect system, no ideal.
Periodically, mostly due to social upheaval, mostly due to technological change, the status quo is disrupted. I call this "shaking the ant farm".
Then there is a period of uncertainty. Until a new consensus is reached. New structures erected.
In USA's culture (and political history), the last major renegotiation was The New Deal. It's duration was extended by the Cold War and the US's massive investment in response to Sputnik.
We've been coasting on those investments ever since.
I don't know when the ant farm will be shook up again.
(My world views are heavily influenced by my understanding of Peter Drucker, Kevin Phillips, and Robert Wright.)
This would imply that the world never actually gets better at all, which I think is clearly refuted by reality. Anyone given the choice to live in 1913 or 2013 would clearly choose the latter -- even if they might ask for 1968 over either!
Just because social perfection has yet to spring from the singular pen of one philosopher in a cafe somewhere doesn't mean that convergent improvements don't happen.
Enlightenment-driven social democracy works better than other systems we've tried. Maybe it's even a local optimum we can't improve on through mere hill-climbing. What I do know is, if we just sit there saying, "There's no ideal to reach towards, shit just happens, what the hell?", we'll never accomplish anything.
We know what we like, so that is an ideal: make a system we like better than the previous systems.
The internet has spawned lots of little communities that can be highly valued by their users. To general outside scrutiny they seem extremely odd. Perhaps our allegiance is moving away from country and nation to small sub-cultures. The problem is that the gap in understanding between these groups can be huge. People can't tell the difference between a mosque or church, reddit, 4chan, and Wikileaks. In fact they are all just groups of people who could be dangerous, or could be a friend. You can't assume anything based merely on nationality or other traditional cultural determinants. But as groups they do have power.
What happens in such a hyper-individualistic, post-System world when organized criminals approach the employees of data repositories and use the typical approaches of {payments, blackmail, threats} to directly retrieve, or install back-doors into, troves of user information?
It is certainly not very nice to suspect that there may be great powers watching and manipulating the world, but real harm and manipulation also exist, and that's why we (historically) have security agencies.
Now if they are not doing their job, or if the capabilities and funding they have far outweigh their accomplishments, then yes, we should curtail them. Or if they have become completely internally corrupt, and are providing no safety at all, then yes, perhaps they should be disbanded.
But we would still need an alternative which we do trust (collectively, if not individually) to provide the same services, or people will just be exploited worse by malignant players who don't have even the pretence of moral behaviour.
My line of thinking here might seem to be a conservative one of "don't rock the boat" - but I'm not necessarily proposing inaction/the status-quo; open source does a pretty good job of promoting trust in software where previously there was a large information disparity between developer and customer, for example, and I think that concept could (potentially) apply here too.
No, just a programmer with a philosophy degree who occasionally tries to convince himself that the degree was worth it ;)
Peter Ludlow, who wrote the NYT piece, is a real Professor of Philosophy. If you're interested in philosophical treatments of cyber rights, hacktivism, and online communities, read his books!
Never heard of him before, but looks like my kind of novelist. I'm a big fan of speculative fiction, and I also like a slightly cynical voice. Thanks, I'll put him on my reading list.
The real crisis is the crisis of the State. Anti-Statism has found many supporters in the newer generations, and for good reason. The homogenization of western cultures has made all boundaries easily transgressible to the point where the sovereign state is seen as an archaic and irrelevant construction that is not so easy to trust as it used to be.
Seriously. We've got a generation of journalists who grew up reading about Woodward and Bernstein, went to j-school full of idealism and wound up being a bunch of boot-licking cronies, trying to get their access.
Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that fails such scrutiny will receive anyone's respect. Gone are the days when "institutions", "common procedures" and "cooperative managerial work", for example, were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they need to prove their own worth, or else. Because if they have no intrinsic moral worth, you can't blame others for eroding them.
I don't know whether there really is such a thing as Generation W, but if Snowden and Swartz are its holotypes, then I have rather high hopes for it. Not because I expect a whole lot of whistleblowing in the foreseeable future, nor because I think they're particularly interested in politics (they probably aren't), but because they're probably the first generation to ascribe absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the "System" in "Systemic Evil".
The System, whether it's a corrupt industry, a corrupt three-letter agency, or your country, has finally lost the romantic halo ascribed to it by traditional assumptions. It has revealed itself to be just another social convention with some (in fact, lots of) instrumental value but zero intrinsic value. The baby boomers, of course, also had their moment of subversiveness in the form of the civil rights movement. But the U.S. in the 60s and 70s was affluent and egalitarian enough to leave them with lifetime jobs, nice suburban homes, and enough money to watch Fox News on their four-foot TVs for the remainder of their retirement. Those perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the System's romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure with questionable instrumental value at best.
So perhaps for the first time in human history, a large number of people are now mentally prepared to judge the "System" solely on its instrumental value. Instead of asking whether or not their actions will help preserve the System, people can now honestly ask whether certain portions of the System are worth preserving in the first place. Gen W is like the theoretical physicist in that famous story who, when asked how his research contributes to national defense, replies that his research makes the nation worth defending. Only sometimes, it might not be worth defending. Or perhaps even worth destroying.
It is no surprise that the Obama administration has a reputation for prosecuting more whistleblowers than (nearly?) every other administration before it. Previous administrations had no need for massive prosecutions, the population behaved itself. But the population won't behave anymore. The only psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away, and I suspect that it's gone for good.
And like a lot of people who have warm fuzzy feelings about Snowden, I think that this quiet but irreversible change in humanity's sociopolitical lookout will turn out to be a Very Good Thing (tm) in the long term. Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.