Introduction (click for Open Access)
This is an agonistic introduction to the concept of transparency. I argue that disclosure that is radical in position, politics, and platform makes new and unique ways to governing knowable. Radical transparency is not a new bright light, but a prism that breaks apart the political colours within hegemonic democratic assumptions. It refracts the expectations of democratic ‘sunlight’ into specific hues of socio-material expectation to make transparency’s own politics visible, its power knowable, and its design contestable. By definition, the ideal of transparency is deformed through and into novel material practice and informs novel and contested political practice. Radical transparency incites shifts in the everyday practice of democracy. In the chapters that follow I show how historical precedents, current experiments and speculative futures craft the story of radical transparency and democracy.
1 Material Histories of the Radical Transparency Ideal
Current practices of digital Radical Transparency have analogues from an analogue past. The surprising shifts to democratic practice - and possibilities - that emerged in 1771 London, 1918 Moscow, and the era of “Open Diplomacy” are explored here from a perspective that reconsiders how new media, actors positioned outside extant governing structures, and the rejection of staid expectations of politics, reconfigured democratic possibilities via radical forms of disclosure. These insights build an empirical base from which we can better consider how radical transparency works to change things.
2 Mediating Transparency: Governing with Visibility
Here radical democratic theory meets transparency and media studies. Axiomatic definitions of transparency (uncovering singular truth) are swept aside with the provocation that transparency actually refracts new pluralistic expectations of democratic conduct. Transparency functions more as a prism than a window when we consider the performative and material aspects that inform democratic governing. Shifts to transparency practice manage what is visible in ways that make new expectations of the conduct of conduct visible. Further, drawing from post-foundational democratic theory allows me to argue that each socio-technical configuration of transparency creates disclosure in practices of freedom and control that function as technologies of government. The next four chapters show this theory in empirical practice.
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3 WikiLeaks.org - Website to Weapon
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First is the story of WikiLeaks.org, as told through how the evolution of its material design afforded distinct political outcomes. I draw on novel primary accounts and public data to argue that WikiLeaks.org went through four design iterations. Each formulation of disclosure created practices of freedom and control that produced unique forms of impact on democracy. The chapter concludes with the return of WikiLeaks.org functionality, after its brief pause, to host ‘hacked’ leaks (around 2012) through to the 2016 US election, when it became a weaponised information extension of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of Russia.
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4 ‘After’ WikiLeaks
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A Cambrian explosion of radical transparency websites ‘after WikiLeaks’ launch produced a diverse ecology of experimental politics reflecting new ways of managing visibility and governing secrets. This chapter offers a systematic study of over 90 of these designs, showing how the leaking platforms that WikiLeaks inspired lived mostly nasty, brutish, and short lives. This systematic large n view of leaks sites suggests they failed in forming proto-institutions that shifted democracy as we know it. Note that even Snowden’s revelatory documents are now lost forever to the ether of the internet. Yet, the exceptions to the mass extinction of leaks 'after wikileaks' sites are important and become the subject of the next chapter.
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5 Proto-Institutions to Open Government with the Transparency We Deserve
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The radical democratic logic of digital leaks persists in designs that offer glimpses of new ways to conduct democratic conduct. This chapter considers two sets of case studies. The first are Anonleaks, Potentially Alarming Research from the Anonymous Intelligence Agency (Par:AnoIA), and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). These cases show that proto-institutions that survived the Cambrian explosion of leak sites from Chapter Four did in fact normalise shifts in democratic practice - for good or ill. At the same time, they set the stage for larger cultural and technical shifts in how secrets are defined and disclosed in both private and public governance. A second nascent set of cases: QAnon, Clearview AI and the track-and-trace approaches to managing COVID-19 all reflect radical understandings of how to manage the visibility of secrets in accelerating data-rich politics.
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6 Radical Transparency Inverted: Mass and Mutual Disclosure
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Here we stretch our thinking of radical transparency to invert its assumptions and consider reckless experimentation of what publics chooses to make visible en masse. We consider three cases of developed democracies making their publics’ politics radically visible in novel proejcts: in Canada leadnow.ca, in Australia OurSay.org and in Iceland the movement to crowd-source the constitution. Each project radically exposed public opinions and political issues to governors which would otherwise have remained ‘secret’. As expected, each of these empirical examples of radical transparency informed practice as they deformed the ideal of transparency, producing new political configurations.
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7 Radical Transparency, Proto-institutional Government, and Post-Foundational Politics
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This chapter asks what comes next when we recognise radical transparency not only as a mechanism to rip away old modes of secrecy, but as inevitably pulling democracy sideways into new political planes of mediated practice. As the poet Leonard Cohen put it, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. The cracks offer glimpses of what might be before it arrives. So to do instances of radical transparency, showing how expectations of democratic politics are being upended by the inevitable cracks coming to staid ways of managing what is visible, knowable, and governable. This chapter reflects on proto-institutions that have yet to fully coalesce yet transform democracy in unique combinations of media, positionally to power, and expectations of politics. These vigorous and antagonistic rebukes of current democratic structures show futures of democracy that are vibrant and continually contested. The chapter concludes with some speculative design of what such proto-institutions might look like as new media, new practitioners, and new politics combine to tackle public health needs in pandemics.
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Conclusion
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This book argues that any management of visibility (de)forms the idea(l) of transparency in mediated material practice. Radical shifts make this easy to see, exposing the cracks in staid modes of democratic government. Radical Transparency offers both a prism and harsh new light to show the hues of political colour within the ‘sunlight’ of democracy. Its new forms of mediating information to govern suggests a continually agonistic presentation of what transparency is and does, and what democracy can and should be.
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