This book tells the story of radical transparency in a datafied world. It is a story that not only includes the beginnings of WikiLeaks and its endings as a disinfomration weapon, but also exposes other decentralised disclosure networks designed to crack open democracy - for good or ill - that followed in its wake.
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The analysis of digital radical transparency is grounded in surprising analogues from the analogue past. Case studies from 1771 to present day uncover how evolving media practices can divulge secrets in new ways to change how democratic governing works. The latter cases explore how corporate players such as Clearview AI, the civic-minded ICIJ, and state-based public health pandemic disclosures each form unique proto-institutional instances of disclosure that function as technologies of government. The shifts from a trickle of paper-based leaks to the modern digital .torrent allow telling the whole story of how transparency functions in and radically re-forms democracies.
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Radical Transparency rethinks how technologies of government, practices of media, and assumptions of democracy interact. By combining literatures of governmentality, media studies, and democracy, this illuminating account offers novel insights and critiques of the transparency ideal through its material-political practice. It offers an agonistic account of what transparency is and does and what the democratic project can and should be.
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Dr Luke Heemsbergen
