Radical Transparency

Radical transparency is one half of a pair and separating it from the other half is what makes the position coherent. Individuals require a right to privacy. Collaborative society requires full knowledge of organizations and actions which affect the public. The two are not in tension in Marsh's account because they apply to different subjects, and the current arrangement has them exactly reversed, with private individuals exposed and organizations protected. Turning the exposure around is the proposal. Everything the framework builds depends on it. An epistemic community can only be prevented from becoming an oligarchy if authority stays with the user group and the community is forced to remain completely transparent. Concentric circles work because full transparency allows anyone from any part of the system to be as informed as they wish by any other part. Stigmergy depends on it entirely, since if an ant finds food and leaves no pheromone the system does not work, and everything relies on transparency and freedom of information. Nodes need no formal communication channels because information travels freely and is driven by the information rather than by relationships. Her historical point supports the privacy half. Most of the world once acknowledged in both cultural norms and law that privacy was a basic individual right, and it could be argued the right was ours in a state of nature, since mammals generally keep personal matters private and privacy can often be equated with personal security.

Freedom of information law institutionalizes a limited version for governments, and open government and open data initiatives extend it. Corporate governance has its own disclosure requirements. In technology, radical transparency has been adopted as a management fashion, most visibly at Bridgewater Associates, and criticized for exposing employees rather than the organization. Privacy scholarship has argued at length that surveillance runs in the wrong direction, with David Brin's transparent society debating whether reciprocal watching is possible. Marsh's contribution is the strict asymmetry, since she rejects mutual transparency in favour of a rule keyed to power, which is a sharper position than most open government arguments take.