A New TransparentoCene?
The aim of phrasing the latest and definite concept for describing our age has led observers to engage in a race with inflationary outbidding. Among the boldest proposals made, the following deserves special mention. In March 2015, the Scientific American published an article titled “Our Transparent Future.” In the article, neurophilosopher Daniel C. Dennett and Deb Roy, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Social Machines, argue that we are currently witnessing a “transparency explosion ” (Dennett and Roy 2015). This explosion, Dennett and Roy suggest, should be understood in its true implications, which means considering it on the scale of geological eons. As it were, transparency would not so much amount to a societal demand currently voiced in public and corporate contexts as to a major threshold in the development of collective life-forms, and as such, the authors claim, it should be compared to the Cambrian revolution. No doubt: one would be hard pressed to make more brazen a claim. As the authors recall, more than half a billion years ago, a major event took place in terms of geological history. The Cambrian age represents a spectacular evolutionary burst, arguably the most important one in the history of life on Earth: within a geological “instant,” all the important forms of life emerged, with new physiological structures, bodily organs and predatory strategies. One influential explanation for this evolutionary burst, which transformed the biosphere irrevocably, is that within a relatively short span of time a “transparency explosion” occurred. According to the so-called Parker hypothesis, around 543 million years ago, the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere underwent a sudden change with the consequence that they become much more transparent. Lighter carbon isotopes swiftly replaced heavier ones, light flooded the aquatic zones, and vision became possible for the first time. Suddenly, it was immensely beneficial to have sight organs, either to see prey or predators in the offing, and animals equipped with eyes quickly gained the upper hand over other organisms. This newly expanded range of perception privileged distal senses over proximal ones, and a drastic natural selection process solidified this new hierarchy. Consistent with the Parker hypothesis, the oceans’ new transparency galvanized the emergence of camera-style retinas, which themselves propelled new defensive body parts, even as nervous systems were evolving in parallel to the development of novel predatory behaviors, all of which led in turn to new methods of evasion, mimicry and camouflage. The old tactics of obtaining information (or misinformation) no longer worked, and organisms that didn’t quickly adapt, and evolve, were doomed to extinction, in the new era of fully lit, visible environments.
Dennett and Roy do not restrict themselves to recalling the geochemical hypotheses concerning the Cambrian age, but use it as a foil for a straightforward claim concerning the present. What the authors of “Our Transparent Future” surmise is that on the brink of the twenty-first century, we are witnessing a transparency explosion which might be as important, on the scale of geological life, as the Cambrian one. The old ways no longer suffice in a world of widespread, universalized transparency: individuals and corporate entities are now exposed to the general gaze, for better and for worse, while the transparency of information generated by electronic technology has drastically modified our epistemological environments in which we live, impacting notions such as knowledge, belief, illusion or confidence. Dennett and Roy present a radically Darwinian reading of these changes:
The tremendous change in our world triggered by this media inundation can be summed up in a word: transparency. We can now see further, faster, and more cheaply and easily than ever before—and we can be seen. And you and I can see that everyone can see what we see, in a recursive hall of mirrors of mutual knowledge that both enables and hobbles. The age-old game of hide-and-seek that has shaped all life on the planet has suddenly shifted its playing field, its equipment and its rules. The players who cannot adjust will not last long . (Dennett and Roy 2015: 66–67)
The two authors don’t use that expression themselves, but if a similar claim hadn’t already been made for the Cambrian age, one would be persuaded to believe that Dennett and Roy were in fact suggesting renaming our current age in terms of geological transparentocene. Suddenly, it seems as if we had leaped forward: rather than seeing it a normative demand for achieving a different future, transparency would now stand for a stage already achieved (or on the verge of being so). According to such a picture, transparency stands for an uncontestable new state of affairs, as the new overarching characteristic of an entire age, the age of reciprocal and unrestricted exposure. As bold as it may sound, Dennett’s and Roy’s claim is matched by many concurrent descriptions. In such an age, secrets will, if not entirely dissolve, at least dramatically diminish in their half-time value. As a former NSA (National Security Agency) senior counselor, Joel Brenner, eventually declared, “those things which are kept secret won’t stay secret very long…. The real goal in security now is to retard the degradation of the half-lives of secrets .”
As a matter of fact, the Snowden Papers as well as the ongoing Wikileaks revelation have had the effect of not only divulging the degree of mass surveillance to which citizens are exposed worldwide—the secret PRISM program of the US National Security Agency being just one amongst many—but also to show how the surveillance technology itself has left traces which could be used and disclosed by counter-surveillance actors. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes could be the question of our time: who watches the watchmen? Beyond the classical purview of the “right to know,” many voices are raised to demand a “right to know about those who know.” Transparency initiatives flourish in numerous contexts—public governance, financial transactions, extractive industries, food chains, pharmaceutics, global sports contests, and so on—in order to provide a legal framework for surveillance practices. Significantly, some of them focus on making a certain perceptibility visible, for example, when Global Witness reports things “seen” by local informants or when Transparency International publishes its annual “corruption perception index”: the stress lies not on mortgageable, objective data, which purports to be impervious to corruption, but on its “perception,” which in turn is meant to be shared with the international audience. Making perceptions visible (indeed, making them perceptible) and amplifying availability seem to be the internal mechanisms of these initiatives occasionally referred to as “civilizing techniques.” By subjecting such things to the glare of the public eye, the aim is to force institutions to practice self-restraint. Still, it would be naïve to confine the transparency initiatives to civil society and non-governmental organizations, as—and so far Roy and Dennett seem to be proven right—governments and corporate entities are now increasingly under pressure to implement transparency standards and to release transparency reports. From comprehensive transparency standards such as the EU Transparency Directive (TD) to individual decisions made by companies that they will publish annual transparency reports for the public, numerous indicators converge to the point of calling secrecy a thing of the past. Such general demand extends even to intelligence agencies: since 2016, the U.S. Freedom Act has required the NSA itself to start publishing a transparency report of its own.
If an agency whose actions by definition must be secretive is suddenly forced to disclose details about its actions, Dennett and Roy have been proven right. Rather than continuing to debate the normative contents of the transparency claim, one should accept that it names a descriptive situation; we’ve moved from value judgments to fact. Contesting that the rules of the games have changed would be as futile as to contest the reality of evolutionary biology: that is, in substance, the naturalized standpoint the two authors have adopted. Yet such confidence is misplaced, and it remains to be seen what we are claiming precisely when claiming that modernity has experienced a “transparency explosion.” Undoubtedly, this way of narrating the story doesn’t do justice to the ambivalence of the concept. Just as some might say that we have never been modern (Latour 1993), it is quite possible to argue that we have never been transparent. Just as the perception of modernity oscillates between an era now firmly in the past and a project that is still ongoing, transparency permanently wavers between a state and a future requirement, an optical impression and a metaphorical promise, which makes it a “thick concept” that cannot be simplified into a purely descriptive or prescriptive concept. As such, it makes little sense to speak of a transparency explosion within modernity; rather, modernity is but a name for this explosion. Consequently, studying the discursive effects of transparency can shed light on the very project inherent to modernity.
A Magic Concept
In the 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, Walter Benjamin used to associate transparency with modern glass architecture. As opposed to the overloaded and highly personalized nineteenth-cent...