by xpe | 2025-10-22 14:58:19+00:00
Thanks for mentioning Byung-Chul Han and The Transparency Society. I previously worked for an organization that promoted government transparency. Here, I'd like to share my take in the hopes of it being useful and/or getting feedback. Here's the first paragraph from [1]:

> Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. ...

The core argument for why transparency is crucial for democracy is can be framed as a question. How can people be sufficiently informed to govern themselves without information? This leads to follow-up questions like: (1) How much will it "cost" to get X more units of transparency? (2) How much will this help? (3) Who will "pay" for it (in terms of political capital and issue prioritization)?

> ... Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world.

I take Han's meaning, but there are major limits to this. Practically, various byzantine corporate ownership structures can make it very resource-intensive -- sometimes nearly impossible given a time deadline -- to make sense of who controls what.

Information has the potential to move way faster than our ability to vet it.

> A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. [2]

Back to Han, second paragraph from [1]:

> Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust.

Speaking in terms of statistical association, sure. Transparency may co-occur with the negatives listed above. But -- YIKES -- the quote above muddles the issue! We should not confuse causality: transparency does not cause a lack of trust once you include the other relevant factors. [3] Transparency promotes trust in the long run, even as it highlights scandals and corruption in the short-run.

Don't shoot the messenger. Don't blame transparency. The deeper problems tend to involve human nature (e.g. greed, power-seeking, tribalism), misaligned incentives, ineffective institutions, and eroded norms. [4]

Too much of anything can be a problem, but in aggregate, I doubt we have too much transparency in government and corporate affairs.

Of course transparency is not free; we want to spend our political capital strategically on the better kinds of transparency. Nuance matters. For example, effective negotiation requires that leaders can speak candidly and off the record when working out deals. However, once a proposal is hammered out, there should be a sufficiently-long public comment period so the public and interested parties have time to make sense of whatever has been proposed and get involved.

[1]: https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/transparency...

[2]: Who originally said this? Twain? Churchill? Not according to the analysis at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ which suggests the core idea can be traced to Jonathan Swift in 1710.

[3]: I'm a huge proponent of promoting clear and direct statements of causality, rather than burying one's assumptions. See Judea Pearl's "The Book of Why" as well as his more technical work on causality.

[4]: One can divide this up in different ways, but I think this four-way split is reasonably useful.