A Short Essay on Transparency

A short essay on transparency

German President Wulff and a civic group in Hamburg are said to have rallied behind the slogan “Transparency creates trust.”

Of course, openness, transparency, and the trust economy show up as keywords not only in domestic corporate and government policies but also in the communities run by individuals.


But this rather common-sensical slogan actually carries a significant contradiction.

Trust is only possible between knowing and not-knowing. The moment I know everything about you, the word ‘trust’ can no longer exist. So in a perfectly transparent state where not-knowing has been completely stripped away, there is no room for trust.

Unfortunately, moral values like honesty and sincerity have, at some point, become old-fashioned.

Could it be that the demand for transparency already assumes the absence of trust, and is merely a strategy for securing quantitative data as a pretext for control? Before we argue for transparency in the name of common sense and fairness, maybe we need to be a little more honest with ourselves.


P.57
Georg Simmel writes:
“The mere fact of knowing absolutely, of having psychologically exhausted someone, sobers us up without any preceding intoxication, and paralyzes the liveliness of the relationship. Only in the most intimate relationships that embrace a whole human being does the tenderness and self-restraint that respects inner private property, that limits the right to question through the right to secrecy, repay us with the productive depth of a relationship that dimly senses and honors the true final beyond every revealed last thing.”

Given the passion for transparency that has seized today’s society, we may need to practice the passion of distance.
Moreover, the human soul clearly needs a space where it can stay with itself without worrying about the gaze of others.

A line by Peter Handke:
“I live by what others do not know about me.”
Only machines are perfectly transparent. But the human soul is not a machine. Interiority, spontaneity, and event-ness — the very essence of life — are opposed to transparency. Precisely, human freedom makes total transparency impossible.

A transparent relationship is a dead relationship with no pull to it. Only the dead is transparent. If we recognize that the coercion of transparency destroys a positive and productive range of human existence and being-together, that itself would be a kind of enlightenment.
What is completely transparent is, in fact, nothing but emptiness. To banish this emptiness, vast amounts of information are circulated. The more information released, the harder it becomes to survey the world at a glance. Vast information does not shed light into the darkness.
Transparency is not light but a lightless radiation — a radiation that, instead of illuminating, makes everything see-through. Seeing-through (radiation, transparency) is not seeing-clearly.

From a conversation between philosophers Peter Singer and Julian Assange in Philosophie Magazin:
Assange himself says he “is not such a big advocate of transparency.” He says he merely relies on a “thin philosophy” that better decisions about one’s surroundings can be made with more information about them, and that this is the entire motivation behind his actions.
Assange seems skeptical of transparency as it is elevated today into a totalizing ideology. Further, he points out that today’s internet has become a sophisticated, large-scale surveillance system, spreading like a cancer.

To be clear and avoid misunderstanding, I have nothing against transparency in service of anti-corruption or the protection of human rights. Such transparency is to be welcomed.
The target of this critique of transparency is the ideologization, idolization, and totalization of transparency.
Above all, what is worrying is that today’s transparent society is on the verge of morphing into a control society.

Countless surveillance cameras suspect every one of us. Body scanners that examine us down to the skin have become a symbol of our era beyond their practical utility. When you look closely, the internet is a digital panopticon. Everyone is laid bare. This is the logic of the control society.


http://aladin.kr/p/eQFwY