In digital terms, transparency is usually a one-way window allowing government agencies and big corporations to see us while keeping us in the dark about their machinations. Clare Birchall from London’s King’s College calls this “zombie transparency” and poses “radical secrecy” as an alternative. In what sometimes reads as a riff on Heidegger, Birchall understands the concepts of transparency and secrecy not as opposites but as “essentially connected, sharing vital functions, and only severable by extreme measures and at some considerable risk.” Perhaps in plain speech, we need access to both in ways that allow us privacy as well as access to the forces that shape our lives (and the possibility of achieving alternatives to contemporary society).
