How Public Scrutiny of Power is Becoming the Power to Scrutinise the Public


Demands for transparency are central to the current culture of public debate. Climate scientists and their associations, the former English football captain, individual politicians and political parties, arts organisations, BBC broadcasters, financial institutions, and local government have all been criticised in the past few days for not being transparent enough. The right of the public to question the decisions of those with power and demand disclosure of information from those in authority is essential for democracy, but transparency has become a double-edged sword, smudging all kinds of cultural distinction between the powerful and ordinary person. This has led to demands for transparency of that entity we used to call the private citizen. These demands can only control the behaviour of the citizen in general and stifle the creativity that relies on cultural exchanges between people.



That transparency would threaten the privacy of the individual at first seems obvious, because wanting to know something requires the disclosure of something that someone else may prefer to remain hidden. We have always had to balance the public interest with that of the privacy of the individual, depending upon the issue. But when those in authority take up the cry for more transparency, rather than those who seek to bring authority to account, the result is less likely to be the democratic investigation of powerful interests and more likely the undemocratic control of the individual.

Transparency is less of a threat to privacy in the sense that more information about an individual may be gathered or demanded. It is a greater threat to privacy in the sense that the actions we take and the autonomous decisions we all make in whatever capacity become subject to a panoptical scrutiny with the retrospective ability to censure or punish. This has the potential to restrict action and narrow the basis upon which we act.

If the first problem with transparency is its adaptation for use by those in power, the second is that it frustrates the purpose of disclosure. The discovery of how a decision was made or why an action was taken is sought so that conclusions may be drawn on how to proceed in the future. This process may be stalled by the general assumption that knowledge or understanding is the same thing as information. While everyone who makes a particular demand for disclosure, such as a freedom of information request, has some purpose or objective in mind, a cultural perception that all information must be known, in an unspecific way, scrutinises the act of decision-making rather than the decision itself.

That is to say that all actions and thoughts become socially undifferentiated, of equal importance, in the quest for transparency. Instead of the actions of organisations being judged by their consequences, they are judged by their processes, regardless of outcome. In this way, the result of inquiries carried out in the name of transparency result in the call for further transparency instead of a change in actual policy.




This confusion of information and knowledge has two further difficulties. In an age of increasing management of information, and alongside our cultural preoccupation with ‘sending the right message’, it is understandable that we seek an ideal of the unvarnished truth, free of spin or vested interest. What bits of information are actually relevant to understanding an issue depend, though, upon the knowledge and understanding of the issue that we already have. For example, not being a scientist, what would I do if every piece of data on climate change was at my command? Even if I could assimilate it all, how would I make sense of it? Everyone (including scientists) depends upon a process of specialist social editing so that the expert opinions of one field of human activity can be assimilated by others in a society.