Chapter 1: Material Histories of the Radical Transparency Ideal

200 years before the Internet, cryptography, and digital media enabled WikiLeaks and its offshoots, the course of modern democracy was already being re-written by radical transparency. This chapter reaches back into that history to explore instances of radical new communication technologies, specific social contexts, and emergent political expectations that together cleaved open governments in order to conduct conduct in new ways. I consider how records of parliament were born as illegal pamphleteering, how Marxists cracked open international diplomacy, and how democratic control of international relations came to be accepted. From these moments of history, the focus is specific instances of radically disseminating information that used to be secret, and using those acts to affect governing practice. This exploration of the history of radical transparency paints a nuanced but precise picture of how the material constructs and consequences of new forms of transparency interface with concepts of government. That is to say, this chapter considers how instances of radical transparency manage visibility in new ways to create new technologies of government. Further, it shows that transparency is a technology of governing that is productive of a range of mechanisms of control across a spectrum of political expectations. In other words, the empirical record of radical transparency offers exploratory research that falsifies axiomatic assumptions of what transparency is and what it does in democracy by considering context, methods, and effects for each instance. Together, these three indicators speak to the importance of considering the design and makeup of the media that direct flows of information.