Conclusion

This book built a case towards how extraordinary moments of transparency built by renegade, revolutionary, and otherwise outsider media apparatuses have shifted the course of democracy. Its focus on radical transparency showed how new forms of media disclose and disseminate information to pull away from current standards of secrecy. But, it also recognised that disclosure is an inherently political act. Each new light of transparency that breaks up the darkness has a political hue. While transparency scholarship and studies of government often hide any political design found in the ‘electric light’ (Brandeis, 1913) of transparency, the work here embraced political intricacies for what they are and what they mean for democratic practice. In short, I used transparency as a least likely case to observe irreducible political differences in democratic practice. Difference does not only mean difference of opinion on policy outcomes, resource distribution, or who gets to know what. The differences speak to more fundamental concerns of the democratic project. They suggest a continually agonistic presentation of what transparency is and does, and what democracy can and should be.