Chapter 5: Proto-Institutions to Open Government: (In)forming Publics with the Transparency We Deserve

Failed vigilante James Welch, believing there were trafficked children at risk in a Washington DC pizza parlour, entered the premises and discharged his AR-15 to find them. Finding only a closet, he was subsequently arrested. Welch is data point from 2016 on the story of how far the cultural institutionalisation of leaking and secrets has come, set against the uniquely American tapestry of Fake News, Second Amendment rights, and general Internet weirdness. The data point shows one of a plethora of political cultures using the discovery of secrets to form proto-institutional action. This chapter focuses on the cultures of digital leaking that have transfigured unique proto-institutional forms. It shows how radical transparency apparatuses after WikiLeaks have, in limited and discrete cases, formed proto-institutions and novel publics that involve disclosure as government, while also contributing to cultures of data use by state and private actors alike. I explore those diverse cultures in two ways in this chapter. First is a focus on the cases of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and Anonymous' foray into stealing secrets. Second is a coda for cultures of leaks more generally that applies the arguments to continuing evolutions of disclosure. Here, information-previously-secret form into new proto-institutions as experienced in the 2020s through public health, information rich conspiracy theories in an era of fake news such as QAnon, and a new form of corporate raider that transmutes public secrets into private information. Public secrets are defined here as those data given off as exhaust (Harford, 2014) or through other means of capture that might break the contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2010) of personal data life, but are not yet operationalised to any effect; they exist as the haystack that no one or machine has bothered to analyse. From this sense actors can make those secrets public, but until that point, the secrets remain un-managed by either visibilities of control or recognition. Cultures of radical transparency transform these public secrets into an ever increasing array of private information. This claim and its political implications is not without precedent (see Zuboff, 2019) but is used here to uniquely specify how cultures of leaks, mass disclosure, and digital capture combine in socio-technical apparatuses to produce a new chapter for the political capacities of radical transparency.