If the root cause of most of our problems, including the climate crisis is secrecy, more transparency could be the answer.
This article views effective climate activism through sunglasses, evaluating the disinfectant of sunlight against the risk of blinding yourself.
No news is honest news
Here’s an experiment.
It can work if your news arrives in bite-size chunks from social media platform feeds, but is most effective for the decreasing number who get news from news bulletin buffets.
This experiment doesn’t change the Buffet of Despair on offer, but:
- If you find the news increasingly indigestible, it might alert you to a common ingredient to which you may be allergic.
- If you aspire to move people towards a sustainable future, it might help target your efforts.
STEP 1: Pen and paper to hand, listen to a news bulletin.
STEP 2: Briefly summarize the essence of each story as they appear.
STEP 3: Imagine the story’s antagonists had been perfectly transparent all along.
STEP 4: Cross out any story that would not have been a story in the event of Step 3.
On a particularly bad day, your final list might look something like this:
Defiant minister categorically denies wrongdoingCountry X dismisses country Y’s accusations of war crimesBillionaire X accuses billionaire Y of lyingLeading figure vows to clear name after secret funding revelationsNew details of redacted files emergeEmbattled premier establishes public enquiry to clear up scandalBig business rejects greenwash accusationsSmugglers find new route to beat banCelebrity spat takes new turnLatest twist to football cheating accusations
In other words, if everyone was always completely open about everything, our current news programmes would struggle to find much news we’d be interested in hearing about.
Without cover-ups, redacted files, blackmail or greenwash, what stories would we tell instead?
Would it be a less entertaining bulletin, reporting on a safer and more sustainable world?
Transparency’s limits
This experiment does not prove that a perfectly honest and transparent world would:
- generate no news
- guarantee permanent peace on earth
- create a sustainable future for humanity
Complete transparency would leave our other self-destructive traits intact: tribalism, aggression, fear and greed etc.
Indeed, perfect communication of equal access to all information might make some divisions worse, not better.
‘White lies’, after all, are social lubricants. Omissions, misinformation and outright fibs can all act as buffers, reducing violent impacts. Even if ignorance falls short of being bliss, it can protect us from being overwhelmed by the bad news tsunami.
Opacity, transparency’s opposite, is not always bad. Like sunglasses, opacity can protect us from harm.
‘Tact’, ‘politeness’ and ‘diplomacy’ are all yin to the yang of ‘lying’, ‘deception’ and ‘deceit’. One person’s transparency is another person’s brutality. Your ‘opacity’ is my ‘discretion’.
The sheer number of positive and negative synonyms we have for ‘lying or concealing the truth’ reveal how deeply deceit is embedded in us.
Power imbalance underpins most of our self-destructive threats, but especially climate change.
To understand the impact of truth and lies, and how to deploy transparency to combat opacity, requires an understanding of our complex relationship with the truth.
We can’t always handle it.
Deceit is in our DNA
Deceit is as old as language. The evolution of ‘modern man’ dates from the moment, around 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens developed language.
Deception, fakery and lying had been integral to life on earth long before we arrived. Plants fool flies into becoming food. Flies imitate toxic wasps to deter chameleon predators, who in turn disguise their appearance, and on it goes.
Our primate relatives went beyond the inherited deceptions and misdirections evolved over millennia and coded in DNA. They can also adapt differential information dynamically, in real-time, to gain advantage.
Chimpanzees are expert at ‘tactial deception’, deliberately abusing standard vocal and visual cues to benefit themselves, in ways humans find all too familiar.
But with the complexity of spoken language, Homo sapiens took obscuring the truth to new levels.
Entire cultures, civilizations, economies and societies are built around information asymmetry.
From priests to insider traders, those in the know get the spoils. Their gain usually comes at the expense of the ignorant, but since the Industrial Revolution, also at the expense of Earth’s environmental stability.
The digital revolution made things better, then worse
The digital revolution was initially sold as democratising knowledge, a one-and-zero, clean break from the grime and soot of our fossil fuel addicted last couple of centuries.
Knowledge, once kept under lock and key in libraries, universities and ivory towers, was now available to anyone with a gadget and the Internet. Internet pioneers claimed to demolish the library walls, allowing anyone with a thirst for knowledge to gorge themselves on limitless free information.
We now realise that while some, especially in the Global South, have benefitted from greater information access, this story was itself a con, a misdirection, a trick.
Our Silicon Valley overlords plundered the information from the old libraries to package into attractive, addictive platforms. While we were Googling exam questions, replacing encyclopaedias with Wikipedia, finding old friends and making new ones online, and watching cat videos, our Silicon Valley Overlords were harvesting our data.
They stored our data in ultra-secure data fortresses. Directly and indirectly, we’re now paying to access it.
As the hyperscalers grow in power and influence they present a double threat. Their data fortresses require more and more of our energy and water. And their concentrations of wealth and influence derived from their asymmetric information, is growing more extreme.
The library keys are now cryptographic, the gatekeepers now robot algorithms, and the knowledge storehouses are way bigger, fewer, more opaque, inaccessible, impregnable, and way more lucrative by the day.
The digital revolution keeps promising us sunny uplands, via technological fixes that are always on the horizon, while blackening the skies here and now.
If we can’t turn the clock back, we need to rein in our Information Age beasts to drive us away from our climate abyss, rather than pulling us faster towards it.
And whatever the question, greater transparency will help.
The Age of Unenlightenment
What promised to be an Internet-powered new Age of Enlightenment now looks like the reverse.
The notion of digital democratization now appears naive. For every better angel of our nature enlightened by access to knowledge, there’s a demon polluted by misinformation, manipulation and malice.
We were promised we’d become auto-didacts seeking renewable energy solutions, cures for cancer, elimination of disease, poverty and hunger. Instead, the Internet had bred and fostered climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers and other conspiracy ‘theorists’, algorithmically fed ‘research’ that confirms their ignorance.
The democratising advantages of equal access to information appear to have come at the cost of concentrating asymmetric knowledge advantage in the hands of a few tech billionaires.
They’ve turned out to be just as indifferent to sustainability, and bent on short-term profit, as the fossil fuel giants they usurped in the Richest and Most Powerful lists, and whose energy they now need to power their information fortresses.
Radical transparency is talked about as a solution to make the most of our accelerating technological revolution, but is little practised by those who wield power.
Radical is often used to mean ‘extreme’, but actually just means getting to the root of things.
The pros and cons of visibility
In real life, transparency and opacity don’t exist as extremes, like black and white. It’s always nuanced, a matter of degree, circumstantial.
Think of it as wearing sunglasses.
Complete transparency could be harmful – look directly at the sun, or weld without goggles, and it could blind you.
But complete opacity is even more obviously harmful – drive down a motorway or cross the road blindfold, and you won’t last long.
Still, in most situations we’d all prefer to err on the side of more light than less, of being better informed than misinformed or ignorant.
We’d rather walk around in sunglasses than welding goggles.
Not everyone, not always. Some people would rather not know they had cancer than take a test to find out. Wilful ignorance can bring peace of mind, so long as your luck holds out.
But most of us would prefer to know, especially when we know some people know, and are deliberately withholding that knowledge, and it’s a a life-or-death situation.
Knowledge is power
Our societies, economies, and culture are shaped by asymmetric knowledge, because knowledge brings power.
Owning weapons, mines, factories, buildings and machines can bring power and wealth, but increasingly, the most powerful are those with privileged access to information.
The knowledge economy and digital revolution are driven by a tiny number of people hoarding increasingly powerful information, and restrict access to it. Silicon Valley Overlords outmuscle governments and countries because they hold the keys to the data vaults, the patents behind the IP, and the voting rights to the global giants that own them.
Transparency would rob them of their riches, and their influence. Without paywalls to protect the data we’ve given our digital hyperscalers in exchange for convenient services, they’d be a public utility. Without the proprietary IP for the code that creates and distributes that data, investors would have no reason to spend so much money on them.
Hyperscalers insist that data and IP are now as essential to human life as water, yet own all the information reservoirs and distribution networks.
In most countries, essential services like water or energy are either publicly-owned, or heavily regulated to ensure their citizens don’t die of thirst.
Yet information, data and IP is increasingly in the hands of a tiny group of impossibly wealthy men, competing to add more zeroes to their net worth. Now their wealth depends on energy-guzzling data centres, their interests are even more closely aligned to the fossil fuel giants they’ve usurped in the corporate rankings.
It’s all looking very familiar. The same old Three-Headed Beasts of Government, Business and Media are getting bigger, still united below the neck by power, and wallowing in the money mire.
The easier we make it for the powerful to lie with impunity, the harder it is to restrain our most self-destructive actions, from nuclear war to our fossil fuel addiction.
New existential threats, like AI, biowarfare or cybersecurity, illustrate the need for opacity – to keep their secrets as hidden as possible from bad actors.
But we need to be well informed to hold those making such decisions to account, and trust comes from transparency.
The more we force the powerful to tell the truth, the harder it becomes to hide it.
And nowhere is this more important than in decisions about our human-induced environmental crisis.
What can we do?
The point of the experiment we started with was to expose how critical information asymmetry, secrecy, and lying are in the stories that appear in our news bulletins.
Truth-seeking journalists ‘follow the money’, but money itself is derived from privileged access to truth. And there’s no bigger, or more important story, than our self-induced climate crisis.
Corruption thrives in darkness, and sunlight is the best disinfectant. Whatever the question, transparency tends to be part of the answer.
This is why:
- The See Through ecosystem operates independent of money.
- See Through Carbon trades free carbon footprint measurement for transparency.
- All See Through Together projects make their data public, and their methodology open source.
If you want to help shed light, and are a transparency fan, here’s how.