If the root cause of most of our problems, including the climate crisis, is secrecy, we need more transparency and accountability, not less.

This article views effective climate activism through sunglasses, evaluating the disinfectant of sunlight against the risk of blinding ourselves.

No news is honest news

Here’s an experiment. 

It can work if you’re grazing bite-size news snacks from social media feeds, but is most effective for the decreasing number of us who consume regular 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’re an activist aspiring to move people towards a sustainable future, it might help target your efforts.

STEP 1: Listen to a news bulletin, with pen and paper to hand.

STEP 2: Summarize the essence of each story as it appears, as generically as possible.

STEP 3: Imagine the story’s main characters, people, organizations or countries, had all 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 opaque day, your final list might look something like this:

1. Defiant minister categorically denies wrongdoing
2. Country X dismisses country Y’s accusations of war crimes
3. Billionaire X accuses billionaire Y of lying
4. Leading figure vows to clear name after secret funding revelations
5. New details of redacted files emerge
6. Embattled premier establishes public enquiry to clear up scandal
7. Big business rejects greenwash accusations
8. Smugglers find new route to beat ban
9. Celebrity spat takes new turn
10. Latest twist to football cheating accusations

In other words, if everyone was always completely transparent about everything, by choice or by regulation, our current news programmes would have to find different stories.  

Without cover-ups, redacted files, blackmail or greenwash, what stories would we tell instead?

Would more transparency make a less entertaining bulletin, reporting on a safer and more sustainable world?

Transparency’s limits

This experiment does not prove that a perfectly 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, and we have plenty of them. Tribalism, aggression, fear, greed etc. can work perfectly well if people are open about them, as some demagogues are re-discovering.

Indeed, perfect communication of equal access to all information might make some divisions worse, not better.

Yet there’s a reason why dictators still choose to hold elections, even if they rig them. The appearance of transparency confers legitimacy.

The problem is, while we tell our children about the importance of honesty, and lecture them on the perils and sins of lying, our actions suggest otherwise.

Any child whose parent has told them about the Tooth Fairy, The Monkey King or Mama Tinga Tinga discover at some point, we’re constantly justifying lying. Transparency, it turns out, is relative and contextual.

‘White lies’ are social lubricants, and reducing friction often means an easier life, in the short term at least.

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. 

Grey areas

Concealing things you know to be true, or saying things you know to be true, is not a black-and-white matter. But when you allow shades of grey, it leaves space for the powerful to justify acting in their interests, while claiming its in ours.

In this grey area, ‘accountability’ is easily erased, in the name of righteous lying. Over time, without constant vigilance, the powerful can nudge the transparency needle by invoking such righteous lies. Look again at those news headlines in the thought experiment and imagine what the defences would be:

• ‘National security’
• ‘Commercial confidentiality’
• ‘Personal privacy’
• ‘Deregulation’

Righteous lying can always be justified in extremis, but the more it’s cited, the more it is normalized, and the greyer the transparency zone becomes.

Transparency’s opposite isn’t 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, and often choose not to. Transparency is learned behaviour, not instinctive. 

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. Transparency in nature would be a massacre.

Some species learned to go one better. Instead of relying on inherited deceptions and misdirections evolved over millennia and coded in DNA, they learned to develop it as a flexible tool to be deployed in real time. Our primate relatives started using transparency and opacity as a tool to manipulate not just predators, but each other.

Chimpanzees are expert at ‘tactial deception’, deliberately abusing standard vocal and visual cues to benefit themselves, in ways humans find all too familiar. We spot the way they manipulate differential information dynamically, in real-time, to gain advantage, because we’re even better at it than they are.

The complexity of spoken language took Homo sapiens’ truth-obscuring skills to new levels. Entire cultures, civilizations, economies and societies have been built around information asymmetry. 

From priests to insider traders, those in the know get the spoils. Transparency is their enemy.

The powerful gain’s usually comes at the short-term expense of the ignorant, but this isn’t always obvious. The time-frame of these contests is critical.

• When rulers grab land from the ruled and move them to cities to work in factories, it looks like the powerful win in a zero-sum game.
• When the ‘dark Satanic mills’ produce goods, and pay wages, that raise living standards for everyone, it looks like a win-win for the factory owners and the employees.
• When, after two hundred years of burning fossil fuels that powered this growth, the environmental cost of this ‘free’ energy starts to come in, it looks like a lose-lose.

Throughout this tussle, transparency generally improved. Leaders no longer inherited power, but were voted into it by citizens, whose interests they nominally served. The governments they formed regulated the rich and powerful, obliging them to move their decision-making from smoke-filled rooms, to public forums, exposed to the scrutiny of shareholders, journalists and the public.

Ironcially, as the Industrial Revolution’s chimney darkened our skies, it made power dynamics more transparent.

But we now have another revolution that promised to boost transparency, but is starting to look like it may be nudging us back towards opacity.

The digital revolution made things better, then worse

The digital revolution was initially sold as democratising knowledge. A one-and-zero revolution marking a clean break from the grime and soot of our fossil-fuel-addicted last couple of centuries.

Transparency was a key selling point. Knowledge, once kept under lock and key in libraries, universities and ivory towers, would be made available to anyone with a gadget and the Internet.

Internet pioneers claimed to be transparency crusaders. As they demolished the library walls, scanned every book, they invited 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. Their concentrations of wealth and influence, derived from their information oligopoly, is growing more extreme. 

Like all previous information monopolists, they’re monetising their information asymmetry. Unlike their predecessors, it’s happening much faster, they’re getting much richer, and there are fewer of them.

The library keys are now cryptographic, the gatekeepers now robot algorithms. Their knowledge storehouses are way bigger, fewer, more opaque, inaccessible, impregnable and lucrative than their bricks-and-mortar predecessors.

The digital revolution keeps promising us sunny uplands, via technological fixes that are always on the horizon, but this is another self-serving misdirection, to distract us from the reality that they’re blackening the skies here and now.

The tech bros justify their recklessness by saying we can’t turn the clock back, we’re the Good Guys, and if we don’t do it first the Bad Guys will.

All this may well be true, but they present the transparency grey area as black and white. The price they want us to pay is zero regulation, so they can operate in the shadows, unencumbered by transparency. Whether it’s constraining AI usage, reporting their data centre carbon footprints, or unionising their workforce, they’d much rather we just trusted them. Verification, reporting and accountability is for wimps.

Our Information Age beasts are pulling us faster towards the climate abyss. They could, as they promise, pull us faster away from it, but not if we allow them to operate with impunity.

So many questions, but whatever the question, greater transparency will nudge them in a direction that will benefit us all in the long term, rather than their quarterly results.

The Age of Unenlightenment

What promised to be an Internet-powered Digital 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 autodidacts, 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, and boost profits.

The democratising advantages of equal access to information have come at the cost of concentrating asymmetric knowledge advantage in the hands of a few tech billionaires. This doesn’t have to be the choice, but we’ve allowed it to be.

Our Silicon Valley Overlords have 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’ (‘the radical left’, ‘radical fundamentalists’).

Actually it’s from the Latin for ‘root’. It 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 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. 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 restricting 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 wouldn’t rob them of their riches, and their influence, but it would help transfer the decision making from the hands of the few to the many.

Paywalls protect the data we’ve given our digital hyperscalers in exchange for convenient services. Make more of the information open, and they’d be a public utility. Proprietary IP for the code that creates and distributes that data is why investors spend so much money on them. Make it open-source, and we could all benefit, and that money might be better invested in projects to secure a sustainable future, rather than accelerate climate collapse.

Hyperscalers insist that data and IP are now as essential to human life as water, even as they tighten their private monopoly on our 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 gas-guzzling data centres, their interests are even more closely aligned to the fossil fuel giants they’ve usurped in the corporate rankings.

Far from being revolutionary, 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 to hold those making such decisions to account, we must be well informed. 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.