Prelims

Luke Heemsbergen (Deakin University, Australia)

Radical Transparency and Digital Democracy

ISBN: 978-1-80043-763-0, eISBN: 978-1-80043-762-3

Publication date: 4 August 2021

pdf (315 KB) ePub (19.3 MB)

Citation

Heemsbergen, L. (2021), "Prelims", Radical Transparency and Digital Democracy, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. i-xv. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-762-320211011

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Half Title Page

Radical Transparency and Digital Democracy

Title Page

Radical Transparency and Digital Democracy: WikiLeaks and Beyond

by

Luke Heemsbergen

Deakin University, Australia

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2021

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80043-763-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-762-3 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-764-7 (Epub)

Dedication

To Wyatt and Sebastian,

may you crack things open so that others might see

List of Tables

Table 1.1.	History of Radical Transparency.
Table 2.1.	Transparency Hues.
Table 3.1.	WikiLeaks Phases.
Table 5.1.	Summary of Leaks Proto-Institution Apparatuses.
Table 6.1.	Inverted Radical Transparency Apparatuses.
Table 6.2.	OurSay Winning Questions, Corangamite, Shared with Permission from Citizens Agenda Research Project.
Table 7.1.	Visibility, Control, and Government.
Table 7.2.	Radical Practices and Visibilities.
Table 7.3.	Spectrums of Power and Transparency.

List of Figures

Figure 1.1.	Pages From the Herald, 11 May 1918.
Figure 1.2.	The New York Times, Page 2, March 5, 1922.
Figure 2.1.	Digital Democracy Paradigms.
Figure 3.1.	WikiLeaks Portals.
Figure 3.2.	Collateral Murder.
Figure 3.3.	War logs.
Figure 4.1.	Guardian Search.
Figure 4.2.	Cabledrum
Figure 4.3.	Waterfall Chart of Leaks Sites.
Figure 4.4.	The Unsocial Network of Leaks Sites.
Figure 4.5.	Leak Site Categories (Note That Six Sites Were Uncodable).
Figure 4.6.	Al Jazeera Investigations (AJI).
Figure 5.1.	OAS-Leakspin.
Figure 5.2.	AnonLeaks.
Figure 5.3.	HBGary.
Figure 5.4.	Par:AnoIA.
Figure 5.5.	CBC.
Figure 5.6.	ICIJ.
Figure 6.1.	Long tail of Democracy.
Figure 7.1.	NextStrain Ncov/Global, CC-BY-4.0 nextstrain.org.
Figure 7.2.	COVID-19 App Design.

About the Author

Luke Heemsbergen's research and teaching, lights fires and builds bridges between digital communication and political life. This work has been shaped by serving the public in the Canadian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and (separately) serving up international profits in the corporate sector. His return to academia allowed him to critically engage emerging forms of socio-political visibility afforded by digital communication technologies that open new power relations in society, including novel interfaces of the digital-material world such as 3D printing and augmented reality.

Acknowledgements

This book started a long time ago in a galaxy far from where WikiLeaks is now. When I left government to pursue a graduate degree, WikiLeaks was a quirky website that most people thought similar to Wikipedia, and I thought interesting enough to make a fun MA thesis. Fifteen years later, a lot has changed, and a lot of people have guided the thoughts that are expressed in these pages. Once again, I start by acknowledging Jess as my constant enabler and, through the turns of 2020, underwriter of this work. Robert Hassan, Helen Sullivan, and Sean Cubitt built any rigour that is displayed herein, and I continue to appreciate their lessons and friendship. Lincoln Dahlberg, thank you for your guiding comments to my early research that allowed this next chapter to flourish. Comrade-mates Robbie Fordyce, Suneel Jethani, Alexia Maddox, Bjorn Nansen, Luke van Ryn, Thao Phan, Nate Tkcaz, César Albarrán Torres, Andrew Schrock, Tom Sutherland, and Katie Warfield, your work and critique of mine inspired me to perspire towards the light. Special thanks to my RA, Dr Johnston, whose archival research did Harvard (and I) proud. Berkman friends, thanks for blowing my mind and breaking my research doldrums. Mikkel Flyverbom, thank you for making new prisms not only visible but also accessible for me in so many ways; I will be forever grateful to the Stohls, even if these particular acts of kindness are now forgotten amongst their many others. The support given during the research journey from the Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University (from Fethi to Jenny), as well as support from the University of Melbourne (Adrian especially) cannot be overstated. Endless thanks to Jen McCall for green-lighting a green author, despite me writing phrases like that, and for the continued support of the team at Emerald that saw the work through.

I acknowledge it takes far more courage for whistleblowers, leakers, and muckrakers to carry out the task of cracking open what democracy must be, compared to merely writing up how their stories inexorably shift our own goals forward. We are all indebted to those who move to break open new ways of seeing ourselves and our potentials.

Book Chapters

Prelims

Introduction

Chapter 1 Material Histories of the Radical Transparency Ideal

Chapter 2 Mediating Transparency: Governing with Visibility

Chapter 3 WikiLeaks.org – Website to Weapon

Chapter 4 ‘After’ WikiLeaks

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

Chapter 6 Radical Transparency Inverted: Mass and Mutual Disclosure

Chapter 7 Radical Transparency, Proto-Institutional Government, and Post-foundational Politics

Conclusion

Index