Privacy or transparency?

Instinctively I agree with the MIT student. As insight, I offer my not so original "no duh" observation: Moral imperatives often posture as a license to erode personal "rights." From only the clues above, the Harvard/Columbia project seems morally motivated. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it would be naive to ask researchers leave their morals at the door. But, for them, transparency seems to have trumped privacy.

So for me, the question becomes, when did transparency become the ideal we're all chasing? What does it mean? And, is there really a RIGHT to transparency?

I have to admit I am suspect of transparency. People use it way too much to connote the positive things of technology. Godlike. For who gains the power of vision, when we SEE inside the machine? And, why does it seem that the journey towards transparency becomes spectacle? Even for the Harvard/Columbia project, the act of uncovering is a story, though not the only story.

I wrote about transparency in the thesis, so I feel compelled to cut and paste. I mean, what use is it on my hard drive. Be kind. The section looks at the transparency in terms of aesthetics, security and terror. It is not a direct response to the Harvard/Columbia project, but perhaps it answers _some_ question.

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According to Rachel Hall (2007) in “Of Ziploc Bags and Black Holes,” the aesthetics of transparency portrays security in terms of visibility. What we can see—transparency—is safe; what we can’t see—opacity—is threatening. The modern articulation of security as a fluid dynamic of transparency and opacity began with the police photograph. As Hall (2007) explains, “While a thief was often a good liar, a photograph of a thief—it was believed—could not lie.” . . .

Tensions between power, shadow and truth, as embodied by the photographed image, underpin the aesthetics of transparency. As Michel Foucault says in conversation with Jean Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot visibility represents “a mode of operation through which power will be exercised by virtue of the mere fact of things being known and people seen in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze.” Started during the Enlightenment and extended through the Panopticon, such legibility produces power as “subjection by illumination.” Areas of darkness—whether of the body or of city—are not tolerated (Foucault
[1977] 1980a)

In the United States’ current political climate, visibility empowers agents of surveillance, including the citizen-detective, to produce the body as visible and therefore transparent to government translation. For instance, docile citizens conceive others and themselves as objects amenable to bag searches, zip-locked toiletries and retina scans, all for the right of passage. Hall (2007) calls this manifestation of transparency, “body without words.” In this strategy of power, the body, and not one’s modes of being, reveals itself as truth.

This economy of truth propagates under “a few great political and economic apparatuses,” including academic, military and news disciplines (Foucault [1977] 1980b). These sites of production produce and maintain truth within circular systems of power. (Foucault [1977] 1980b). As a condition of capitalism, the search for truth in the war on terror creates a consumer spectacle where what cannot be seen terrifies. In response, the good (i.e., visible) body must ferret out the hidden. As the counterweight to the visible body, the opaque Other personifies the terror of darkness.

The fear of darkened spaces full of darkened bodies has long haunted political discourse (Foucault [1977] 1980a). Hall (2007) points to the photographs of Saddam Hussein’s capture as a contemporary example of darkness mediated as a potential space of horror in its obstruction of truth. The images capture the moment when visibility defeats opacity. The terrorist’s “cover has been removed” as we become privy to the caverns of Hussein’s spider hole and oral exam (Figure 24). These images of what Hall (2007) calls “darkness and interiority” demonstrate the spectacle of seeing into the darkness.

For the upcoming show, “The Aesthetics of Terror,” curators Manon Slome and Joshua Simon (2008) write, “Terror is, in and of itself, an image making machine. The very point of terror is a spectacle that plays endlessly in the media.” The immediacy of television, the Internet and other networked information, strategically forwards the endless time line of spectacle. Visibility projects everywhere in real time, all the time.

Immediacy guarantees spectacle but not accuracy or authenticity. Both technology and opacity obscure the specifics. Fear and xenophobia are left to fill the holes. Like a suspect sketch or a Nancy Burson photograph, the opaque citizen becomes an amalgamation of everyone, and no one. A machinery of power projects its own truth onto a body clothed in shadows. In balance to the previous formulation of “body without words,” Hall calls this projection of transparency “words without a body” (2007).

The current codification of visibility, shifts the body from one inclusive of interior spaces toward one solely of legible surfaces. As only a surface the body dissociates from the word and a certain silence falls. Paul Virilio suggests in Art & Fear, that silence is often misread as consent: “Nowadays everything that remains silent is deemed . . . to accept without a word of protest . . . the optically correct.” Consequently, silence seems to no longer have a voice (2003). Virilio, however, argues that when knowledge comes through the immediacy of glancing, one will not hear silence. In other words, deafness censors the message of silence. By eliciting the voice of typically silent bodies, Hero Reports shifts the codification of visibility to include hidden spaces.