Transparency, not Secrecy
Been picking a bit through Dreaming 5GW. Lots of thoughts that I haven’t been keeping up with, so I latch onto the margins. This bit, for example:
While secrecy may be a natural response, it does not prove a successful defense against 4GW style threats. A stronger defense would be radical transparency, an idea that Robb explored last month. Secrets will be found out, and even if they aren’t, opponents could attack one’s character with lies and distoritions. The only way to truly evicerate such attacks is to already be transparent, allowing third parties to independently varify the absurdity of the attempts to pillor your record. After all, the problem is rarely the actual act that precipitated the scandel, it is the resulting cover-up that turns wrong-doing into a full-blown scandel.
Hello Wiggins, glad to see that D5GW is not staying within the margins of our handful of regular visitors and contributors!
I had linked this post in a post on D5GW which I erased from the system after deciding to give it more thought; but my MT installation did not remove the ‘hard copy’, which should still be accessible. I realized that I was thinking in one direction, and you were thinking in another; and, I’m still mulling over the concepts of transparency.
When I tend to think of 5GW, I think of a style of warfare rather than of a method for organizing society (although, to be sure, the style of warfare will often attempt to organize societies!) I.e., by saying that secrecy will be an important tool of 5GW, I’m not saying that any society should be organized on the basis of institutional secrecy.
By all means, open up the vaults and let everything be viewable — that will help in 5GW efforts. If moves toward greater transparency happen to be a signal characteristic of trend lines shaping the actual future, then 5GW, as an emergent generation of warfare and thus as a generation dependent on future contemporary dynamics, will evolve to account for the radical or merely typical transparency (whichever it may ultimately be.)
We do run into problems such as the burying of open data (See WaPo’s “How to Bury a Secret“) and the normal issues involving massive amounts of data to be processed. We may have much secrecy in government now; but even the available data is hardly ever dissected by the majority of Americans. Not even by Congressmen reading it before they vote on it. So I suspect that increasing information resources will aid most those who are the most ambitious, and I have my doubts about whether they will be altruistic. Increasing debate by providing more data points has rarely led quickly to a resolution or joint agreement by the parties involved.
I’ve been working on the concept of transparency for some time now, preparing a post on it (mostly in my head, and bookmarks.) I do not like the utopian view; whether that’s because I do not understand it or because it’s merely founded on faith in the possibility of human omniscience, I’m not will to say at the moment!
Comment by Curtis Gale Weeks — January 29, 2007 @ 3:39 am
Increasing debate by providing more data points has rarely led quickly to a resolution or joint agreement by the parties involved.
As an afterthought, I’m sure the above should be amended. One can see, for instance, that adding the data points, “Saddam has WMD and will use them” and “Saddam has close ties to terrorists” — things which the average listener could not verify with first-hand knowledge — helped in creating a joint resolution. But there are those debates concerning morality, and so forth, which are rarely resolved by adding data point, at least not well-resolved. We are a country with the best technology, and the most available data, that has ever profited any nation; but we still argue over homosexuality, religion, the existence of UFO’s, and so forth.
Comment by Curtis Gale Weeks — January 29, 2007 @ 3:46 am
Hi Curtis,
Thanks for coming by! Lots to unpack there. For the moment, though, I just have time to comment on this:
When I tend to think of 5GW, I think of a style of warfare rather than of a method for organizing society (although, to be sure, the style of warfare will often attempt to organize societies!) I.e., by saying that secrecy will be an important tool of 5GW, I’m not saying that any society should be organized on the basis of institutional secrecy.
No argument there. Your example, which I quoted in my post, refered to President Bush’s administration using secrecy to preempt 4GW campaigns against it. I was asking whether transparency might be a more robust defense against such campaigns. A friend in public affairs has said that the first rule in PR is to get out in front of a story. Break it yourself if possible. Transparency just seems to push this rule to the limit - an individual or organization could be coming clean even before the “story” broke. Seems like it could throw a wrench in the current 4GW playbook of using embarrassing and/or shocking revelations to undermine an adversary. Not that there wouldn’t be some new counter (there always is), but at least it would force the enemy to innovate again.
cheers,
Wiggins
Comment by Wiggins — January 29, 2007 @ 9:13 am
A friend in public affairs has said that the first rule in PR is to get out in front of a story.
Wiggins,
That seems like an attempt to contextualize any information that others may seek to use: preempt the revelation with data that will force any debate along predetermined paths.
That’s a lot like what I was getting at in later comments discussing a recent ‘working definition (V. 2.3)‘ of 5GW. My own working theory of applied transparency vis-a-vis 5GW efforts is this: By delivering a disclosure of goals, methods, etc., ahead of time and providing a means for verifying them, attention can be focused not only upon a subset of all available data, but also, whatever data emerges will be pressed into a contextualization beneficial to the 5GW campaign. The best way to ’suppress data’ in a complex world, with any chance for long-term success, is to preempt its becoming, which may mean creating the conditions that prevent the data’s becoming; failing that, a 5GW org will need to be able to contextualize data beneficially. Rather than ‘hide’ or destroy existing data, more data will need to be introduced in order to create the best confluential processes — although I do think that data can be temporarily ‘hidden’ openly by focusing attention away from it, a not-to-difficult process given the general tendency to dismiss or overlook data that seems irrelevant or meaningless. (I.e., data that hasn’t been contextualized.)
Comment by Curtis Gale Weeks — January 29, 2007 @ 8:35 pm