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Cover Page -- Electronic Mediations -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Transparent Times, Secret Agency, and Data Subjects -- Chapter 1. The Changing Fortunes of Secrecy and Openness -- Chapter 2: Information Imaginaries -- Chapter 3: Opaque Openness: The Problem with/of Transparency -- Chapter 4: Shareveillance: Open and Covert Government Data Practices -- Chapter 5: Aesthetics of the Secret -- Chapter 6: Secrets of the Left: A Right to Opacity -- Conclusion: Toward Postsecrecy -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Electronic Mediations (continued) -- About the Author.

Reimagining transparency and secrecy in the era of digital data When total data surveillance delimits agency and revelations of political wrongdoing fail to have consequences, is transparency the social panacea liberal democracies purport it to be? This book sets forth the provocative argument that progressive social goals would be better served by a radical form of secrecy, at least while state and corporate forces hold an asymmetrical advantage over the less powerful in data control. Clare Birchall asks: How might transparency actually serve agendas that are far from transparent? Can we imagine a secrecy that could act in the service of, rather than against, a progressive politics? To move beyond atomizing calls for privacy and to interrupt the perennial tension between state security and the public's right to know, Birchall adapts Edouard Glissant's thinking to propose a digital "right to opacity." As a crucial element of radical secrecy, she argues, this would eventually give rise to a "postsecret" society, offering an understanding and experience of the political that is free from the false choice between secrecy and transparency. She grounds her arresting story in case studies including the varied presidential styles of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump; the Snowden revelations; conspiracy theories espoused or endorsed by Trump; WikiLeaks and guerrilla transparency; and the opening of the state through data portals. Postsecrecy is the necessary condition for imagining, finally, an alternative vision of "the good," of equality, as neither shaped by neoliberal incarnations of transparency nor undermined by secret state surveillance. Not least, postsecrecy reimagines collective resistance in the era of digital data. --

"A voice on late night radio tells you that a fast food joint injects its food with drugs that make men impotent. A colleague asks if you think the FBI was in on 9/11. An alien abductee on the Internet claims extra-terrestrials have planted a microchip in her left buttock. 'Julia Roberts in Porn Scandal' shouts the front page of a gossip mag. A spiritual healer claims he can cure chronic fatigue syndrome with the energizing power of crystals ... What do you believe? Knowledge Goes Pop examines the popular knowledges that saturate our everyday experience. We make this information and then it shapes the way we see the world. How valid is it when compared to official knowledge and why does such (mis)information cause so much institutional anxiety? Knowledge Goes Pop examines the range of knowledge, from conspiracy theory to plain gossip, and its role and impact in our culture. What do you believe? This title examines the popular knowledges that saturate our everyday experience. How valid is it when compared to official knowledge and why does such (mis)information cause so much institutional anxiety? It examines the range of knowledge, from conspiracy theory to plain gossip, and its role and impact in our culture. Clare Birchall is Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University"--Publisher's description

A voice on late night radio tells you that a fast food joint injects its food with drugs that make men impotent. A colleague asks if you think the FBI was in on 9/11. An alien abductee on the Internet claims extra-terrestrials have planted a microchip in her left buttock. 'Julia Roberts in Porn Scandal' shouts the front page of a gossip mag. A spiritual healer claims he can cure chronic fatigue syndrome with the energizing power of crystals ... What do you believe? Knowledge Goes Pop examines the popular knowledges that saturate our everyday experience. We make this information and then it shapes the way we see the world. How valid is it when compared to official knowledge and why does such (mis)information cause so much institutional anxiety? Knowledge Goes Pop examines the range of knowledge, from conspiracy theory to plain gossip, and its role and impact in our culture. What do you believe? This title examines the popular knowledges that saturate our everyday experience. How valid is it when compared to official knowledge and why does such (mis)information cause so much institutional anxiety? It examines the range of knowledge, from conspiracy theory to plain gossip, and its role and impact in our culture.

A voice on late night radio tells you that a fast food joint injects its food with drugs that make men impotent. A colleague asks if you think the FBI was in on 9/11. An alien abductee on the Internet claims extra-terrestrials have planted a microchip in her left buttock. 'Julia Roberts in Porn Scandal' shouts the front page of a gossip mag. A spiritual healer claims he can cure chronic fatigue syndrome with the energizing power of crystals . . . What do you believe? Knowledge Goes Pop examines the popular knowledges that saturate our everyday experience. We make this information and then it shapes the way we see the world. How valid is it when compared to official knowledge and why does such (mis)information cause so much institutional anxiety? Knowledge Goes Pop examines the range of knowledge, from conspiracy theory to plain gossip, and its role and impact in our culture.What do you believe? This title examines the popular knowledges that saturate our everyday experience. How valid is it when compared to official knowledge and why does such (mis)information cause so much institutional anxiety? It examines the range of knowledge, from conspiracy theory to plain gossip, and its role and impact in our culture.Clare Birchall is Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University.

As many anthropologists and sociologists have long argued, understanding the meaning and place of secrets is central to an adequate representation of society. This article extends previous accounts of secrecy in social, governmental, and organizational settings to configure secrecy as one form of visibility management among others. Doing so helps to remove the secret from a post-Enlightenment value system that deems secrets bad and openness good. Once secrecy itself is seen as a neutral phenomenon, we can focus on the politicality or ethics of any particular distribution of the visible, sayable, and knowable. Alongside understanding the work secrecy performs in contemporary society, this article argues that we can also seek inspiration from the secret as a methodological tool and political tactic. Moving beyond the claim to privacy, a claim that has lost bite in this era of state and consumer dataveillance, a "right to opacity"—the right to not be transparent, legible, seen—might open up an experience of subjectivity and responsibility beyond the circumscribed demands of the current politico-technological management of visibilities.

As many anthropologists and sociologists have long argued, understanding the meaning and place of secrets is central to an adequate representation of society. This article extends previous accounts of secrecy in social, governmental and organizational settings to configure secrecy as one form of visibility management among others. Doing so helps to remove the secret from a post-Enlightenment value system that deems secrets as bad and openness as good. Once secrecy itself is seen as a neutral phenomenon, we can focus, rather, on the politicality or ethics of any particular distribution of the visible, sayable, and knowable as well as the conditions that underpin a regime of visuality. Alongside understanding the work secrecy performs in contemporary society, this article argues that we can also seek inspiration from the secret as a methodological tool and political tactic. Moving beyond the claim to privacy, a claim that has lost bite in this era of state and consumer dataveillance, a 'right to opacity' – the right to not be transparent, legible, seen - might open up an experience of subjectivity, responsibility and even liberty beyond the circumscribed demands of the current political and technological management of visibilities.

This article articulates "sharing" with "veillance" to focus a discussion of sharing in the digital context away from file-sharing, the business of linking and liking on social media, or the "sharing economy", towards a form of contemporary subjectivity shaped by both "open" and "opaque" digital data practices and the "open" and "closed" data they deal in. Looking at government open and closed data as case studies, this article demonstrates how "shareveillance" – a state in which we are always already sharing; indeed, in which any relationship with data is only made possible through a conditional idea of sharing – constitutes the depoliticised role the neoliberal security state imagines for its public. In this context, the public is configured more as either a flat dataset or a series of individual auditor-entrepreneurs than as a force with political potential. Taking inspiration from the etymological roots of "to share", which points towards cutting, this article imagines ways to interrupt – cut into and apart – shareveillant formations and data distributions that support a political settlement shot-through with inequity.

Given that the Obama administration still relies on many strategies we would think of as sitting on the side of secrecy, it seems that the only lasting transparency legacy of the Obama administration will be data-driven or e-transparency as exemplified by the web interface ' data.gov '. As the data-driven transparency model is exported and assumes an ascendant position around the globe, it is imperative that we ask what kind of publics, subjects, and indeed, politics it will produce. Open government data is not just a matter concerning accountability but is seen as a necessary component of the new 'data economy'. To participate and benefit from this info-capitalist-democracy, the data subject is called upon to be both auditor and entrepreneur. This article explores the implications of responsibilization, outsourcing, and commodification on the contract of representational democracy and asks if there are other forms of transparency that might better resist neoliberal formations and re-politicize the public sphere.

In re-igniting a familiar debate about the balance between state security and individual privacy, the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have have stalled on matters of regulation and reform, which treat secrecy, securitisation and surveillance largely in procedural terms. This article seeks to interrupt the containment strategies of communicative capitalism/democracy evident in these debates by configuring secrets as subject to and the subject of radical politics rather than regulation. Its premise is that we might be better able to form a radical political response to the 'Snowden event' by situating the secret within a distributive regime and imagining what collectivities and subjectivities the secret makes available. Through a consideration of artworks by Trevor Paglen and Jill Magid – which help us to stay with the secret as secret, rather than foregrounding the more individualistic notion of privacy or moving too quickly towards revelation and reform – the article turns from a hermeneutics of the secret towards an aesthetics of the secret. Considered as a Rancièrean 'distribution of the sensible', a delimitation of space, time, the visible, the sayable, the audible, and political experience, this aesthetics can help us to imagine a politics of the secret not bound to policy and legalities.

This article considers the cultural positioning of transparency as a superior form of disclosure through a comparative analysis with other forms. One, as yet under-examined appeal of transparency lies in its promise to circumvent the need for, and usurp the role of, narrative-interpretive forms of disclosure such as scandal, gossip, and conspiracy theories. This growing preference for transparency as a more enlightening, honorable mode of disclosure is not just a result of the positive qualities that are seen to be intrinsic to transparency (particularly e-transparency) itself, but a response to the perceived negative characteristics of other forms of disclosure. After questioning the opposition between transparency and narrative-interpretive disclosures, we can see the preference for the former to be, at least partly, ideological: Transparency reinforces neoliberal tenets as much as democratic ideals. WikiLeaks is invoked in this article as a case which draws on both e-transparency and narrative-interpretive forms of disclosure in a move that wrests transparency from the clutches of neoliberalism and refuses the traditional hierarchy between forms of disclosure. This hybrid form helps us explore the possibility and implications of non-ascendant, radical forms of transparency or, in other words, disclosure without political foreclosure.

This article opens a special section on the politics of opacity and openness. The rise of transparency as a political and cultural ideal has left secrecy to accumulate negative connotations. But the moral discourse that condemns secrecy and rewards transparency may cause us to misread the symbiotic relationship between these terms. After providing a historical account of transparency in public and political life, this article therefore makes the case for working with the tension between these terms rather than responding to the dyad as a choice. We need to find different ways of staying with the aporia of transparency-as-secrecy and secrecy-as-transparency. Despite common demands to support either transparency or secrecy in political and moral terms, we live with the tension between these terms and its inherent contradictions daily. The theoretical questions posed by this material reality need to be asked and responded to. This article and the special section as a whole begin such an enterprise.

While the choice between secrecy and transparency has political and cultural salience, this paper questions the logic of such an opposition. Through a consideration of the different attitudes towards secrecy embedded in the Bush and Obama administrations, this paper argues that both positions fail to understand their own relation not only to secrecy itself, but also to each other. They are caught, that is, within the same commonsensical idea of the secret: one that assumes the secret is secreted away, waiting to be exposed. By introducing a third term – Jacques Derrida's "unconditional secret," a structuring secrecy beyond the logic of revelation – this article questions transparency's link with democracy and its cultural place today as a force of good. Through Derrida's work we must face the proposition that although the choice between secrecy and transparency is presented as one between lesser and greater democracy, both are in fact beholden to democracy's enemy: totalitarianism. This article ends by asking what a post-secret politics might look like.