Perhaps, rather than a linear and causal relationship between transparency and accountability, these function more autonomously or the relationship is instead more like a zero-sum game. 

What are the relationships between transparency, accountability, and legitimacy as they are mobilized in discourse related to contemporary acts of governmental and corporate elites and their agents, particularly acts that leave civilians harmed?

I explore this question in my study of police violence rendered persistently visible via surveillance and sousveillance. Transparency is often considered as an open and visible access to the policies applicable to official action and the policing thereof. Recent “open government” initiatives, open budgets in both government agencies and corporate firms, and related efforts pose transparency against secrecy. Most such framings of transparency discuss it as the willing or coerced self-disclosure of activity by officials. Increasingly, this is an expected, normalized behavior of legitimate administrators of popular sovereignty and powerful private bureaucracies. Such transparency is either an act of good will or compulsion by courts and legislatures to reproduce the legitimately privileged position of businesses and agents of the state.

This, however, is explaining a distinctly postmodern phenomenon (transparency) with a modernist conception of power and the state. Vulgar Foucauldian readings of power as purely performative, not as something “held” in institutions and wielded by highly included and authorized actors therein are insufficient. Nonetheless, Foucauldian approaches to power would encourage us to recognize the now widespread activities by the governed to render acts of governments and businesses transparent, not only by seeking compulsion by courts and legislature, but by their own subjective activities. These include whistle-blowing, citizen monitoring projects, sousveillance, and so on. Likewise, modernist theories of the state are predicated not only on outdated conceptions of sovereignty; they also rationalize and legitimize this sovereignty via Enlightenment ideas of the social contract. They fail to explain or allow for an explanation of the failures of accountability, thought to be a product of transparency as classically conceived. We need to further develop theories of transparency, derived from empirical and analytic study, that are appropriate to the contemporary context.

Civilians monitor things historically under the purview of governments. This monitoring could be a form of redundancy, to make up for declining monitoring by government, or to produce information where government monitoring is deficient or negligent. For instance, civilian water monitoring projects test for water quality. They do this either as redundant activity expected to improve the quality of information through repetition, to monitor environmental indicators where government agencies may be negligent, or as such governance is scaling back through processes of neoliberalization and thereby expecting civilians to maintain needed activities through private means, whether individual, collective or corporate in quality.

These changes are some ways the product of what many call the information society. In his classic essay, “Mythinformation,” Langdon Winner characterized “computer romantics” (best typified in its time by the Whole Earth folks) as assuming:

1. “people are bereft of information”;
2. “information is knowledge”;
3. “knowledge is power”; and
4. “increasing access to information enhances democracy and equalizes social power” (1986, p. 108).

A higher quantity and higher quality of information is presumed to have inherently empowering qualities. Secrecy, presumably the antithetical to or opposite from transparency, is promoted by governments and corporations because the information they withhold has certain power that travels with it. Simply combatting this secrecy will promote popular power, or so the myth claims.

These activities and the mythologies that surround them are also a product of the surveillance society. We are conditioned in this society to be watched, and to watch. If there’s any singly remarkable advance in surveillance studies — and I would argue in the popular conception of surveillance — over the past decade or two, it’s that we no longer see surveillance as activity exclusive to the state and other powerful institutions. We also watch one another (i.e. Facebook, reality TV), and often surveil the state and other powerful actors. Moreover, we have witnessed the success of the state in documenting the actions of civilians, and the documentations thus produced are then used to administer, protect, control and punish them. This surveillance activity is thought to amplify state power. The logic of the technological fix would presume that were civilians to employ surveillance technologies to monitor official conduct, and more importantly official misconduct, civilians’ power would similarly be amplified.

A long-standing conception of transparency is that it is hinged to accountability, and the performances of official accountability reproduce the legitimacy of the state’s sovereign power. In the democratic social contract model, the sovereignty is ceded to representatives of the state. This is variously explained by political theorists. These representatives can act more efficiently, on the basis of greater and more applicable expertise, can free up the time of the governed to most suitably contribute to the community and explore their private interests, are better able to provide protection from internal and external threats to social order, and so on. However, the state can only be ceded this authority from the people, can only retain the sovereignty of the governed, if these representatives wield this power legitimately. Increasingly important in contemporary Western societies, this legitimacy is said to be earned (in part) through accountability. Classically conceived of as the rule of law — governing actors are held accountable to the same laws as the governed — this has expanded uniquely in the information and surveillance society to include accountability to social conventions that extend beyond the law. The “non-official” lives of government agents are more routinely subjected to public scrutiny. The infidelity of a congressperson, for instance, can be cause to hold them accountable to community standards for fidelity. This is a product of transparency, and clearly not merely a transparency gained beyond self-disclosure.

Important to my study is the classic idea, most popularly attributed to Max Weber, that the modern state may legitimately (and exclusively) use violence in maintaining the social order. Police violence was historically removed from public view. But in the surveillance society, the police use of violent force is more routinely documented by cameras. These may be dashcams, private security cameras, or civilian videocameras. Most recently, we can add to this list on-officer, wearable cameras and smart phone cameras. For many activists concerned with reducing police brutality and holding officers accountable for excessive force, this visibility is presumed a certain positive good. This transparency offers both protective power and expands the capability to hold officers accountable when these protections fail. We might presume that this expanded transparency is also making police more legitimate. I would suggest that this is a partial explanation for why despite the proliferation of videos documenting police violence — and especially in instances when the violence is clearly not needed to protect police or civilians from likely harm — we are not seeing a dramatic decrease in instances and severity of the use of force. Violent crime rates are in decline, and injuries to officers on the job are at the lowest in the history of the institution. Evidence of use of force incidence is unreliable and at times equivocal. However, we can say for certain the frequency of police violence is not abating similarly to the likelihood of an officer encountering a violent criminal or a likely threat of harm. And all of these activities are more likely to be documented on video. Evidence suggests that this visibility has aided in putting more civilians in jail by documenting their crimes. But this transparency also has reduced complaints against officers. I argue we can also reasonably speculate that video is no more helpful in excessive force complaints and criminal investigations against officers than are eyewitness accounts.

I’m beginning to ask: If transparency extends far enough, does accountability and legitimacy lose relevance? Perhaps, rather than a linear and causal relationship between transparency and accountability, these function more autonomously or the relationship is instead more like a zero-sum game. Perhaps, the flawed conception of the people as the sovereign in the modern democratic state has produced the idea that armed with sufficient information, and when official mechanisms for accountability fail, the people may act, and they need only accumulate enough information of some variety (and video documentation is a privileged medium) — all the while deferring action for some later moment when this accumulation is sufficient to act. The state still has sufficient legitimacy, and therefore can act as representative of the sovereign people (so says the social contract). This pact might at some point be undermined, and then the people can rescind the legitimacy of the state and act on their own behalf, now armed with the appropriate information.

But this is a flaw in the modernist conception of the state and of citizenship. In contemporary society, the good citizen is one who is a participant in producing transparency and one who participates by watching. As Slavoj Zizek observed regarding Wikileaks, these documentations provided “proof” of what we already knew, and it was our duty to feel satisfied with being proven right. Importantly it was not to expect any substantive change in official activity and the policing thereof. Certainly we are not to will that change through action that would only end when successful. As Jodi Dean has argued, recirculation of media content is sufficient in lieu of an official response, because social media participation is identified with political activity. I think this maps onto my own object of study (police violence) in important ways that I will explore at length in future research.