What if? A short commentary on the philosophical bedrock of open government discourse

For Jeremy Bentham – the eighteenth-century philosopher, jurist, and reformer – there are three types of citizens.11 First, there is the class of what can be called smart or expert citizens. Expert citizens have the capacity, willingness, and time to reflect on their being-in-the-world. They know, or are at least very busy in acquiring knowledge of, their relationship with the authorities that rule the environment in which they were thrown and reflect critically on whether these relationships are legitimate and just. The number of experts, however, is limited, and the public is composed of two other classes: those who primarily rely on the judgements of the experts (the ‘middle’), and those who do not have the time to engage in public affairs at all (the ‘many’). Though the experts have the capacity to formulate considerate judgements about, for instance, the most recent governmental policy, they do not necessarily have the information and facts on which their judgements can be build. And this is a problem, according to Bentham. Information, proper information, is needed so that the experts can do their work, which indirectly also benefits those believing in their authority: the class of citizens that like to believe the experts, and the many who are too busy keeping themselves afloat.

Two centuries later, political theorist Jodi Dean uses Bentham to make an argument on the value and functioning of publicity and openness which is of value for researchers working on open government and open data. According to Dean, public information is important because it allows those with the capacity to know, to transform the information into something valuable for those that believe in their expertise. Interesting here is less the fact that those who are able to know, know something, or that those who can believe, believe someone, but that publicity’s value is grounded in the promise that there is information to be found, later to be transformed into something valuable for society. This promise transforms the public into a part that is ‘supposed-to-know’, and a part that is ‘supposed-to-believe’ (Dean, 2005, p. 18). Key here is to realize that publicity’s value and functioning is dependent on this inherently divided public. In the words of Dean:

But what makes us then believe in the experts? The secret is the answer (Dean, 2005, p. 21). Secrecy, or the belief that information is missing and that it in principle can be found somewhere, is the ingredient needed to make sense of publicity and openness. One’s belief in the value of openness is dependent on the existence of the soon-to-be-published fact. Publicity and secrecy, as Dean argues, are mutually dependent, and together postulate and justify the existence and functioning of those who are supposed-to-gather-process-and-know, and those who-are-supposed-to-belief-in-those-who-know.

Publicity thus hinges on (a) the belief that there is information missing, that (b) it can be found, and (c) that it can be processed in such a way that the experts know, and (d) that the expert’s knowledge will ‘trickle-down’ in the form of knowledge, goods, and services to be consumed by the other two classes.

The idea that there is a public composed of a class of potential knowers, and a class of potential believers (let us ignore the many for a moment) thus depends on the presumption that there is more to know, and that this knowledge is of use for how we govern our mutual expectations – or do democracy. Publicity (including secrecy) is thus directly related to a particular conception of how democracies function, and ought to function. What is sometimes forgotten, and what was an explicit part of Bentham’s theory, was that the promise of publicity’s potential to uncover secrets as a means to improve and legitimize democracy, is indeed not much more than a promise. It is a good promise, though, and it is still one of the most popular though hardly explicated ideals motivating our (Western) beliefs in democracy. And unsurprisingly, this ‘fantasy of the public’ (Dean, 2005) or ‘promise of access’ (Greene, 2021) is one of the key promises made in much of the open government and open data literature (Baetens et al., 2017; Van Eechoud, 2014), of which I will discuss three implications for our thinking about open government, democracy, and citizenship.

To start, it is present in the attempts made to identify and get rid of a lot of the barriers that prevent open data to do the things we expect it to be doing (Janssen et al., 2012). The promise of access also informs our thinking about the roles particular intermediaries ought to play when governments communicate information. While in the past the cafes and salons were the places the latest news and gossip were shared (and later traded), professional journalists, newspapers, and later online media took over this role (Habermas, 1989; Wu, 2016). Nowadays, when thinking about these intermediaries, Bentham’s class of experts transformed into one consisting of those capable of processing large datasets, producing compelling visualizations, and providing us with the services they think we need. Thinking in terms of barriers, unfortunately, presupposes that the act of data communication is unproblematic or good, and nurtures our uncritical acceptance of publicity’s promise. This is reinforced by publicity’s undefined aim, nicely illustrated by the growing literature on algorithmic transparency and explanation (Burrell, 2016; Edwards & Veale, 2017). At what point, it is worth asking, do we uncover all the secrets? When do we know enough? What amount of data do we need before we are satisfied? And how does this unquenchable thirst for information differ from the extractive practices of the tech companies we like to criticize so much (Lund & Zukerfeld, 2020)? It might not be a coincidence that openness and transparency are the preferred values of those who are best capable of making use of them, and who might not always be that interested in presenting more positive duties regarding their substantive aims (Tkacz, 2012). Openness is good because it is not closed or secret, and the new experts do their best to prevent openness from attaining too positive and more stringent connotations.

Second, the felt need to climb these barriers combined with the responsibilities attributed to intermediaries that are supposed-to-know-gather-process-publish-and-distribute, enacts a particular idea of democracy, which is composed of a strange and ill-defined mixture of the classic marketplace of ideas, the public sphere, platform governance, and ecosystems thinking (Maanen & Balvert, 2019). Mixing these together has three important implications. First, potential differences between public and private spheres are diffused because the new experts – our intermediaries – are often commercial actors capable of processing large amounts of data and information.22 Are these the best actors to put our trust in? Second, the platform-like type of government constituted by calls for open governmental data aspires to make as much data available to help others transform these into valuable products (O’Reilly, 2011). Other-than-public parties are thus effectively given more influence onto the kind of services available and provided for, and hence also indirectly downgrade the expectations we have about our governments. Third, what if the problem we must deal with is not the height of the barriers that prevent our governments from throwing data over the wall, but our belief in the existence and relevance of these barriers itself? What if, in the end, this rendering of democracy manages to transform the political-material question of who should receive what amount of goods, into the information-based capitalist one about how to make nice products on the basis of free information and data.33 Put differently: to what extent does the problem of openness and transparency enact an epistemic conception of democracy that prioritizes the processing of information over the maximalization of welfare?44 What if the problem is less one of communication (of data, information), and more one of distribution (of resources, welfare, justice)?

Third, the promise of access, or the fantasy of the public, also presents us with the comfortable soothing feeling that everything is going to be ok – if we had only known.55 ‘Everything’ here refers to the coercive nature of the governmental systems we are subjected to. What if, indeed, we can band together in public as a public, uncover the hidden sources of the problems we are experiencing, and try with our newly acquired knowledge of them, also take back some control by holding government officials accountable?66 Two different questions are conflated here. First, the idea that transparency or openness is like a window that allows one to see what is inside, to next, also control it (Ananny & Crawford, 2016; Flyverbom, 2019). Such a conception of transparency is grounded in seventeenth century ideas about how vision, control, truth, and autonomy interrelate and interdepend. These ideas are dated (for quite some time now), and it is much more appropriate to consider openness and transparency as activities, work, or political strategies, replace the metaphor of the ‘window’ with that of the ‘prism’, and highlight the diffusing, steering and managerial characteristics of transparency (Flyverbom, 2019; Goëta & Davies, 2016; Meijer, 2013; Ruijer et al., 2018). Transparency is governance, and not a value-free tool to help neutralize governments’ coercive nature. Second, more controversial, is the almost natural cumulation of what I have discussed so far: the idea that the public through the increase of publicity, is able to deal with, contest, but more often, legitimize governments’ functioning. What if we take seriously the idea that like publicity, the public as some sort of stable, unified entity on which we can rely, is also more of a promise than reality?

Many – in fields and disciplines further removed from the administration – have explored notions of politics and democracy that do not rely on promises about publicity that fall prey to the empirical and conceptual worries I just hinted at. Jodi Dean sought inspiration in the work of pragmatist philosophers who argued to replace the ‘public sphere’ with the ‘issue-network’, in which not citizens but issues or problems are granted analytic priority (Dean, 2005, pp. 169–175).77 Knowledge about a decision-making procedure is in an issue-oriented approach less relevant than the effects or problems such decisions bring about, the actors thereby brought into being, and the political debates fought over the issue’s meaning and future. Politics is not to be neutralized procedurally but appreciated analytically. Others put forward other, also less knowledge- and communication-oriented conceptions of democracy. Think here, for instance, about the work of Pierre Rosanvallon, Huub Dijstelbloem, and Jeffrey Edward Green (Dijstelbloem, 2016; Green, 2011, 2016; Rosanvallon, 2008). For Green, ordinary citizens are too removed from politics, and too numerous to be able to be in a position to have some sort of impact on decision-making (Green, 2016). Rather than conceptualizing the problem of governmental data communication in terms of a public sphere which is in principle open and accessible to all, Green argues that the role citizens have in contemporary democracy is closer to the audience watching a play performed at a stage, thereby reducing their action repertoire to boos and walk-outs (Green, 2016, p. 115).88 Similarly, Rosanvallon and Dijstelbloem argue that citizens are better understood as vigilant smoke-alarms that go off when problems become public, than as actors proactively involved in decision-making procedures (Dijstelbloem, 2016, p. 83; Rosanvallon, 2008, Chapter 1). Rather than understanding a lack of citizenry interest in governmental information as a problem to be solved (or as a barrier to overcome), it is worth readjusting our expectations with respect to what we can expect from citizen involvement. Citizens do keep an eye on government’s functioning and interfere and raise the alarm if harm is done but are rarely in the publicity-business of information-processing, discussing, analyzing, rationalizing, and evaluating of governmental policy. When problems occur, citizens will respond, but only on a case-by-case basis and as involved actors in the issues themselves (Dijstelbloem, 2016, p. 171). Communicating information proactively is a nice gesture, but does not necessarily have to do with the types of democracy and citizenship we are situated in.