Update: The article is now online. Citizen Tools has collected some responses to it at the end of this post.
Lawrence Lessig has a provocatively titled article in the October 21 issue of The New Republic: “Against Transparency: The Perils of Openness in Government.” (Couldn’t find a link.) As a reader, I found it alternately mysterious, boring, and LOL funny.
I’m a person who notices premises, and Lessig sets up an interesting premise indeed: What he calls the “naked transparency movement”—unvarnished access to government data—“is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system off the cliff.”
Yes, Lessig has “change” and “pushing faith in our political system off the cliff” in opposition. So, the only thing that qualifies as “change” is improving faith in our political system? This pegged my bs detector.
Given the pains Lessig had taken to define the “naked transparency movement” and preemptively critique its effects, I was prepared for a straightforward criticism of public access to raw data. Continue reading →
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