The “transparency movement” is, by all accounts, on fire. Obama campaigned on openness, launched his administration with nods to citizen participation, and has talked up a wonderful storm about credibility. The Sunlight Foundation [1. I should say, in advance, that I think the Sunshine Foundation is a fantastic organization with its heart in the right place. My concern lies in their emphasis, not their motivation. Also, despite the fact that I say almost nothing about it, they do have output-focused programs...just very few] is managing a fleet of projects intended to make government as open as your grandmother’s heart. Yet somehow Lawrence Lessig wants to ruin the party and talk about the “perils of openness.” What gives?
The Sunlight Foundation loves transparency. Lawrence Lessig is against it. They’re both right, but for the wrong reasons. Lessig’s right on what’s wrong, but wrong on what’s right. Put slightly more confusingly: Sunshine’s wrong and Lessig’s right, but Lessig’s wrong: we should do Sunshine right. We shouldn’t care about the money going into the system, not because it cripples our confidence in Congress, but because we’ll miss the real issue: the money coming out.
Take a look at the Sunlight Foundation website. The group is behind or partnered with a dizzying array of organizations and projects: OpenSecrets.org, MAPLight.org, OpenCongress, Party Time!, Real Time Investigations, Fortune 535, Punch Clock Map. Notice a trend? The vast majority of these projects focus on understanding what our legislators are doing. That is, where they are, who they’ve worked for, what parties they attend; in short, why they do what they do. This omits the most important part of transparency: what they are doing.
Take a look at the broadside Lessig leveled at transparency in The New Republic last month.
[I]t is impossible to know whether any particular contribution or contributions brought about a particular vote, or was inspired by a particular vote. Put differently, if there are benign as well as malign contributions, it is impossible to know for any particular contribution which of the two it is. Even if we had all the data in the world and a month of Google coders, we could not begin to sort corrupting contributions from innocent contributions.
Or at least “corrupting” in a certain sense. All the data in the world will not tell us whether a particular contribution bent a result by securing a vote or an act that otherwise would not have occurred. The most we could say–though this is still a very significant thing to say–is that the contributions are corrupting the reputation of Congress, because they raise the question of whether the member acted to track good sense or campaign dollars. Where a member of Congress acts in a way inconsistent with his principles or his constituents, but consistent with a significant contribution, that act at least raises a question about the integrity of the decision. But beyond a question, the data says little else.
Lessig continues in a vein much more damning to the transparency movement as we know it. His argument is twofold; a) we can never do more than speculate as to the reasons why Congress acts the way it does, and b) endless speculation, enabled by endless reams of data about who Congress talks to, parties with, accepts money from, or, hell, rolls the Yahtzee dice with, will only undermine the faith in Congress, leaving them incapable of doing the right thing.
His first point hits the nail on the head: except in the most obvious cases, it’s almost impossible to link cause to effect when it comes to all that “evil” money in politics. In fact, we don’t need to “illuminate the connection” between money and politics or to write a “nonpartisan guide to money’s influence on U.S. elections.” Such enterprises suppose that their ends can be reached: with enough journalism and enough databasing we can prove (and defeat!) the influence of money in politics. The result will be a virtuous legislative body, spending money the right way, not the evil way. Lessig, happily, doesn’t buy this bridge.
Lessig’s later claim, however, is just as wrong, and if anything . He likens the transparency movement to the fevered accusations of scholarly impropriety, a damaging trend that the Journal of the American Medical Association tried to grapple with. Incredibly, Lessig analogizes the position of doctors forced to defend themselves against unfair accusations to that of American congressmen. Apparently, names like Duke Cunningham and William J. Jefferson aren’t as memorable as I thought. Lessig, though, seems to harbor some optimistic notions about the makeup of our public officials:
D.C. will become as D.C. is becoming: a place filled with souls animated by–as Robert Kaiser put it recently in his fine book So Damn Much Money–a “familiar American yearning: to get rich.“
Would that Lessig was right. Sadly, I think D.C. has long attracted the wrong souls, particularly if we define the hunger for wealth broadly, to include the avarice for power and esteem.
Lessig is worried about our distrust of Congress and the Sunlight Foundation (with their tech-savvy army) are hell-bent on finding evidence for that distrust. But distrust is meaningless, particularly when it has no impact on the behavior of those untrustworthy pols. In fact, it’s worse than meaningless. It distracts citizens from their proper role in the democratic process: being good consumers.
The citizen consumer does not, as one Texan memorably counseled, go shopping at the mall to defeat terrorism. He gives negative feedback on eBay and refuses to buy products from crappy sellers. He doesn’t spend angst-ridden hours speculating as to why amazingbooks77 sent him a copy of Saving Ryan’s Privates instead of Saving Private Ryan. He’s a little more focused on what he got: a piece of trash instead of the promised Spielberg blockbuster.
The implicit message of Sunlight’s efforts is that we shouldn’t buy what Congress is selling. But what that means in real terms is that we should fight government spending. Lessig, in his 6,500 word gentle jeremiad against openness, at least briefly nods to the benefits of “management transparency,” but even that obscures the fundamental point: the transparency movement has got it completely backwards. Don’t try to cap the money getting in to the system; strangle the money going out.
The only way to do that is to reveal the utter ineffectiveness of government spending in achieving its stated aims, to awaken citizen consumers to the obscene facsimiles of the promises that are being delivered. What’s Sunlight’s celebrated project in that arena? An iPhone app that reveals nearby stimulus spending via an augmented reality viewer. Sweet? Definitely. Informative? Certainly. Effective? Only at conveying a general sense that the stimulus is all around us and having an impact. That’s not quite what I’d hope for from a transparency initiative.
To recap, as wonderful as the manifold tools and toys the transparency movement has cooked up are, they’re pushing us further and further from what Congress is doing, in favor of speculating why. Even worse, Lessig’s unsurprisingly excellent dissection of the problems with this approach actually makes the problem worse: people should no more trust Congress with its money than they would Pacman Jones. We should focus on the fact that Congress continues to make it rain, not the inscrutable (and doubtless sordid) reasons why.