The Boy Who Could Change the World by Aaron Swartz Read Free Book Online Page B

political spectrum. It is likely many would accept—all they’d need to do was read a page and spend a little time agreeing to summarize it. And in doing so, they’d provide a great contribution to political debate (as well as getting their side represented).
    All of these phases would be going on essentially simultaneously—the argument could be updated as new evidence came to light, new evidence could be added to fill holes in the argument, and the adjudicating jury could keep tabs on the page as updated.
    And once a decision on an issue was made, it could be cited as evidence in the argument for a related issue (“Gore is a serial liar”).
    Everything would be very fluid and wiki-like. We’d make up the rules as we went along, seeing what was necessary. And when we learned from our mistakes, we could go back and fix them.
    This seems like an awful lot of effort for just coming to a decision on a couple of silly issues, but I think it’s far more than that. The result would be a vast collection of trustable arguments for many of the hot topics of the day, a collection that could be relied on through time to give you the fair truth—because everybody had essentially signed off on it (it is publicly modifiable, after all). And if you look at the effort expended on these claims and political fights, spending a little time getting the facts right seems like a small price to pay.

When Is Transparency Useful?

    http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/usefultransparency
    June 2009
    Age 22
    The following essay appears in the new O’Reilly book Open Government and attempts to combine and clarify some of the points I made in previous essays. It was written in June 2009 .
    Transparency is a slippery word; the kind of word that, like reform , sounds good and so ends up getting attached to any random political thing that someone wants to promote. But just as it’s silly to talk about whether “reform” is useful (it depends on the reform), talking about transparency in general won’t get us very far. Everything from holding public hearings to requiring police to videotape interrogations can be called “transparency”—there’s not much that’s useful to say about such a large category.
    In general, you should be skeptical whenever someone tries to sell you on something like “reform” or “transparency.” In general, you should be skeptical. But in particular, reactionary political movements have long had a history of cloaking themselves in nice words. Take the Good Government (goo-goo) movement early in the twentieth century. Funded by prominent major foundations, it claimed that it was going to clean up the corruption and political machines that were hindering city democracy. Instead, the reforms ended up choking democracy itself, a response to the left-wing candidates who were starting to get elected.
    The goo-goo reformers moved elections to off-years. They claimed this was to keep city politics distinct from national politics, but the real effect was just to reduce turnout. They stopped payingpoliticians a salary. This was supposed to reduce corruption, but it just made sure that only the wealthy could run for office. They made the elections nonpartisan. Supposedly this was because city elections were about local issues, not national politics, but the effect was to increase the power of name recognition and make it harder for voters to tell which candidate was on their side. And they replaced mayors with unelected city managers, so winning elections was no longer enough to effect change.
    Of course, the modern transparency movement is very different from the Good Government movement of old. But the story illustrates that we should be wary of kind nonprofits promising to help. I want to focus on one particular strain of transparency thinking and show how it can go awry. It starts with something that’s hard to disagree with.
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