Twisted by knaves
Like the US, the UK government is opening its data. The closed beta of hmg.gov.uk/data has been up for a few days, civil servants are gathering spreadsheets are fast as they’re told to, and there will be iPhone apps to reconfigure the NHS via Twitter in a matter of weeks, I’m sure.
I kid. It’s nice to see TBL finally finding a place for his RDF/Semantic Web stuff that’s both big enough to be cool, and with a closed enough ontology to actually possibly work. It’s also nice to see the release of creative energy that’s coming out of the hack days – Young Rewired State, especially, was extraordinary. (Although how long hack days will continue after it becomes apparent that the auditionware approach doesn’t really work for the auditionees, is anyone’s guess. Rather like moving your newspaper to awesomely expensive offices, and then getting The Crowd to do your work for free in the same year. They might tire very quickly.)
Anyway, I’ve spent quite a bit of time speaking to civil servants about this (both journalistically and as a guide – I wrote some books on semantic-webbish stuff a few years ago, and can boil triples down to wonk-speak if asked nicely) and while the technological stuff is all very exciting, everyone I’ve spoken to is deeply worried about the social effects of the grand project. It’s there that the geeks and the wonks just don’t see eye to eye. One thinks the other is being bureaucratically obstructive, the other thinks the one is horribly naive. The whimper from Westminster is that it’d be all very nice if we were starting the country from scratch – but that the culture just isn’t ready for open data. No one, they complain, is thinking about this out loud.
Will Davies’ elegant exploration of the Conservative Party’s plans for open government data is a joy, therefore, to read. Taken to its logical conclusion, he says, the transparent government movement would end with a state that was accountable, but not legitimate. It starts to break down under the weight of uneducated opinion:
So, following Mirowski, we might say that ‘government 2.0′ is the final realisation of neo-liberalism. No auditors, no experts, no objective knowledge, no sense of the common good, just maximum freedom for individuals to form opinions and privately process information. As David Weinberger says in triumphant Hayekian style, “transparency is the new objectivity.” In some instances, consumer perspectives may form the basis of action – demanding change if they’re a prominent journalist or campaigner, selecting a different service supplier if they’re a fortunate lay-person, or just mouthing off on facebook if they’re not so lucky. But siding with perspective over expertise cannot be the basis for legitimacy. Allowing people to express their frustration or disappointment, but without offering dialogue or improvement at the end of it, removes the security offered by expertise, but without offering anything in its place. Auditors act as the critics of experts, but they do so from some position of expertise; they damage legitimacy, but partly so as to then rebuild it. By contrast, a state laid bare to only the audit of general public dissatisfaction is surely heading towards a legitimacy crisis.
Readers of, say, Ben Goldacre’s on the Sunday Express’s reporting of science could well be sympathetic to this. As too can anyone who giggles at Intelligent Design, or homeopathy, or the Daily Mail. Like the misreporting of medical news, a misinterpretation of government data could have horrendous results. A media scare that causes a few hundred girls to not have a vaccine, say, will eventually kill some of them. By its very nature, government data could be equally as far-reaching if mis-used. The risks are outweighed, perhaps, by the potential benefits – but the inevitable misinterpretation is something that few but the government statistician corps appear to be taking seriously.
Even Larry Lessig, who continues as the Liberal Internet’s Intellectual Of Choice, is worried, as he writes in The New Republic:
And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The ‘naked transparency movement,’ as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.
Me, I’m rather enamoured by a remark made to me the other day by a German, in Germany, well versed in international shenanigans:
“You’re releasing all of your governmental data? The Chinese will be all over that.“