Barely Legal Substance: Transparency & The Atomic Bomb

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March 01, 2005

Transparency & The Atomic Bomb

I first learned about transparency from Photoshop. Beginning in version 3, Photoshop's editing metaphor became layer-based. Images are 2-D, and in Photoshop each image becomes a 2-D layer sitting in a z-axis stack of layers. Play now with many layers stacked on top of each other. What good is this? Well, if part of a layer is transparent, you are able to see the layer underneath (and if that layer is transparent, the layer underneath that continued). So if you make the background of a layer transparent, the foreground will be set in the background of another image. Repeat about ten times and mix with vaguely medieval religious imagery, and you're well on your way to becoming a mid-90s graphic designer of the Seattle grunge style!

Transparency, I've come to realize, is vital in more than image-editing. It's a fundamental ethical virtue. The present moment hosts a struggle between transparency and opacity that must galvanize us into living more transparently and calling for more transparency from our institutions. Government, business, education, and science must be transparent in important ways for their future fundamental integrity.

Korby Parnell tells a motivating tale of transparency at work in the splitting of the atom. But significantly, other institutions must act transparently as well. Higher-Ed springs to mind, perhaps from recent experiences. So does Enron, WorldCom, Google, and Microsoft. There's varying degrees of transparency in each of those companies (and varying degrees of failure therein). For lawyers and their firms, there's even less transparency, as Evan Schaeffer humorously relates.

Transparency. Not like a Johnsone-esque glass house, but like a piece of open code. Transparency over processes, models, and compliance. Not over execution and decision-trees. Think about why I believe it to be so important over the week.

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Posted by Noel at 05:25 PM tagged as: