July 4th Thunder Moon Lunar Eclipse

With a partial eclipse on the way I've been contemplating alignments, both hidden and revealed. In particular, Hawk and I have been ruminating on The Transparency Society by the philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, so I'll share a few excerpts here:<br/><br/>"Today the word &#8220;transparency&#8221; is haunting all spheres of life&#8212;not just politics but economics, too. More democracy, more freedom of information, and more efficiency are expected of transparency. Transparency creates trust, the new dogma affirms. What is forgotten thereby is that such insistence on transparency is occurring in a society where the meaning of &#8220;trust&#8221; has been massively compromised.Wherever information is very easy to obtain, as is the case today, the social system switches from trust to control. The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control.If everything becomes public right away, politics invariably grows short of breath; it becomes short term and thins out into mere chatter. Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long-term planning impossible. A vision directed toward the future proves more and more difficult to obtain. And things that take time to mature receive less and less attention.As total communication and total networking run their course, it proves harder than ever to be an outsider, to hold a different opinion. Transparent communication is communication that has a smoothing and leveling effect. It leads to synchronization and uniformity. It eliminates Otherness. Compulsive conformity proceeds from transparency. In this way, transparency stabilizes the dominant system.Transparency is a neoliberal dispositive. It forces everything inward in order to transform it into information. Under today&#8217;s immaterial relations of production, more information and communication mean more productivity and acceleration. In contrast, secrecy, foreignness, and otherness represent obstacles for communi