Killing secrets from Panama to Paradise: Understanding the ICIJ through bifurcating communicative and political affordances

Abstract

This Machine Kills Secrets is how Greenberg explains the widespread adoption of digital encryption and anonymity tools in practices of disclosure. We consider how that machine works, to the extent that new and sustained political practices in society have emerged through digital disclosures. We offer the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as a paradigmatic case to inform new metaphors of what disclosure is and what it does in democratic governing. The empirical work focuses on how ICIJ’s data mining, manipulation and visualisation interface with traditional governing institutions of accountability. The article relates the affordances present in the ICIJ to modes of societal control that are available through Brighenti’s consideration of visibility as a social category and governmentality scholarship through three theoretical moves: bifurcating affordance theory on communicative and political planes, relaying a complimentarily delineated model of media apparatus and considering how such apparatuses shift towards proto-institutions.

Keywords

Affordance disclosure governmentality ICIJ leaks transparency visibility

Introduction

Woody Guthrie taping ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ to his guitar in 1941 helps us understand the affordances of digital media ranging from WikiLeaks to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). That provocation is not meant to signal a detailed archaeology of media(ted protest). Instead, our claim is that like today’s digital disclosure media practice, Guthrie’s ‘machine’ works through two related yet discernible levels of affordance that should be considered in tandem: communicative and political affordances. Guthrie’s guitar affords a form and function of communication through strummed melody, matched chords and new potentials for harmony with a (somewhat twangy) lyrical verse. This creates the communicative regime of a song. These affordances concern imagining and materially creating (Nagy and Neff, 2015) specific communicative practice regimes (Schrock, 2015). Yet, the machine also affords a new form and function of politics within a specific media ecology – later identified as protest or People’s Songs (Lieberman, 1995) – that gave unique visibility to disparities in political, economic and civil rights.¹ The guitar’s superordinate set of affordances are political and present a new way to ‘kill fascists’. Consider how a drum next to Guthrie, or indeed estranged from him by geography or genre can, past any emergent communicative regime, be(at) political(ly). The utility of exploring this distinction, and beginning to develop a theory of superordinate political affordance in and for digital media, are what drive this article.

Our key claim on digital disclosure projects is that their ideal of radically increasing ‘transparency’ relies on discrete communicative and political affordances that combine to form new ways of managing visibility. We follow Brighenti (2010) to suggest visibility as a social category that imbues efficacies of recognition and control. These efficacies offer a way to govern that has been described as the management of visibility (Flyverbom, 2016; Hansen and Flyverbom, 2015) and relate media to modern critiques of governmentality. Yet, as we expand below, they also align with agonistic theories of democracy that acknowledge practices of both freedom and control (Griggs et al., 2014). Our research questions thus consider how to better theorise the socio-material reality of disclosure practices in the digital age that produce novel governance mechanisms and, specifically, to what extent the ICIJ is demonstrative of such practice.

But how can affordances of communication coalesce with political regimes of government? And how do we link this to theories of disclosure and visibility? To answer the first question, it is useful to begin with Foucault’s (1980) clarification of what makes up an apparatus or ‘dispositif’. His description allows us to think through how two planes of affordance might be constituted within and create socio-technical apparatuses designed for political use. Foucault (1980) describes apparatus through, first ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble’ of elements, which for our study include people, platforms, algorithms and networks attached to evolving forms of disclosure (p. 196–197). Second, is the ‘nature of the connection that can exist’ between these ensembled elements – what these elements beget together. We interpret these intra-apparatus interactions through communicative affordances. Think here of what regimes of communication are perceived, imagined and attainable within the heterogeneous mix of elements constituting an emergent apparatus. These communicative regimes signal related sets of potentials and we return to Foucault’s description of dispositif to help explicate them. Foucault’s (1980) third described aspect of apparatus is a ‘formation which has as its major function’ a response to an ‘urgent need’ (p. 196–197). We consider socio-technical form and function of apparatuses in terms of design that speak of political affordances. This will become clearer as we expand our discussion of governmentality and our empirical case below; we leverage the concept, as written by Foucault, towards current media and affordance scholarship through the case study of the ICIJ.

Scope and organisation

Our scope defines ‘killing secrets’² as instances where digital media are used in the practice of anonymously accepting data for the purpose of making these data or their information publicly available. Websites such as WikiLeaks, services such as SecureDrop and organisations such as the ICIJ all meet these criteria. The space offered here allows an in-depth focus on the ICIJ as a paradigmatic case of what political affordances tied to digital disclosure offer governing, and media and affordance scholarship.

The work also offers an in-depth empirical look at the ICIJ that is, to date, not present in media or communications scholarship. While over 1500 Factiva entries exist for the ICIJ from 2013 to 2018, there is a surprising lack of academic attention to ICIJ findings or practice, considering its pervasive effects on news media. Academically minded tax journals, a discourse analysis on ICIJ’s own presumptions of impact (Konieczna and Powers, 2017), a detailed account of computational teaching from ICIJ data (Zhuhadar and Ciampa, 2019) and work that references ICIJ’s virtual workflows (Bunce et al., 2018) seem to define the nascent corpus of peer-reviewed scholarship. Obermayer and Obermaier (2016) offer a notable internal narrative account of one of the ICIJ’s major scoops in The Panama Papers, but contextualising these data via media theory or in societal terms has yet to be considered in scholarship.

We consider ICIJ as a case that transfigured disclosures of highly disparate financial data into a stream of news stories that provided rhetorical governing devices that reignited the interest of state anticorruption structures. This includes the capture, analysis, disclosure and reportage of massive databases of companies through the Offshore Leaks (2013), China Leaks (2014), Swiss Leaks (2015), Panama Papers (2015), Bahama Leaks (2016) and the Paradise Leaks (2017). Taken together, these ‘leaks’ lend evidence to the ICIJ transitioning from leveraging the communicative affordances of anonymous digital disclosure towards a media apparatus with a routinised form of political agency that forms a nascent proto-institution. Proto-institutions have previously been defined (Lawrence et al., 2002) as new local practices, rules and technologies of governing that transcend particular relationships and may become normalised either formally or informally. However, the interest here is in the formation of such regimes of practice that Sullivan (2009: 65) speculates may be designed to unsettle the established relationships of governing and society. This is to say that we are interested in both the socio-digital mechanisms of collection of information (i.e. surveillance per Andrejevic (2006)), and the specific design of purpose for sharing that information through public disclosure.

The remainder of the article is organised to first detail sociological critiques of transparency that apply to information and communication technologies (ICT) and governing society, before relating these to our theoretical claims around communicative and political affordance. With the theoretical work exhausted, in the second half of the article we invite readers to consider evidence of the ICIJ as digital disclosure apparatus turned proto-institution. This half organises around Foucault’s language on dispositif to analyse the ICIJ’s diverse elements, relationships between them and resultant design that conducts conduct through disclosure. Doing so provides greater accuracy to understanding and explaining the construction of governmental regimes via ICT and opens up for discussion the implications of communicative and political affordances to affordance theory, media studies and governmentality – with which we conclude the article.

Disclosing that transparency is not transparent

Transparency’s openly democratic ideal blinds us to its own politics. We contend that rather than expose truth, transparency exposes and forms expectations of conduct in the process of information materialising through media apparatuses. This differs from the transparency ideal of democratic government imagining disclosure (or exposure) as a way to uncover truth for decision-making (Heald, 2006) via opening the accounts of government practice or outcome to public forums (Bovens, 2010). That transparency ideal is drawn from a long history of cognitive metaphors that as far back as Brandeis (1913) considers the power of letting the electric lights of modernity ‘disinfect’ what is hidden in the darkness. Yet in practice, transparency is far less transparent.

We must consider what transparency practice is and does at its interface with digital technologies and society. Openness itself does not remove the political and necessitates its own political relations (Tkacz, 2012) that obfuscate traditional forms of power. At the same time, any ‘truth’ that is made visible is usually at the expense of another aspect of consideration slipping into darkness and out of a shared account (Hansen and Flyverbom, 2015). Walter Lippmann (1927) was one of the first to make this critique of ‘Blazing Publicity’ that claimed to extinguish the unseen, commenting that mediated visibility ‘does not flood the world with light (p. 47). On the contrary it is like the beam … which plays somewhat capriciously upon the course of events, throwing now this and now this into brilliant relief, leaving the rest in comparative darkness’. Farther still is Birchall’s (2011) suggestion that transparency works as a floating signifier, articulated to ‘no essential meaning outside of the discursive formations that invoke it or the historical context in which it is situated’ (p. 78). Transparency in this view becomes a metaphor of governing that is as much about what one expects to uncover and how it is to be uncovered, than being about letting light pass through a medium to make political life visible (Ananny and Crawford, 2018; Heemsbergen, 2016).

To illustrate, consider how Fung et al. (2007) trace generations of transparency practice that have enabled citizens and other stakeholders to (1) use disclosure to limit the liberal state by making its actions visible and the state accountable for them, (2) regulate interactions between citizens and other stakeholders via state compulsion of targeted disclosures that create rational choices matrices and encourage citizens towards self-care and (3) make things visible through citizen-initiated transparency systems relying on collaboratively created data, interfaces and outcomes. Fung et al.’s third generation of transparency forms its expectations of conducting participative government through connection to innovations in decentralised digital communications.

From a genealogical perspective, the first two shifts provide parallels to how governmental technologies of discipline shift to technologies of (neoliberal) control (Miller and Rose, 2008). These generational ‘regimes of practice’ (Dean, 2010: 30) can be explained through what is rendered visible and governable, the mechanisms used to exercise power, and the undergirding rationalities or worldviews that shift to answer specific political needs. Fung’s third generation of transparency practice does not ostensibly offer protection of society from the state or offer subtle forms of control in a panoptic process that creates subjects of/for governing. Instead, it is framed to answer the ‘positive’ side of the informational problem that allows people to ‘conduct their lives’ (Fung, 2013: 185) for the better through networked information flows. This third generation of transparency practice seems to speak of what Arendt (1970) might understand as producing empathetic capacities ‘to act in concert’ for public-political purpose (p. 44). Third-generational transparency seems to be at political odds with more panoptic interpretations. Interpretations of surveillant assemblages (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000) account for this turn as the partial democratisation and increased breadth of electronic surveillance in rhizomatic spaces of bounded physical and cognitive capture and disclosure. Yet as Hier (2002: 410) comments, the seemingly endless rhizome remains as governance infrastructure, connected to, or developed out of, the desire to coordinate and control populations by making them visible.

The juxtaposition of transparency ideals, generations of practice and critiques of surveillant assemblage are given note by sociologist Andrea Brighenti’s (2010) differentiation of visibilities of control and visibilities of recognition. The former evokes new forms of discipline through hierarchies, while the latter empowers through mutual recognition (of the empathetic individual or group). We will return to Brighenti, but for now his critiques suggest that transparency might be best understood through specific cognitive metaphors used to convey ways that organisations, nations or society are ‘expected to conduct their day-to-day activities’ (Ball, 2009: 303). Ball’s insight of ‘expected conduct’, more than wordplay to the ‘conduct of conduct’, defines the concept as something that makes conduct visible, while also setting expectations towards what conduct should be made visible. Transparency then, exposes and forms expectations of conduct as it is mediated through apparatuses and institutions that disclose. We now turn to how these visibilities are managed via affordance.

Affordances afford affordances

The use of affordance theory in media and communications is well worn. Affordances provide a satisfying way to understand how communication forms inform day-to-day mediated life. We build on the recent proliferation of affordance literature (see Costa, 2018; Nagy and Neff, 2015; Schrock, 2015; Treem and Leonardi, 2012) to suggest a way to develop the term of art to study ICT mediating socio-political concerns. We bifurcate ‘affordances’ to suggest that communicative affordances create regimes of communication practice, while a related, additional vocabulary of political affordances describe the related creation of regimes of practice in governmental terms. Consider the former as speaking of the user context and the latter as the societal context.

To illustrate this approach with a digital example, consider Mark Zuckerberg’s thesis on radical transparency on his platform, Facebook. Zuckerberg and his core team held a deep ideological belief that living increasingly open, transparent and less private lives would enable a more compassionate, equal and just society (Kirkpatrick, 2011: 207). From these political assumptions they designed communicative affordances to match: we can see subjective perceptions of digitally integrating individuals, family and ‘news feeds’ combine with the objective qualities of the Facebook interface, database and its algorithms. Each user and their connections are afforded ‘radically transparent’ communication from/to others in the clickable Facebook public. The political consequences of executing these communication goals in the Facebook media apparatus do not, however, necessarily align. The political affordances layered atop the successful communicative goals are open to a new set of political relational potentials afforded through a human-societal environment outside of Zuckerberg’s vision. Here, consider Pearce’s (2015) argument that the intended affordances of social media can be put to other (nefarious) ends outside of the ideal-user use case.

Zuckerberg’s ‘radical transparency ideal’ accounts only for how the communicative affordances of transparency might be imagined to affect privileged classes who benefit from greater visibility (boyd, 2014). At the same time, Bucher (2012) claimed early in Facebook’s mainstreaming that it is not visibility on Facebook that is a social threat, but invisibility: participatory subjectivity is perceived through the constant potential of disappearing into social obsolescence. Facebook might afford political invisibility in the networked society as much as it is designed to afford communicative visibility.

Furthermore, we observe specific political manipulations of Zuckerberg’s vision via firms like Cambridge Analytica. As of late 2017, the firm still advertised how it could exert the maximum influence towards altering voting patterns by targeting Facebook users with specially crafted messages relying on bespoke data to analyse ‘everything from [individuals’] voting history to the car they drive’ (Cambridge Analytica, 2017) to identify behaviours for algorithmic analysis and messaging. Here we see that the datasets and digital traces that individuals create (or do not) in the practice of attaining certain communication goals can lend to a reconfiguration of political goals that were not yet imaginable before the communicative affordances of Facebook.

Communicative affordances and political affordances

Schrock (2015) specifies communicative affordances as the ‘interaction between subjective perceptions of utility and objective qualities of the technology’ that alter communicative practice (p. 1233). User perceptions, goals and material constraints affect specific expectations on the conduct of communications in terms we can speak of as regimes of communication practice. Media use affords specific regimes of production, dissemination and response. Castells (2009) might identify such regimes as mass communication or mass self-communication. Note the focus on practices, rather than study of ‘effects’, signals that the perception of utility is not constrained by objective materiality (Hutchby, 2001) and instead, is developed via communication goals users might have, later discover or abstractly imagine (Nagy and Neff, 2015).

We can specify political affordances as the interaction between subjective perceptions of utility and objective qualities of the socio-technological apparatuses that alter political practice. In relation to our case of the ICIJ, we discern affordances functioning to increase visibility as a technology of government at an ICT-society level in addition to communication at an ICT-user level. As technologies of government, these shape a functional regime of social ordering and accountability practice via visibility management. Consider that the saturation of (digital) media in the human environment begs us to consider how communication goals become interlinked with political goals specific to modes of governing. The networked society Crozier (2008: 8), among others, suggests is an environment where shaping and interpretation of ‘information flows themselves take on a new significance as sources of creativity, productivity and power’ as do the networks that process them (Castells, 2009). In the mediated environment that humans inhabit, affordance offers agency to shape and be shaped by media environments, perceive these shifts and reconfigure practices in the attainment of goals. Thus, a second plane of affordances of ICT in the networked society considers what happens when communication ‘goals’ are leveraged towards, or are in themselves, able to shift regimes of socio-political practices. These political affordances interact between subjective perceptions of utility and objective qualities of the socio-technological apparatuses for altering potentials of political practice.

Precedence for political affordances explained above is available in the recent literature. Treem (2015) describes social media in an organisational context as ‘technologies of accountability’ where ‘the communication itself serves to provide meaning to a social context’ (p. 4). Hansen and Flyverbom (2015) also consider the political through their study of ‘disclosure devices’ such as rankings and algorithmically enabled big data analysis, which create ‘fields of potential action that can respectively enlarge and restrict social interaction’ (p. 877). We might also consider Davis and Chouinard’s (2016) STS-focused contribution that acknowledges the interrelated conditions of perception, varied user-dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy that enact affordances. These developments are furthered by Costa’s (2018) concept of affordances-in-practice, which, similar to our argument, reference the ‘enactment of platform properties by specific users within social and cultural contexts’ (p. 11). We explicate ‘contexts’ with the language of political to denote human relations with society and bridge to theories of governmentality and democracy. Any claims of political affordance are not meant to retread well-developed approaches of the politics of technology (see Winner, 1980). They instead focus on the socio-technical apparatus made up of relations between diverse elements, including user goals and unique elements of ICT design and specific socio-technical contexts. This view of (media) technology acknowledges the agency of platforms, protocols, interfaces (Galloway, 2012) and user-level algorithms (Crawford, 2016; Flyverbom et al., 2017) that make up political potential from the micro down through to what DeNardis (2012) considers macro governance constructs of technical architecture.

Political affordances may thus provide a tentative step towards answering Hansen and Flyverbom’s (2015) well-taken critique that affordance theory does not adequately analyse the relational linkages between material and human life. Our contention is that the human–material linkage can be thought of in the plane of political affordance that creates previously unthought-of-potentials between how material communications enable human political context.

In sum, we note that ICT-enabled disclosure practices render what is visible and thus governable in ways that were previously unavailable. Describing how they do so through communicative affordances is necessary but not sufficient. A second plane of affordance that is based on the technical, but interacts on the socio-political, needs to be considered as distinct; goals shaped by the technical communicative affordance in turn create new categories of goals and imagined political interactions that constitute regimes of governmental practice. By this, our argument approaches what Dean (2010) considers ‘regimes of practice’ that conduct (political vs communicative) conduct in a way that resonates with governmentality scholarship and enables a model of media that relates communicative and political affordances to government (p. 30). We now shift to an empirical account of such an apparatus that offers radical disclosure in the digital–political terrain.

The ICIJ as apparatus

As a case study, the ICIJ apparatus distilled, disclosed and reported on massive databases of offshore companies in a design that afforded a new formation of governing. The apparatus was able to transfigure disclosures of highly disparate financial data into multiple series of news stories that provided rhetorical governing devices and reignited the interest of state anticorruption structures. These stories were made visible and relatable to the public interest in ways that were previously difficult. Specifically, financial connections and hidden wealth were made visible through novel communicative affordances such as digital transfer, algorithmic sorting, visualisations of financial connection, transnational networks of collaboration and follow-on publicity in traditional national newspapers. On a subsequent plane, political actions that were, before the disclosures, unthinkable became imaginable through nation-based accountability infrastructures. These modes of communication and government were enacted through a repeated pattern: digitised leaks were remediated into news including the Offshore Leaks (2013), China Leaks (2014), Swiss Leaks (2015), Panama Papers (2016), Bahama Leaks (2016) and the Paradise Leaks (2017). Taken together, we argue that this shows a transition of the ICIJ into an apparatus that has become socially acceptable as a routinised form of political agency – a nascent proto-institution of democratic governing. As such, ICIJ is seen to offer a paradigmatic case (Flyvbjerg, 2006) of communicative and political affordances (of digital disclosure) coalescing into a proto-institution.

At the same time, the ICIJ’s sustained empirical record shows how the ideal of transparency in democratic society materialises through technical-participative apparatuses designed to impact the conduct of conduct. Indeed, our focus on, as Foucault put it, the ‘conduire des conduites’ (Foucault, 1994: 237), allows consideration of how ideals of transparency, openness and participatory culture – mediated through ICTs – construct and are constructed by practice. To do so, we borrow from Foucault’s (1980) language on dispositif to plot both communicative and political affordances within and enabled by the ICIJ. Specifically, analysis of the ICIJ organises around its elements and their potential communicative relations and then considers the resultant political design that answers specific needs of government. Doing so explicitly steers away from governmentality theory that limits Foucault’s language on apparatus to interpretations of capture (see Agamben, 2009). This method of inquiry allows reflection on why ICT engineered for disclosures can produce agonistic hues (Crawford, 2016) that create specific political regimes of practice, rather than merely affording greater communicative rationality tied to the idealised expectation of transparency. As such, the work aligns to critiques of ‘transparency’ being not about uncovering a truth, but rather, enacting a performative management of visibility (Flyverbom, 2016), which is embedded in and creates its own political contexts.

Elements and communicative affordances

The elements that make up the ICIJ apparatus were from the beginning quite diverse and diverged from past fourth-estate configurations to enable a new set of communicative affordances. The initial element was a ‘computer hard drive packed with corporate data and personal information and emails [that anonymously] arrived in the mail’ (ICIJ, 2013b) for Australian investigative journalist, Gerard Ryle. The types of data within that hard drive and how the ICIJ worked with them represent unique elements and communicative potentials. The ICIJ claims this first leak consisted of 10 times the amount of files leaked in the US State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2009, including 30 years of ‘large and mainly unsorted company and trust documents and financial instructions, emails, large and small databases and spreadsheets, personal identity documents, accounting information and [internal] reports’ (ICIJ, 2013b: n.p.).

The crux of the communicative affordances tied to disclosure apparatuses evolving in the networked age can be understood in relation to how data are handled. These data are formatted in a manner that requires both low-level conversion and high-level analytics for sense to be made. The ICIJ’s methods required proprietary data management software (Nuix Investigator was donated) that indexes and searches unstructured data, and presents findings in ways similar to social network analysis tools. Note, Nuix advertises an ‘unmatched ability to provide visibility into data at hyperscale’ (Nuix, 2018). The results of analysis were presented to readers of the ICIJ website in simple network-style graphs. Relations between the data themselves, algorithmic sorting and visualisation afford deciphering the seemingly unconnected entities in new ways. Those communicative affordances of data reporting continue to be presented on the ICIJ website, with the 2017 Paradise Leaks showing a similar, if refined, interface from 2013 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Social network analysis diagrams on ICIJ. (copyright ICIJ, reproduced here with permission).

Note that the same webpages that show social-network-analysis-type relations invited readers to become participants by downloading partial datasets for detailed analysis. The ICIJ also documents its ‘offshore leaks database’ to serve as a public central repository for ferreting out relations in data from this formative leak. The ICIJ website explains the methodology of creating the database with clear ties to these communicative affordances. Data started with a ‘disorganised and scattered structure, which for years enabled an insufficient [accounting] … and poorly solved relations’ that belied ‘the true links and relations of each separate element [to be] disclosed … Part of the solution consisted in integrating the databases … in such a way that the structure would become practical for visualisation’ (Segnini, 2013: n.p.). In line with Hansen and Flyverbom’s (2015) study of numeration, the lead journalists of the 2015 Panama Papers commented that ‘the head of the data team, loves lists. Using lists, you can impose order in the data chaos’ (Obermayer and Obermaier, 2016: 83). Mediating these data through algorithmic sorting and visualisation affords unique and generative ways of making visible that which was previously hidden. It affords a communication regime that easily made known what was secret in its ‘paper’ form, even with prior public access. Without the assistance of digital analytics and their generative outputs of interoperable data for expanded publics/users, communicating a news story across the ICIJ network would have been improbable if not impossible. Interactions between subjective perceptions and objective constraints of what could be gleaned from such analytics afforded new ways of communicating about them, and new ways of making sense of the financial patterns; a new communication regime for a networked fourth estate had taken hold.

If financial relations were made visible and communicable by indexing, algorithm and visualisation, sense-making of the newfound visibility was performed through a thoroughly networked ensemble of human elements building from these interoperable data. Participants in 2013 included a handful of public broadcasters (e.g. the BBC and CBC), private media organisations (e.g. El País, Le Monde, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post) and independent journalists for a total of 112 reporters in 58 countries (ICIJ, 2013a). By the time of the Paradise Leaks in 2017, the ICIJ claimed 95 media partners, an enlarged core staff, including a data and research unit of six people, and more than 380 affiliated journalists (ICIJ, 2017a). This regime of communication practice was noticed in journalistic circles. The ICIJ was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for its Panama Papers reporting in the category of ‘Explanatory Reporting’ (not investigative). The jury noted how the series utilised ‘collaboration of more than 300 reporters on six continents’ (The Pulitzer Prizes, 2017). The award is instructive of the power of these communicative affordances to ICIJ’s newsworthiness.

The communicative affordances of the ICIJ do not only focus on outputs. In terms of inputs, the ICIJ has diversified the ways in which it receives leaks in an attempt to, it seems, lower the barrier of entry to the regime of communicative practices within its own leaks ecology. Atop the ICIJ homepage, ‘leak to us’ is commensurate in prominence to ‘follow us’ and ‘support us’ – two of the more standard Web 2.0 interactions for online publications circa 2018. The ‘leak to us’ page encourages whistleblowing via links for six different secure apps that encrypt or otherwise obfuscate transmission over the Internet, offers ICIJ’s public PGP key for secure email and displays a mailing address for physical media. Note that the communicative affordances that lead to continued leak submissions and interoperable data help sustain the ICIJ itself. More than a discrete series of data-stories, the ICIJ’s aggregated database combines multiple leaks for its members, offering ‘information on almost 500,000 offshore entities [that] covers nearly 40 years’ (ICIJ, 2017b). This allows old data to be generative in new ways. For instance, the West Africa Leaks stories, authored in 2018 with new regional partners, were reliant on previously leaked data.

Together, these communicative practices build towards a new form and function of a networked fourth estate (Benkler, 2011), which also opens up new governing practices. The socio-political contexts of these technological–human–organisational elements, and the ‘urgent need’ they – as vanguard fourth estate actors – are designed to address, help define the second-order political affordances of the ICIJ. Before we shift to political affordances though, another way to consider the delineation of communicative affordance is to note the disclaimer positioned underneath displayed financial connections on the ICIJ (2017b) Offshore Leaks Database:

There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply [that] entities included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly. (n.p.)

More than anti-libel boilerplate, this notice speaks of how disclosing data does not fully inform a regime of governmental practice. Bringing visibility to this data through a new regime of communicative practice was necessary but not sufficient for the management of visibility as governmental practice.

Design and political affordances

The political affordances of the ICIJ offered new paths towards regimes of political practice that utilise disclosure for accountability and discipline. The technologies of government present were conducted through a double movement of the ICIJ apparatus. First, communicative affordances tied to networked disclosure of financial information created a new regime of communicative practice that invoked publicity for that which was previously secret. Second, this information afforded a set of practices anchored in ‘rationalities’ of government that bounded the particular problem of hidden wealth in a classical mode of control facilitated through public shaming and coercive state action. Headlines from ICIJ media partners speak of possible tax fraud and seem to relish exposing the efforts of the world’s elite to hide their money in webs of anonymity. Judicial consequences predicated on the same understanding of governing followed suit. As with reports of the first major leak in 2013 by one national news network, the recent leaks of secret banking information have helped authorities around the world crack down on tax cheats who go offshore, resulting in billions of dollars recovered for the public purse, in official investigations in the Philippines, Greece and India (CBC, 2013).

Such developments continue. As of 2017, governmental actions based on ‘Papers’ releases by the ICIJ include the empowerment of an informal group of tax agencies called the Joint International Taskforce on Shared Intelligence and Collaboration (JITSIC) branching off from the annual Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) meetings to simultaneously exchange tax information and share investigations based on The Panama Papers information, the resignation of Icelandic Prime minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson and the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s decision to disqualify Nawaz Sharif (and his subsequent speedy resignation; Shahzad and Hassan, 2017). The ICIJ suggested that by the end of 2017, over US$500 million had been recovered by governments worldwide due to the disclosures (Gallego, 2017). We note that the complexities of these cases are contextualised in local politics in ways that cannot alone be explained by the ICIJ’s form of governing, yet the conduct of conduct available against these executive branch members and financial recovery is reliant upon specific political affordances made through acceptance of ICIJ disclosures in international fora. These political interactions seem to continue with the 2017 Paradise Papers disclosures that have news organisations and government bodies continuing to explore new measures of control for elites based in the United States and the United Kingdom, regions that were noticeably absent from previous ICIJ leak-based reporting. The elements of the ICIJ in conjunction seem to answer a design need of a cross-national accountability that the fourth estate was previously lacking.

Distinguishing between political and communicative affordances may also offer a re-contextualising critique of the ‘user’ for the relational nature of affordances and ICTs. The affordance literature in communications seems to de-contextualise the consideration of relational aspects between ‘user’ and society. We might speculate that the ideological construction of ‘user’ as an artefact of the communications networks that first materialised in California towards the end of the century (Hu, 2015), is what limits the relational aspects of affordance theory to humans in society (Costa, 2018). Fully developing this political economy critique remains outside the scope of this article, but some related empirical work ranges from describing ‘affordances in practice’ at weddings in Latvia (Costa, 2018) to the affordances that control dissent in Azerbaijan (Pearce, 2015), or could develop the affordances of Fake News on Facebook.

The ICIJ apparatus then, shows a progression from communicative practices to a political regime afforded by the apparatus. Diverse elements including journalists from around the world, algorithms that visually represent financial and business relationships and user contributions to make these relationships visible, created specific forms of disclosure that both enabled and left alone the coercive-corrective power of ‘transparency’ to the state. Such practice is actually in line with how Fung et al. (2007) describe third-generation transparency. While disclosed data are sourced and remediated through citizen-initiated interfaces, it is the state that retains the coercive powers to act upon the information the crowd produces. That design assumes, or makes rationalities of, government around elites being brought to account for misdeeds. Citizens are surveilling their political others in the shadow of the state. Conducting conduct here is meant to disarm opponents of their secrets, and by so doing make them governable. This neoclassical moment of transparency logic relates to a decentralised design of Brandeis’ (1913) sunlight disinfectant, but in so doing, offers a revised panoptic diagram. Consider how the governing regimes around offshore regulatory filings were built from the communicative affordances of paper records that explicitly belied surveillance, sharing, publishing and so on, and managed visibility quite differently. We argue the ICIJ afforded political outcomes that were previously unthinkable by making incumbent (tax) secrecy regimes moot. Yet, the ICIJ’s continuing decentralised capture and disclosure of secrets led to ambiguous re-integration to state institutions of control – the ICIJ did not share its raw data with tax authorities (Obermayer and Obermaier, 2016). Thus, The ICIJ and its project persists as a socio-technical apparatus that informs new regimes of both communication and governing in a manner that disturbs and governs the conduct of conduct in productive ways.

Discussion: affordance theory, media apparatus and proto-institutional government

Here, we discuss how our research contributes to affordance theory, media studies and governmentality. To affordance theory, the distinction between communicative and political affordance was useful as an analytical tool to increase the accuracy of describing relational potentials through technology–user–society interfaces. To show how, the ICIJ acted as a paradigmatic case of managing visibility in a manner that was only attainable through radical shifts in communication regimes. These unique digital communicative affordances opened up specific superordinate or second-order political affordances that are ripe for interpretation though governmentality literatures.

In terms of media theory and governmentality, our analysis integrates the language of ‘apparatus’ as described by Foucault (1980) with affordances and may be transferable to the future study of digital media. Our approach (1) identifies disparate elements (platform, user, etc.) that make up a subject apparatus to consider how available relations between them relate to communicative affordances, and then (2) discerns how in conjunction, these affordances manifest in an apparatus design to answer a political need as a technology of government. Further theoretical dissection of dispositif itself is interesting, but remains outside the present scope. More generally, Foucault (1982) signalled government as ‘games’ of confrontation reaching their final moments through ‘stable mechanisms’ that replace anarchy and allow one to ‘direct, in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable certainty, the conduct of others’ (p. 794). In the case of the ICIJ, winning over an opponent meant rendering them ineffectual in a strategic game of monetary hide-and-seek. We note though, that the practical effects of disturbing incumbent regimes of government is complex and sometimes kinetic. Executive branches of government have been disposed, while the 2017 death of journalist Daphne Galizia by car bomb in Malta was directly tied to her investigative work on Panama Papers data.

We also note that although surveillance and disclosure were decentralised across nations and media actors, political powers of accountability seemed to constrain back to nation-state structures (see Obermayer and Obermaier, 2016: 327–344). Citizens used novel political affordances to assist the state in novel control of fellow citizens, speaking of a very specific formation of government through ICT. That new surveillant ‘transparency’, as Hier (2002) might predict, still tied the dominating power of the state to discipline and control actors previously hidden from view. So how do we best understand the seeming paradox of digital disclosure apparatuses that both obviate and empower ‘state’ forms of societal control? To discern the governmental mechanisms at hand in the ICIJ we must understand the visibility ICIJ provides from terms that acknowledge visibility’s implications on both sides of disturbance and control.

Institutions of radical disclosure and radical democracy

Our final analytical provocation suggests how theories of radical democracy helpfully integrate apparatuses and the routinisation of emergent technologies of government via proto-institutions that elicit both disturbance and control. Disturbance and control are what Norval (2007) considers the productive ambiguity required of government in healthy democracies. Andrea Brighenti’s (2010) study of visibility as a social category suggests that it begets both recognition and deprivation in ways that, respectively, relate to disturbance and control. Recognition offers visibility as a way to grow empathy while deprivation signals depriving power of the other through creating hierarchies. The governmentality of visibility is thus usefully linked to ‘practices of freedom and control’ that (Griggs et al., 2014) make up democratic regimes (see Table 1). Practices of freedom indicate modifying practices within set institutional rules, contesting procedures and channels, and exiting relations of domination or contesting them via enacting strategies and struggles for new formations outside of institutional norms. Such moves require new recognitions of empathetic others that act in concert to make governing anew. Yet, such formations can then conduct conduct in ways more aligned to control.

Table 1.

Visibility and governance.

	Deprivation of power	Provision of power
Griggs et al. (2014)	Practices of governance that centre and control language for coordination conduct of conduct habitualising thinking processes	Practices of freedom that decentre and disturb modifying practices from within rules contesting institutional procedures and channels strategies and struggles for new formations
Brighenti (2010)	Visibility of control	Visibility of recognition
Brighenti (2010)	purposeful and contextual asymmetrisation and hierarchisation	for being ratified by others as humans endowed with equal dignity

Although seemingly oppositional, these categories are linked in fundamental ways. Brighenti correctly realises that in practice, the two poles of ‘recognition’ and ‘deprivation’ are not dichotomous. As he sees it, while human emancipation through the dignity of recognition is ‘the political undertaking of modernity, control is its omnipresent socio-technical counterpart’ (Brighenti, 2010: 148). In the case of the ICIJ, negotiations between new recognitions of elements across the globe acted productively in concert to create a new apparatus of control: digital leaks were manipulated into actionable regimes of communication and governmental practice.

The ICIJ then, shows a negotiation between recognition and control that uses new forms of visibility to both empower novel governors/ment and disempower newly created subjects of disclosure. The apparatus emerges to transcend specific relationships in time and space and become a proto-institution of leaking, disclosing and controlling the network society. This proto-institution de-centres governing through contesting incumbent institutional procedures and channels, while materialising strategies and struggles towards new formations. These new formations are designed to conduct conduct in new ways and in relation to new and evolving political needs. So, following Brighenti, we might say the political affordances of the ICIJ rely on two movements of visibility management. The first can provide solutions for informational problems by creating capacity to act in concert through shared recognition of data, subjects and self-empowerment. The second move constrains what has been made visible by setting new frameworks that generate and limit opportunities in a society built atop digital affordances of communication and government.

Conclusion

This study found value in the language of communicative and political affordance to accurately signal technology–user–society relations and to provide a method of inquiry that aligns media theory with frames of governmentality. Aligning the planes of communicative and political affordance with Foucault’s original description of apparatus may offer researchers a transferrable method for future inquiries. We exampled this approach through the case of the ICIJ disrupting what is visible to enable new determinants of what is expected to be governable. The ICIJ’s communicative affordances include digital data transit (from hard drives to encryption), algorithmic sorting and sharing, and the distributed cognitive capacity of the ICIJ. These opened potentialities of reconfiguring the (public) visibility of vast tracts of financial information and in so doing, the ways in which their linked subjects conduct their conduct. We sought to make visible the links of communicative and political affordances to apparatus, link apparatus to routinised proto-institutions, and link these proto-institutions’ governing potentials of disturbance and control to theories of visibility and democratic governing. We hope this article opens future research on affordances and ICT apparatuses that more fully relay the relational potentials imagined and materialised from media technology through to society.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

ORCID iD

Luke Heemsbergen

Author biography

Luke Heemsbergen researches the intersection of digital communication and political life. His interests and publications consider the radical decentralisation of communication technologies and practice and their socio-political effect. This includes focus on shifts in democratic governance through digital leaks and radical transparency to the social-political implications of the distributed 3D printing design and use. His recent publications include research articles in New Media and Society, the International Journal of Communication and Surveillance and Society, with white papers funded by Australia’s peak consumer communications body. Previously to academic life, Luke was a public servant at Global Affairs Canada. Luke lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his family and strong coffee.

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