The Radical Transparency Collective
If They Watch You, You Watch Them.
Not everyone wants less surveillance. Some want more.
The Radical Transparency Collective argues that the Transparency Bargain's problem isn't surveillance — it's asymmetry. Corporations observe everyone. No one observes corporations. The solution isn't privacy. It's reciprocity. Their platform: universal access to all telemetry, individual and corporate alike.
The platform is philosophically elegant and practically impossible. Corporate data security costs ¢4.7 billion annually — more than the Opacity Movement's total operating budget over five years. But the RTC has reframed the debate: the question is no longer "should we have privacy?" but "who gets to be opaque?"
The answer — the rich — is the same answer the Glass District's architecture provides.
Doctrine
Three positions that share one premise: the injustice is not being watched. The injustice is watching without being watched back.
Asymmetry Is the Injustice
Privacy is a luxury the powerful hoard. Your boss can purchase your behavioral model, but you cannot purchase theirs. BehaviorExchange trades your future, but you cannot trade BehaviorExchange's. Making surveillance universal — not abolished — eliminates the power asymmetry.
Reciprocity as Equality
If Nexus Dynamics can see your cognitive load, you should see their board deliberations. If the Spire can model your purchasing behavior, you should be able to model their pricing algorithms. Equal visibility. Equal vulnerability.
Survivable Transparency
Lens proves by example: three years of continuous broadcast, still functional, still effective. The claim that privacy is essential is disproven by her existence. Visibility only hurts when it's enforced on some and denied to others.
Field Report: Lens's Public Feed
Observation notes, monitoring station intercept, 2184.
Lens's public broadcast feed is mostly mundane — the cognitive texture of breakfast, commuting, meetings. Subscribers report that after a few days, the mundanity becomes the point. A life lived without privacy barriers is recognizably, banally human. The radical act is not the content but the continuity.
Approximately 4,000 people subscribe. Most check in sporadically. A few hundred watch consistently. They describe the experience as strangely calming — proof that the worst-case scenario of total transparency is a person eating cereal and thinking about logistics.
The feed's power is not in what it reveals. It's in what it normalizes. Three years of uninterrupted broadcast, and Lens is still alive, still leading, still functional. Every day the feed continues is another day the privacy-is-essential argument weakens.
Points of Inquiry
The Infrastructure Gap
Reciprocity is philosophically correct and materially impossible. Corporate data security costs ¢4.7 billion annually. The RTC's annual operating budget is less than what Nexus spends on cafeteria surveillance. How do you force open a vault when the vault's locks cost more than your entire organization?
The Reframe
Before the RTC, the surveillance debate had two positions: more privacy or less. The RTC introduced a third: equal visibility. The question shifted from "should we be watched?" to "who gets to be opaque?" The answer exposed more than any data leak could.
The Lens Problem
One person broadcasting voluntarily proves transparency is survivable for one person. It does not prove that universal mandatory transparency wouldn't be weaponized against the vulnerable. The powerful have lawyers, PR teams, context-management departments. The Dregs have none of these. Equal visibility may produce unequal consequences.
Notable Members
Lens
Leader — Continuous BroadcasterThree years of uninterrupted neural broadcast. Every thought, every meal, every strategy session — public. Her subscribers number approximately 4,000. Her critics call it exhibitionism. Her supporters call it the most powerful argument against privacy essentialism ever constructed. She calls it Tuesday.
▲ Restricted
The Witness Protocol Split
The RTC's founders were Witness Protocol operators who grew frustrated with passive recording. The Protocol records corporate activity but never publishes proactively — evidence is released strategically, on the Protocol's timeline. The RTC founders believed strategic timing was strategic gatekeeping. Records should be immediate, universal, and public. The Witnesses disagreed. The split was civil but permanent.
The RTC still uses Witness Protocol infrastructure for some of its monitoring. The Protocol has not revoked access. Whether this is tacit support or strategic patience is an open question.
Nexus Dynamics Response Assessment
The RTC's reciprocity demands specifically target Nexus: if Nexus can model individual cognitive load through neural interfaces, individuals should be able to model Nexus board decisions through equivalent access. Nexus has not responded publicly. Their internal security budget increased 23% in the quarter following the RTC's founding — the largest single-quarter increase in five years.
Corporations do not increase security budgets in response to threats they consider irrelevant. The budget increase is itself a disclosure — the kind the RTC would appreciate.
Diplomatic Posture
The Witness Protocol
Origin FactionThe RTC grew out of the Witness Protocol. The Protocol records corporate activity passively; the RTC wants to make those records universal and public. Parent and child, with different theories of change.
The Opacity Movement
Philosophical RivalSame diagnosis — asymmetric surveillance harms people. Opposite prescription. The Opacity Movement wants sovereignty: the right to be unseen. The RTC wants reciprocity: the right to see back. The argument is ongoing and productive.
The Transparency Bargain
Primary TargetThe Bargain's problem isn't surveillance but one-directional extraction. The RTC doesn't oppose the Bargain's premise — only its asymmetry. Make it mutual or make it nothing.
Nexus Dynamics
AdversaryTarget of reciprocity demands. If Nexus can see your cognitive load, you should see their board deliberations. Nexus has not responded publicly. Their security budget responded for them.