Transparency, a paradigm for governing sociality, has come under extreme pressure. As power increasingly shifts from representative to performative modes, it reorganises the strata of society by creating divisions that affect bodies, minds and affiliations along quite different lines as to how class and consent have been contextualised historically. The logics of techno-capitalism, with its hyper-competitive monopolisation of the platform, thus rendered sovereign, have become a threat to the body politic – it not only restrains agency, but carves out new forms of exploitation, segregation and governmentality. Hence, the techno-capitalist platform constitutes the next crisis of democratic resolution that exacerbates, and exceeds, the non-transparency which capitalist interests were able to exert in pre-data platform times. The complex and intricate operations and machinations between humans and bots result in new data-driven resolutions that usually constrain, but can also resolve our perception, cognition and appreciation.

Proposals to reconstitute transparency by reengineering data access and governing (big data) algorithms often resort to regulatory solutions that suggest, amongst other things, a new professional class of algorithmists or corporate digital responsibility, as ventilated by Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, whose Facebook empire is facing an antitrust suit at the time of writing (December 2020). However, transparency governed via US-Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (‘sunlight is the best of disinfectants,’ 1933) and policies following Linus’ Law (‘Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,’ 1999)[1] often take a too linear bona fide approach. Obscuring transparency, visibility and information access for proprietary interests is no trivial offence or question of negotiation. It has rather become the new rule because in today’s hypercompetitive world, where margins narrow and monopolisation is in the ascendant, non-transparency is tantamount to leveraging against adverse selection and thus a fight for survival to the last ‘man’ standing. Even a break-up of monoliths like Facebook, Google or Amazon would arguably not achieve the kind of transparency sought for standards of democratic accountability. Rather, it would amount to the restoration of neoliberal competition, a position complicated when one takes into account the geopolitical power struggles over who is going to define the politics and economies of data and urban platforms in the 21st century.

The pitfalls of a linear conception of transparency fall into two main categories. One is characterised by Wolfie Christl and Sarah Spiekermann as follows: ‘Transparency is not provided but avoided’ by ‘ambiguous business practices […] and even misleading rhetoric is used to trick people into one sided and disadvantageous data contracts’ (in Networks of Control). The second issue relates to the depth and scope of algorithmic automation ‘when a system is too complex to understand, transparency will not help us – not even with the most skilled algorithmist to explain what is going on’ (Freek Bomhof). What we are confronted with is a non-linear system that limits transparency (‘The ways in which data collection and processing are accomplished are opaque and exclusive,’ Hacker and Petkova).

But what if the problem was not only the way hypercompetitive systems operate, but our understanding of transparency in the first place? We can describe transparency as a term that is commonly conceived as a prerequisite for resolution. Under black box conditions, in which benefits and profits of data exploitation are privatised, however, this strong relation is shaken and ruptured. In fact, it is ‘colonised by the logic of secrecy,’ as Frank Pasquale argues in The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Moreover, transparency is a rather passive idea, a concept without tools to enforce it. We might, therefore, need to take a different route to challenging platform non-transparency.

To this end, the approach proposed here shifts the attention from transparency to resolution. In contrast to the former, I argue that the term resolution offers a rich semantic (and semiotic) field – ranging from perception, visualisation and cognition to knowledge production and problem solving to decision making and public (regulatory) action – that can be conceived as a toolset: The notion of resolution involves technologies that engineer thinking and affecting, render probabilities, orient attractions and forge applications. Resolution is not restricted to technical appropriation, such as a device for perceiving (previously undiscovered worlds), a visualisation tool, the setting of a laboratory, big data evaluations, algorithms that offer and promote commodities we wish for, or the like. Neither is it merely a cultural technique of conciliation and consultation to craft compromise and compensation. It is a basic category: its trajectory is towards openings and new perspectives, but at the same time it can be reversed to map the scales of new hierarchies.

Even though the means and consequences of resolution agency might turn out to be as ambivalent, and as radical,[2] as the capitalisation of secretive black boxes and their power drive towards platform sovereignty, activating resolution against black box non-transparency exceeds Linus’s Law or the design for accountability. Rather, such an aesthetics of resolution proceeds from what it holds as a techno-capitalist fact: resolution as visibility and decision-making has been severed from resolution as cognition and knowledge. Instead of merely critiquing this breach, enhancing and activating resolution across the whole range of its meanings facilitates access (mainly as perception) to the inner workings of the black box and can thus serve as an entry point for collective/civic agency.

In other words, we need to leverage the conceptual breadth of the concept of resolution for a multidimensional and non-linear practice of civic agency. However, as legal frameworks protecting the proprietary black box prevent resolution via the usual, above mentioned regulatory actions, we need another agent that moves around barriers of entry. Accordingly, the move from an aesthetics to a poietics of resolution – that is, from perceiving to making and consequently from critique to insurrection – requires a corresponding conception of the agent producing and carrying through this escalation against the critical mass of non-disclosure and power asymmetry. In order to push resolution to the level of accountability, we are in need of an attractor that is both inside and outside the proprietary black box. As platforms extract competitive monopolies by implementing access hierarchies that fold in a new ontology of resolution, their reiterated power can only be addressed by the performative resonance of a counteragent who not only knows the violence expertly but takes the consequence of exposing herself. I call this attractor-agent the figure of the renegade.

Merriam Webster defines ‘renegade’ as a ‘person who leaves one group, religion, etc., and joins another that opposes it,’ or, as ‘someone or something that causes trouble and cannot be controlled.’ In our case, the ‘composition’ of the renegade is that of a traitor who denounces loyalty to the black box and transgresses her system’s unwritten laws of complicity and secrecy. At the same time, she becomes educator of the demos, the general public that is kept in a state of non-transparency by hypercompetitive platform monopolies. Providing material from undisclosed or classified sources, the renegade is the principal expert witness who can establish degrees of transparency by procuring otherwise unavailable evidence of information asymmetry (to name but a few, most famously Edward Snowden on the political level; the anonymous Google employee on the Nightingale Project; Christopher Wylie on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, Haim Bodek on automated finance).

Such resolution does not come without risk. Hence, this radical initiative is ambivalent and vulnerable. But this uprising – a marginal and precarious act more promising than the cry for transparency – can deeply destabilise the techno-capitalist hegemony built on discretion and opacity. Here, resolution is not meant as calculable consensus in terms of probability – in other words, as risk management. Instead, resolution points to something incalculable; in the instance of a renegade act even to engaging with the impossible – taking risk beyond one’s horizon (often unwittingly) and thus out of proportion. The renegade is exposed to sheer limitless consequences – impossible personal risk – but her act of civil courage makes resolution possible. Disengaging with the capitalist infrastructure, which renders critique ineffective by exploiting or externalising it, she enters the realm of revolutionary negation. Such renegade activism might seem at the margin of platform techno-capitalism, but it is in fact right at its core; it is the insurrection that unlocks the black box. Leveraged by solidary alliances, it can access the wealth pre-empted by the capital-state nexus, finance conglomerates and data platforms and transform the acquiescent conditions of social automation and (digitised) labour. In a passage that reverberates with how this text reads leverage, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write in The Undercommons.

Credit can be restored, restructured, rehabilitated, but debt forgiven is always unjust, always unforgiven. Restored credit is restored justice and restorative justice is always the renewed reign of credit, a reign of terror, a hail of obligations to be met, measured, meted, endured. Justice is only possible where debt never obliges, never demands, never equals credit, payment, payback. Justice is possible only where it is never asked, in the refuge of bad debt, in the fugitive public of strangers not communities, of undercommons not neighbourhoods, among those who have been there all along from somewhere. To seek justice through restoration is to return debt to the balance sheet and the balance sheet never balances. It plunges toward risk, volatility, uncertainty, more credit chasing more debt, more debt shackled to credit.[3]

At the moment of her ‘betrayal’, the renegade (who in many cases takes risk in an attempt to restore the ‘balance sheet’) plunges into debt that is not forgiven, into credit that will not be restored. At the same time, the renegade act points to a destination where resistance is inside rather than outside a system. In fact, the figure of the renegade constitutes an act that proceeds from mere dissent (critique within a system) to concrete insurrection (an act of renunciation). The renegade is an expert acting from a point of no return, a risk taker at the point of massive crisis. By speaking out and sharing proprietary data or classified information, she not only discloses what was excluded from public debate but also manifests noncompliance as an act of radically shifting resolution.[4] The ambivalence, the perils and the counterperformativity of the renegade surface in condensed form in the experience of Haim Bodek, a financial markets whistleblower:

The whistleblower syndrome is kind of a pattern. The whistleblower says that ‘this is obviously wrong and I’m going to call it out’ and then when I call it out everyone else is going to realise that it’s wrong and it’s just going to get fixed right away. What he doesn’t realise is that everybody knows about it. […] And when you realise that that’s what whistleblowing is – that you’re making people go through the uncomfortable process of looking at themselves […] – you realise you’re not the hero, you’re not bringing new information to the table. You’re the guy pointing out the thing that no one wants to see, that everybody knows about. […] It doesn’t change until the whistleblower does it.[5]

The figure of the renegade is as ambiguous as the world she inhabits. But this is not to the disadvantage of the concept: in the midst of (fabricated) noise, the system accidentally yields information; exploiting the event of sectoral asymmetry resolves societal blindness. The renegade act – essentially a violation of current custom, rule or law – produces, or contributes, a host of viable resolution materials across the semantic field of the term: visualisation, discrimination, cognition, transparency, decision. Whatever the impulse, each act perforates an autonomy that is otherwise decreasingly conceded to natural persons. Hence, the renegade act reclaims autonomy against all odds against platform capitalist and data driven forms of sovereignty. That said, it does not constitute political autonomy with a capital A – an autonomy that bestows rights or vests powers. To the contrary, it constitutes an act that attracts serious consequences and might fail. The renegade is an extremely precarious body, as history has shown unmistakably.

The normalising enclosure, virtualisation and commodification of data by proprietary platforms lead to a constitution of sovereignty over citizenship where the virtual, bot-assembled stake in the subject increasingly separates it from her physical body. What is looming on our political horizon is the body’s disappearance from the social contract and from status, rights and autonomy. Hence, if we expand the figure of the renegade to a notion of collective solidarity in the sense of creative voices, practices and materiality, we might be able to conceive renegade activism as a forceful strategy to counter techno-capitalism. This step from an aesthetics to a politics of resolution could loosen the techno-capitalist grip on the platform, a basically collective space, which it manufactures from the absolute distance it invests in (knowledge does not resolve, it dissolves into what it cannot know but what it can intensify as price).

Together, the making of resolution and the renegade act are an assemblage without creditor, a social bond of mutual debt against information asymmetry and noise. They trace aesthetic (what we see), poietic (what we make) as well as political (how to apply these to resolution as decision-making) consequences. Here, solidarity means either to become or to accompany the traitor-educator. The renegade as a revolutionary figure ‘re-maps’ the playing field from the inside; she is not only invested in research and analysis (critique from the non-transparent outside); in fact, she resists the performative speech asserted by black box data evaluation and decision-making by attempting to change course from within. Renegade activism, on the other hand, stands for counter-institutions whose collectives (activists, experts, artists, nonhuman agents) share risk and act in solidarity to enhance public resolution across the whole gamut of the term’s semantic and political meaning. The autonomy gained is ambivalent, marginal, in debt and in a state of constant flux and highly volatile if not outright dangerous. At the same time, it generates counter-tactics of infiltration that create collective value and produce knowledge.

Renegade activism is a case of offering speculative platforms of moving affiliation (rather than conformity exploited by the institution of platform capitalism); a case of strengthening the desire to risk and participate in other spaces of ownership and autonomy that exist side by side and in flux. In which the future is seen with differentiating, envisioning and resolving eyes through the folds that distort the playing field; (and maybe not unlike Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s fugitive folds of bad debt, ‘which is to say real debt, the debt that cannot be repaid, the debt at a distance, the debt without creditor, the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt. Excessive debt, incalculable debt, debt for no reason, debt broken from credit, debt as its own principle’?)[6] In short, renegade activism is committed to mutually moving through low-res and high-res instances across the whole gamut of resolution’s consequential – and hence not only technological or economic but eminently artistic, philosophical and socio-political – meanings.