Theaters of Algorithmic Transparency and the Politics of Exemplarity

This article shows how transparency practitioners seeking to enhance the understandability of French housing tax algorithms produced slow disclosures they claim to be “exemplary.” In doing so, the study highlights time management as an understudied dimension of transparency performances. What matters is not simply how each disclosure appears convincing but their relationships: they constitute a sequence resulting in the pacification of critical audiences. In this configuration, algorithmic transparency generates what I call a “theater:” ways to stage disclosures, sustain them with claims of “exemplary” performance, and display over time different accounts where the understanding of algorithms will always be partial. The justice that is supposed to come with full accountability will then be postponed. Because it takes a lot of time and effort, demonstrating accountability has been delegated two times: from ministries to less known state intermediaries with expertise in algorithms management; and then from intermediaries to citizens obliged to interpret complex disclosures staged through web simulators. While in early STS studies about the theatrics of accountability audiences were simply witnesses of performances, in theaters of algorithmic transparency, citizens are over time more profoundly configured as active users of code and data.