You can’t ask for something that’s already yours. As soon as something that belongs to you is placed on the other side of a request, it stops being yours exactly as much as whoever you’re requesting it from has the power to refuse you. So why is it exactly that we have to “request” public records? The question becomes even more pointed once we consider the power these records can contain. We have public records so that officials don’t try to rob us behind our backs, so why have we created a situation where we’re essentially “requesting” a bunch of crooks hand us the keys to their jail cells? If someone asked you for a bunch of evidence of a felony you committed, how would you treat that request? These questions swipe the dust off the idea of a right. The answers that lay in wait on the other side of them are proof that we need to open up what our rights really mean or our partial understanding will be mixed and matched to leave us standing empty handed at the most crucial moments of our lives.
“Ten gets twenty, twenty gets you forty, find the lucky lady… Oh! Sorry buddy. No rights for you today.”
A lot has been made of how language is used in America. The Department of War has become the Department of Defense. We identify people of all stripes by the names and terms they’ve chosen for themselves. Enough education puts a doctor title in front of your name. Yet no one finds it odd that we make requests for our rights. If language defines the social situation that a conversation can begin from, then this is a starting point that’s drifted much too far from where a democracy needs it to be. Popsicles are something you request. Rights are something you exercise.
This is not a semantic problem. It’s a cultural state of affairs in which people with evidence of their own wrongdoing think they’re being asked to do favors for the unwashed masses that want to see it. The Public Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act are the specific laws that provide a path for public records to meet individual members of the public, and all throughout those laws, attempts by the public to exercise their right to see records are referred to as “requests”.
It’s become increasingly clear in recent years that public records can be bombshells. The struggles that people like Dr. Mark Skidmore and his team of researchers at Michigan State University had to go through while discovering what turned out to be trillions of dollars in financial misconduct in the public records of the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, have made it clear that we need to change the way the conversation around these records can begin. The work of Dr. Skidmore and the MSU team has revealed a widespread culture of corruption in the employees of government agencies, who will be in a position to provide or withhold the records of the public. These people need to be reminded that we’re not asking them to do their jobs. We’re not requesting a democracy. These are our rights and it’s time they get some exercise.
One of the first reports on the MSU team’s work
We can feel it when our rights are violated, and the feeling is so immediate that it can be tricky to spell out exactly what’s gone wrong. Getting punched in the face, getting robbed, these are rights being violated in real time. We know these things are wrong before we know anything else about them, but there’s much more to rights than what it feels like when they’re damaged. Rights are rarely spelled all the way out; after all, they’re truths we hold to be self evident. But it’s by relying on rights to evidence themselves that they’ve been twisted into something we have to request. We’ve taken our rights for granted, and while we did that they were placed behind the desks of those who’d much rather not grant them to us. If we’re going to stop requesting and start exercising our rights, then we’re going to need to know what muscles we’re flexing.
Consider the following:
Let’s say you look through a frame that’s so close to what’s on the other side of it that you can’t make out anything but the color red. If I pull back and show you that it’s a close up of an apple, then every time you look through the frame after that, you won’t see red nonsense anymore, you’ll see an apple. When this happens you’re not deducing the meaning of what you’re looking at from the impossibly limited frame you’ve been given, instead you’re using a bigger picture that I’ve shown you to connect the information in the frame according to a certain logic that lets you see what it is. Once you’ve seen where the information in the frame finally leads to, you can see the paths that information travels through it, and that organizes the image in a meaningful way.
This big picture/small picture trade off is something that’s built into the way humans look at the world. Our cultures tell us the Earth is a sphere, that a certain history produced the present, that sex produces children and so on. These bigger pictures surround every frame we look through to shape the meaning that we see. So even though we look through our eyes as individuals, what we see with them is actually a cooperative construction, a shared understanding of where appearances lead. We’re born sharing this understanding. It’s not something we can touch but that’s because it’s even more basic than any physical appendage. You can lose an arm, you can’t lose the way you look.
Small picture
Big picture
Small picture
Big picture. $500 Billion Miscalculation at HUD
This shared understanding isn’t just something we receive, it’s something we participate in. After all, people used to believe the earth was flat, that children were made by ghosts, that is to say; our bigger pictures used to look very different. Only by participating in the conversation that draws these bigger pictures did people make them into the more accurate portraits they are today. No one person or committee of people decided by itself what our biggest picture would be, instead the many perspectives we have of that bigger picture were organically able to connect themselves over time to create a more complete image. The more freely these perspectives were able to connect and balance one another, the more historical progress was achieved. The more those perspectives had to struggle against the pointless obstruction of stubborn establishments who knew they were clinging to outdated pictures, the more arduously progress has had to travel to its present location. With the benefit of a history we can look back at those who fought to hold onto the image of the earth as the center of the solar system or of the heart as an organ with no meaningful use and see the pointless suffering their stubborn ignorance inflicted.
It’s precisely this perspective we’re able to see things like the right to free speech and the right to public records through. This organic gathering of different perspectives to create more accurate big pictures over time isn’t some privilege we beg for. It’s a fact about how groups of people are able to know things. The changing of the biggest pictures there are over the course of history demands a certain humility from us and we’ve shaped that humility into a right of all people to be informed and speak their minds. The right to free speech is a lesson learned, one that recognizes that the truth is bigger than any one person. The right to information is what makes the right to free speech a productive social force. Speech is a right to build knowledge and as such it presupposes the right to information that can be built upon. The right to information and the right to free speech come together to form a collective right to communicate. Like the right to assemble, the right to communicate is a freedom we exercise together, one that protects the paths that truth can be achieved across. The truth is something that all of us create together. It’s common sense that’s been allowed to truly work itself out.
This shared drawing of bigger pictures is something so dug into what we are that it can be tricky to notice. The right to communicate wasn’t invented by academics, it’s how we recognize the place of language in a healthy society. Language is shared understanding and like any other organ in the human body of knowledge, it’s something we participate in as much as it’s something we receive. We change what words mean by using them, we change how they sound and we create new words to talk about the new layers of meaning around us. We don’t do this in isolation or with specialists, instead it’s an organic consequence of participating in life. Language is a fact about how humans interact with the world. It’s a cooperative process that evolves with meaning as it’s built.
So when we talk about the right to communicate, the right to public records, the right of a people to a democratic process, what we’re really talking about are these facts we understand about our shared relationship to knowledge. These rights are inalienable because they’re our individual points of contact with the collective body of knowledge that lives and breathes with us. We’re born with them because we’re born out of the conversation that creates this bigger picture. They can be violated the same way a finger can be cut off. The fact that people can be forcibly silenced doesn’t remove their right to speak anymore than cutting off a finger removes its belonging on the body.
There are some things we shouldn’t wait to point out.
Just like language or our idea of what the planet looks like, the law is part of our shared body of knowledge. It needs our participation to work. Just like if we were only ever spoken to but never heard, language would stop working; if we’re only ever ruled by laws but we never never have a hand in making them, then this organ in our shared body of knowledge has been crippled. The law is about how we behave. To live under it is to live through it. We shape our behavior around the law and the law shapes around how we can be expected to behave. Our rights are these acts of expectation. Of course we can speak our minds. Of course we’re connected to the money that’s been taken from us. What did you do with it? We have a right to communicate about what’s happening around us…
Reuters Reports the Department of Defense failure of its 2020 audit
We change our expectations over time because the more history we have, the better we get at expecting. But we don’t just get better without doing anything. Our expectations become more accurate because as history happens we work to understand what it means. We talk about what’s going on and we let people talk freely because our problems don’t care whether we talk about them or not. Freedom of speech is not some frivolous luxury, it’s a cultural decision to actually try and solve our problems. It’s our understanding that understanding is a verb. The story of our lives isn’t going to fall into place without us. We have to create it. We are creating it whether we like it or not so let’s think about what we’re doing. Speaking freely about what’s going on around us is how we keep our thoughts in front of our actions. It’s how we live deliberately, and at the end of the day it’s how we govern ourselves. We speak up about what’s happening around us and that speech brings us into the world. It plugs us into the shared body of knowledge and we feel that body grow and breathe with us.
Everyone is free to communicate because a big part of solving our problems is changing how we understand who and what is important. As our body of knowledge grows, the significance of information changes. We used to think the flatness we see when we look at the earth was much more significant than it actually is. Changing our minds about that significance meant accepting that there was more to the world than what we saw at first. To know the earth is a sphere is to trust your eyes less than the society that’s communicated it’s actual shape to you. That seemed impossible to the first generation of humans charged with doing it, but now it’s a mental exercise we hardly notice. This change in our relationship to what appearances mean, is a bit like the evolutionary change from fur to hair. Appearances are still important to us like hair is still important to us. They’re still at the forefront of everyday life, but we don’t live and die by them anymore. Just like clothing and shelter have reduced our reliance on fur, information and speech have reduced our reliance on appearances.
The right to communicate is the right to cut things down to size.
This break from a direct reliance on appearances is a change for the better and it’s a change that comes from communicating with each other about what we see. This change towards knowing through communication isn’t something we can opt out of, anymore than we can unthink what’s already been understood. Communication is a right because our reliance on shared conclusions over bare appearances is a fact. Communication is how our body of knowledge grows. Protecting the right to communicate is a refusal to cripple our body of knowledge. We tend to think that our rights are things a government gives to us, but rights like communication are really the conditions of social homeostasis that keep our body of knowledge living and breathing. The better they’re protected, the more we thrive. That thriving isn’t a gift of the government anymore than good health is gifted to an individual who takes care of themselves by a doctor. Our bodies of knowledge grow as our ideas grow and our ideas grow as we talk about them; comparing them with each other until we’ve formed a picture that’s bigger than any person who walks away from the discussion. We can feel it when our rights are violated because those violations are acts of violence to the body of knowledge that lives and breathes in the bodies of those who carry it on.
A man who sits in one place for too long might not even notice he’s been cuffed to his seat. This is exactly what happened as soon as our rights to public records were cuffed to requests received by those they’re supposed to hold accountable. The good news is that many public records don’t have to be requested. The Public Records Act requires that agencies who regularly spend public funds release public records of the money they’ve spent on public websites. These records can be tricky to find, but our rights are out there waiting to be exercised. The more we flex that muscle the more alive our body of knowledge will be. Progress is growth and to grow is to immerse ourselves in living. We don’t request permission to become adults. We rise to the biggest pictures we can see and exercise the meanings that flow from our perspective. These are our rights, our lives. This is our moment in history. Let’s stop requesting it and start making it count.
Several City Officials Convicted on Corruption Charges in Bell California because records of what they’d done we’re communicated to the right people.
Princess Fantastic 