Designing hues of transparency and democracy after WikiLeaks: vigilance to vigilantes and back again

This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typology and offering a theoretical explanation towards how political affordances are formed in digital democracy. Specifically, the article relates theories of affordance to an informing/deforming design process to explain how political positions are created in new media apparatus. The article traces iterations of WikiLeaks from 2006 to 2011, as well as derivative projects of radical transparency that existed in 2012 and 2013.