The Ones Who Had Nothing to Hide

The standard defense goes like this: I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear. Every GPS location, every cashless purchase, every photo posted and message sent—all fine, because I’m a decent person, and decent people don’t need secrets. The logic sounds reasonable right up until you examine what it actually proposes: that privacy is a service provided to the guilty, and that volunteering your transparency is a form of moral hygiene. The criminals and terrorists need digital concealment. The rest of us are above all that.

Edward Snowden surfaced in 2013, revealed that the surveillance apparatus was vaster and more indiscriminate than anyone had officially admitted, and the main thing that happened afterward was that everyone kept using Facebook and started posting more. The knowledge didn’t change the behavior—partly because the threat felt abstract, partly because the alternative felt like social death. Daniel Šuljić’s animated short film Transparency takes the logic of voluntary openness and renders it literally. In his world, the people with nothing to hide are physically transparent—glass-skinned, their interiors permanently visible. Opacity is suspicious. If you’re not see-through, you must be concealing something. You must be criminal.

It’s a precise film—the kind of precision short films can afford when they commit to a single idea and don’t flinch. Šuljić plays it completely straight: this is just how the world works, and people move through it with the same resigned compliance we use when accepting cookie notices we haven’t read. What lingers is how clean and legible the transparent world looks. Ordered. Trustworthy. Everyone exactly who they appear to be. The horror isn’t that it looks dystopian. The horror is that it looks appealing, and that the distance between that world and this one is shorter than I’d like to admit.