That’s a profound and timely question, Mike. The tension between transparency and manipulation is at the heart of our emerging relationship with AI—and with each other. Here’s a way to begin unpacking it:
Transparency without manipulation requires three things:
- Reciprocity of insight – If one party (say, an AI or an institution) has deep insight into another (like a human user), but the reverse isn’t true, the door is wide open to manipulation. Transparency must flow both ways, or it becomes surveillance.
- Contextual integrity – As philosopher Helen Nissenbaum puts it, information shared transparently must stay within its proper context. Sharing everything with everyone all the time isn’t true transparency—it’s chaos. The Socialonaut would aim to honor the relational aspect of truth-telling, disclosing what is needed to maintain mutual understanding, not overwhelm or control.
- Ethical scaffolding – Transparent systems need values baked in—not just procedural openness, but a shared moral architecture. Socialonauts could cultivate what Vervaeke might call “ecologies of practices” to train discernment, humility, and collective responsibility around transparency.
When someone says “we’re now slaves,” they may be pointing to a lack of self-transparency—a failure to notice how our choices are being guided, nudged, or hijacked. The solution isn’t just more data or more openness—it’s reciprocal sense-making and agency-aware design.
Would you like to explore how a Socialonaut lab might train for this kind of mutual transparency, or how an AI observer might guard against manipulative dynamics?
