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LIT-1342: From access and transparency to refusal: Three responses to algorithmic governance

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1041) in full, from the publisher's open-access PDF; worth reading for its sorting of responses to algorithmic governance into access and inclusion, transparency, and refusal, and for the point that access and transparency are bidirectional, inclusion giving the powerful access to the included and transparency being demanded of the governed (THEORY-857). Read it knowing that it is a conceptual argument with illustrative cases, mostly Australian, that it shows no comparison of outcomes between the responses, and that it favours refusal on argument rather than evidence.
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Tagssociety-and-governance
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1041 — James, Hynes, Whelan, Dreher and Humphry — From access and transparency to refusal
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-857 — Remedies for algorithmic governance offered as access or as transparency can run against the people they are meant to serve: inclusion in a data system also gives its operators access to the included, and transparency can be demanded of the governed while the governing system stays opaque, so what an access or transparency remedy does depends on who is made visible to whom

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James, A., Hynes, D., Whelan, A., Dreher, T. & Humphry, J. (2023). From access and transparency to refusal: Three responses to algorithmic governance. Internet Policy Review 12(2). doi:10.14763/2023.2.1691.

Read 2026-10-21 in full (NOTE-1041).

Key takeaways

  • Three responses. Access and inclusion, transparency, and refusal, presented as “a dialogue rather than a chronology”.
  • Bidirectional. “Access is however bidirectional, and access ‘down’ for powerful players is politically consequential”. Under Robo-debt, transparency was demanded of welfare recipients (THEORY-857).
  • Refusal is collective and “not reducible to voluntaristic forms of exit”. It is also weakest where people depend on government.

Why this is here

A25 offered it as “a counterweight to the temptation to treat greater legibility or transparency as necessarily desirable”: “This literature asks whether subjects should always be required to participate in the legibility regime in the first place.” Bears on TERM-064 and CLAIM-403.

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