F01: From Agreed Transparency to Engineered Opacity

Bottom Line

The decades-long march toward radical transparency, driven by technology, regulation and social expectations, is reversing. Both governments and sophisticated private actors have discovered that strategic opacity generates critical advantages. Nation-states lead this transformation by restricting economic data, through obscuring locations in which they are invested and information about important activities and facilities. Relaxed reporting requirements allow organisations to systematically engineer information asymmetries through technical obfuscation and jurisdictional arbitrage. Shifting from transparent disclosure to curated invisibility restructures how power operates. When data becomes a strategic asset, its absence becomes a weapon. 

Go Deeper

• Operating in Statistical Darkness — 10F Substack — 29.3.26