The Transparency Society: Byung-Chul Han on What Social Media is Doing to Us

There aren't many things that pretty much everyone agrees on. We live in a world divided over countless issues. And yet there's one message you'll find on almost everyone's lips, from the most ardent conservative to the most virulent social reformer: there is something deeply wrong with social media.

It's been blamed for the rise in mental health issues among young people, political polarization, and the loneliness that seems to stalk modern life wherever it turns. Despite this, we don't often think about the philosophy behind social media. Why, at a fundamental level, can it be so harmful? How does a series of pictures and words presented by an algorithm wreak such destruction on the human psyche?

I've been reading Byung-Chul Han, a Korean-German philosopher who has been quietly dissecting the pathologies of modern life. I started with The Burnout Society—which explains why we're exhausted despite having more freedom than any generation before us. But it's his analysis of what he calls the "transparency society" that really clicked for me.

A few weeks ago, I deleted Instagram. The reasons were simple: I was drowning in information—most of it useless. I'm building my startup NeoSapien right now, and I wanted to focus. My relationships with my girlfriend, friends, and family matter to me, and I realized that mindless scrolling was competing with that. I wanted to simplify. To consume only high-quality content where people have put real effort in—long-form podcasts, books, articles. Things that reward attention rather than fragment it.

But there was something else. I'd noticed people sharing increasingly intimate moments on social media—vulnerable emotional exchanges, private conversations, personal struggles—all offered up for public consumption. Something about it felt off to me, though I couldn't articulate why. Han gave me the language.

The Society of Exhibition

In philosophy, we usually distinguish between intrinsic value (something valuable in itself) and extrinsic value (value derived from relation to other things). Han draws a subtly different distinction: between private value and exhibition value.

Private value depends simply on a thing's existence. A sacred relic in the Catholic faith has private value—it's venerated just for being. Many important relics are only displayed a few times a year. They're kept hidden. Simply to be in their presence is considered valuable.

Exhibition value is different. It's a particular kind of extrinsic value where something is prized for the attention it garners. A publicity stunt's value isn't in the act itself—it's in how many eyeballs it captures. Exhibition value is the currency of the attention economy.

Han observes that we've become increasingly focused on exhibition value to the exclusion of other forms. This is part of what he means by "transparency"—a simultaneous abolition of privacy and a flattening of complexity. A transparent society demands that everything can and should be known and observed. But it refuses to engage with things it cannot directly observe—like the depths and intricacies of human mental states.

The problem isn't that exhibition value exists. Theater directors care about audience numbers. Authors want readers. That's fine. The problem is when we start relating to ourselves through exhibition value.

I heard about someone who would take down a post on Instagram if it didn't get a certain number of likes within an hour. In a small way, that's acknowledging the primacy of exhibition value above any other metric. The content becomes just a means to the end of gaining attention. Exhibition value is the goal; everything else is subordinated to it.

The wisest thinkers on wellbeing have consistently warned against placing our measures of personal value on things we cannot control. In Stoic philosophy, Epictetus divided the world into what's internal and external—we only control the internal. In early Theravada Buddhism, we're encouraged to develop internal resources large enough to absorb the cruelty of the world. Boethius said anything can be taken from us except the functioning of our mind.

But other people's attention is patently not in our control. When we judge ourselves by exhibition value, we're placing our worth in the hands of a nebulized, abstract form of attention from people we've never met.

Forced Intimacy and No Intimacy

Existentialist philosophers placed a high premium on authenticity—being true to your own values, freedom, and sense of meaning rather than denying them through bad faith.

But "authenticity" has taken on a different meaning. It's increasingly used not to encourage us to relate to ourselves more fully, but to bare more and more of our private thoughts and feelings in the public sphere. The trend of people taking deeply vulnerable emotional moments—either alone or with loved ones—and immediately sharing them with the world at large.

This is what had been bothering me. Han helped me understand why.

Here's Han's counterintuitive insight: when we expose too much of ourselves in public, we simultaneously develop a sort of forced intimacy with strangers while damaging our ability to connect with the people closest to us.

When you take a vulnerable, fragile part of yourself and assess its value by the attention and scrutiny of others, you're not building connection. You're creating content. You're turning your deepest feelings into exhibition pieces for parasocial consumption—engagement from people who can scroll past with no consequence.

Think about what makes relationships meaningful. There's a dance of revealing and concealing. You choose what to share. That choice matters. The act of opening up to someone specific—not the entire internet—is what creates intimacy.

Han calls this interplay between revealing and hiding the "eroticism" of interpersonal connections. It maintains our agency. We consciously decide who we're going to open up to, to what extent, and why. The demand for total transparency—the naked display of our whole self to the whole world—robs us of this freedom.

Aristotle said it simply: if someone is a friend to everyone, they are a friend to no one. Han extends this: if you're open to everyone, you're truly intimate with no one.

At its most extreme, Han fears this turns into a kind of self-destructive narcissism—where everything we do serves not others, not even really ourselves, but this strange exhibition we've created to absorb attention from people we don't actually care about.

The Uninformative Deluge

In Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Library of Babel," we're presented with a kind of hell: an infinite library containing every possible combination of letters that will fit in a 410-page book. The inhabitants aren't lacking data. They have quantity in droves. What they lack is any way to make sense of it—to sort through it in a way that brings what matters to the surface.

Many of them go mad.

This was part of why I wanted to step back. I was drowning in information, most of it noise. For much of human history, information was scarce. Books were rare, literacy rates low. Now we have the opposite problem: constant bombardment with far more than we could ever process, increasingly centralized around social media platforms.

Han has several concerns about this. First, within a culture of transparency, more information is considered better—often without regard to quality or utility. This incentivizes mining as much data as possible about people. It rewards producing shocking information that gets clicks rather than valuable content.

Second, the excess of information makes it impossible to give each piece its requisite level of care, attention, and respect. In his other works, Han talks about the value of dwelling on single ideas for a long time—the gentle, exploratory concentration that emerges when we let our mind slow down and occupy itself with a single object.

But if it's more profitable to have our attention flitting from one shallow piece of information to the next, we're robbed of this experience. We only have time to view something, make a snap judgment, and move on. The flow of information deprives us of deeper engagements—insight, trained intuition—because we're never given enough time to reach those levels of thought.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard predicted this in the 1840s. He said an excess of information would create just as much confusion over what is true as a lack of information would. Without the ability to establish what's reliable or important, people would retreat to whatever position seems cleverest or most socially advantageous. We'd adopt an aesthetic view on information—prizing quantity itself rather than truth.

And then there are the algorithms. They don't just show us information—they show us information we want to see. We become intellectual narcissists, trapped in feedback loops that reinforce existing beliefs while serving up opposition only in forms we're primed to ridicule. We're not exposed to other views except when we've implicitly encouraged it with our prior behavior.

Transparency and Control

"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."

This is the general logic behind surveillance. Han traces it back to Rousseau, who suggested citizens should be totally open because they shouldn't be doing anything that would attract censure. Plato had the ruling classes of his ideal city live in one communal building so they could all keep an eye on one another. The assumption: morally upstanding people wouldn't mind being observed.

This surveillance used to be the domain of the state—Stalin's NKVD, Robespierre's Committee for Public Safety. The archetype is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon: a prison where a single central guard can watch any prisoner at any time, so everyone must act as if they're being watched constantly.

Han says this is no longer a complete description of how surveillance works. Much of the data we give is handed over semi-voluntarily—the price of using platforms. And the underlying logic has shifted. It's not primarily about morality or political order anymore. It's economic. We're not surveilled to be thrown in prison. We're surveilled to be sold things.

But here's the crucial shift: we've decentralized surveillance. We now walk around with recording technology that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. And we use it on each other. People recorded and posted online without consent, with the implication they're worthy of scorn. We are not just surveilled from a central position—we surveil one another.

Any objection comes up against the same old totalitarian mantra: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." Only now it's not coming from a secret service agent. It's coming from a teenager on TikTok.

We are denied privacy on a massive scale, but we're given the consolation of being one of the prison guards as well as one of the prisoners. And it's this social pressure to be open—to not just be surveilled but to consent to being surveilled—that marks the situation as different.

What Transparency Destroys

Han argues that extreme transparency erodes something precious: trust.

Think about it. Trust requires uncertainty. You trust someone precisely because you don't know everything about them. You're choosing to believe they won't harm you despite incomplete information. Trust is a leap.

In a culture of total transparency, trust becomes unnecessary. Why trust when you can verify? But when trust becomes unnecessary, it atrophies. We lose the capacity for it.

Han suggests that rather than promoting trust, transparency is only necessary when we feel unable to trust. Too much information breeds suspicion about what someone would do if they weren't being observed—which reinforces the motivation for surveillance in the first place. A vicious cycle.

This matters because trust is the foundation of freedom. We allow others to be free because we trust they won't use that freedom to harm us. Without trust, we need control. And control without end is tyranny.

What is the freedom to surveil compared with the freedom of not being surveilled? It's like being told you're about to get beaten up, but not to worry—in return you also get to beat someone else up. A recipe for resentment, anxiety, and paranoia. The only people who benefit are the spiteful and those making money from it.

What Now?

Han spends more time crafting diagnoses than solutions. But if we take something away from his work, it might be this: the axiomatic goods of a transparency society—that more information is always better, that something should be judged by its ability to retain attention, that privacy is inherently suspicious—these should be held up to careful scrutiny.

We should be hesitant about accepting them wholesale. Consider them as we would any other sweeping statement about how society should function. Carefully weigh the pros and cons before giving our assent.

For me, stepping back from Instagram was part of this. Not a dramatic statement—just a quiet recognition that the trade-offs weren't working. I want to focus on building NeoSapien. I want depth with the people I care about, not surface with everyone. I want to consume content where someone has put real effort in, not algorithmically optimized engagement bait.

I'm still on LinkedIn and Twitter for work. But the relationship has changed. I'm more aware of what these platforms are optimizing for, and it's not my wellbeing.

Maybe that's where it starts. Understanding the trap. Seeing clearly what we're exchanging for what. And then making deliberate choices about which parts of the transparency society we accept—and which parts we refuse.