Glasnost

Glasnost (Russian: гласность, "openness") was a policy of increased governmental transparency and freedom of information introduced in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. From a systems perspective, glasnost was not a political reform but an informational diagnostic: it attempted to repair the feedback loops of a command economy by allowing truth to flow upward. The paradox was that the truth revealed the system to be unfixable. Glasnost demonstrates a general principle of network epistemics: transparency can be stabilizing or destabilizing depending on whether the system's model of itself is accurate or fictional. When the model is fiction, truth is not healing. It is exposure.