Our right to communicate

The first right of any person in any society must be the right to communicate. Without communication there is no way to safeguard our other rights or for us to participate fully in a society. When your right to communicate is interrupted by those who would be your voice, your face or your representative, you are being subjected to the governance of another.

Horizontal governance does not mean no one gets a voice, it means everyone does. A person or group who attempts to suppress the voices of others is attempting to seize control. Official group channels are representative governance, regardless of consensus that may or may not lie behind them. A person who interprets another’s voice instead of amplifying it is assuming control over the originator.

People giving a foreign ‘face’ to a cause are standing between us. Media who pretend to write stories about groups whose voices are never heard but write almost universally through the lens of western men instead, are ensuring that all interpretations and solutions come from the same small segment of society. Wars are told from the point of view of arms dealers and politicians, disasters are interpreted by NGO’s, most issues are never covered at all. Official channels decide what will or will not be revealed and media are rewarded for their obedience by access to more official information.

New media in its current form has made this worse instead of better. Journalists write about those powerful in social media to have their stories amplified by the same people. The news – celebrity symbiosis has only escalated as writers vie for page views. We are at risk of having increasingly narrow news coverage as platforms like Twitter move to increase amplification of already powerful accounts and hide the less powerful opinions from view.

Concentric groups, knowledge bridges and epistemic communities outlined the pitfalls of celebrity replacing epistemic communities and the need for peer ranked value of expertise. It also discussed the potential scope of shunning, photoshopping and trolling to prevent all voices from being heard. As information and voice amplification become the new symbols of power, those who would assume control of society have moved to hoard voice amplification and control the message received by the public in new ways.

The pressure for marginalized groups to stay in their marginalized roles increases as does their opportunities to escape. While it was once possible to simply identify people in relation to a more powerful figure, as assistant, wife, staff, servant, serf, slave or other, the Internet provided the opportunity for all to have an equal voice free of relation to others. The backlash to this freedom has been violent.

Depending on the group, individual voices are told their message will receive greater amplification if it comes from another, the danger of speaking openly is so great they must be protected, their individual voices disrupt the harmony of consensus, or they are part of a collective and will be shunned if they dare speak with their own name. Most importantly, the free information beliefs of many groups which threaten power have been twisted to conflate credit theft with free information.

When you are told that the actions and thoughts you know were your own belong to the group or the cause and you will be punished for claiming your own voice or actions, you know you belong to a cult with a cult leader(s). Devoting all of your work to a brand that will be used to create a bloated central figure who will then be able to control the messages of everyone while dining out on ill-gotten celebrity and collecting brand donations is no different than passing all your money to the Unification Church. The cult leaders of the 1970’s demanded money; in the age of the internet they demand fame and information control. In the 1970’s anyone who did not sign all material goods over to a cult leader was called greedy and materialistic. Now anyone who does not assign all credit to the cult leader is called vain and fame-seeking. The irony and hypocrisy is seen in the multimillionaire cult leaders of the 1970’s or the internet and offline famous would-be cult leaders of today.

It is possibly pure coincidence that every movement today that threatens the powerful is taken over by those that seek to suppress individuals and control the messages which are heard. It is undeniable that as soon as those voices come under centralized control they have ceased to say anything that comes close to challenging authority. The lack of recognition for the real source of any work makes it possible for the opportunistic to claim credit and very quickly build a following with too much celebrity and power for anyone to challenge. In the case of an internet entity such as FBI informant Sabu, this can be disastrous for the gullible.

As discussed in Idea and action driven systems, it is frequently necessary or desirable for the origin of ideas or actions to be unknown. It is essential that ideas and actions branded as unknown origin remain that way and no one is ever allowed to assume credit for them either personally or under a group umbrella. It takes only the slightest glance through all past attempts at societal change to see where every group that subsumed individual credit to ‘the cause’ has ended up, from the Communist Party of China to every Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution that became the new tyrant.

To reiterate once more what was said in Idea and action driven systems, credit theft has absolutely nothing to do with free information. Credit for one’s work or ideas is the right of every person, the human dignity of societal recognition and belonging and an inherent part of their identity. There is no need to ever hide the origin of information unless the ultimate goal is to isolate them and suppress or twist their messages or use their work to glorify another.

To allow local governance and solutions, local voices must be the ones which formulate problems and create dialogue. When there is a need of emergency response of the world to local problems, we must have a way to immediately amplify local voices to a global volume. For this we do not need new media or any media at all. People who are currently faceless and voiceless do not need another to be their face and voice. We need a system where urgent local news can be collected and amplified globally when necessary, and where the people of the world decide which news is important, not official news channels or celebrity nodes.

A person who takes your idea and information to use and build upon is your collaborator, tester and colleague. A person who takes your credit or your voice is your enemy, a thief who steals your societal recognition and approval for themselves and would be your tyrant.

2013: Wishes and predictions

Here are my wishes and predictions for 2013. Have a wonderful New Year’s and may we make great progress in 2013.

Dying

Centralized media: Not just corporate media but also celebrity livestreamers and bloggers, collectives, leak platforms, book publishers, etc. Media now belongs to everyone, news will come from those it is happening to, every person will be a news outlet.

NGO’s: After centralized media, the next institutions to go should be NGO’s. Society’s challenges are for society to deal with directly. If people are in need of assistance, they can ask the world directly.

UN: See above. We can speak to each other now. In the future, epistemic communities, farmgate importing and shunning can replace UN sanctions and resolutions.

Intellectual Property: Credit must be given and compensated, but intellectual property rights must die. The sooner copyrights and patents are gone forever, the sooner we can get on with creation and health, knowledge and prosperity will be available to all.

Institutions: Officially designated institutions will eventually be replaced by open, transparent, idea and action driven systems.

Group affiliation: The root of all evil in society, the cause of wars, the justification for human rights violations. ‘Othering’ must end.

Immigration: See above. All people need the basic human right to move freely and live and work where they choose. People are not illegal.

Still here and growing

Anonymous: By any other name, Anonymous as an idea and a system of collaboration will continue to create new society.

Resource states vs corporations: Governance by user groups will take over governance by corporations, resource corporations will continue to be nationalized and then control will be fought for locally. Communities will reclaim their homes and agricultural land from corporations and states.

Twitter: for better or for worse, Twitter and other social media tools will become global society. We need to replace them with free, secure, p2p software now.

Celebrity: More powerful for more meaningless reasons than ever in history. We need to think of how to manage celebrity influence to not create a new strange oligarchy.

Paranoia and xenophobia: In all times of great change, many people panic, stockpile weapons and fear and loathe ‘others’. Hate has reached intolerable levels as we have already seen in the numbers of people happy to condone baby killng and torture.

Tolerance: will also reach unprecedented levels as we find the society we have been deprived of for so long and begin to communicate.

About to appear

Justice: Laws founded on principals for the benefit of society, consistent social contracts, and a consistent, unbiased, accessible system of enforcement.

Women: Anonymous since forever, photoshopped out of all history and current events, women have been behind revolution and change in every country in the past years. Decentralized media has given them a voice for the first time in history; this will make this revolution very different from all the ones in the past. ‘Women’s issues’ are about to become mainstream issues, women’s solutions will start to be heard over men with guns.

Makers: Every 20 years or so, people’s innate drive to create overcomes consumer advertising, and we are due for this cycle. Time to bring back free stores, hacklabs, neighbourhood commons gardens and more; this time let’s make it last and become the integral part of society it is meant to be.

Me the people: No representatives, no hive mind, we are ready to hear from the individuals.

2010-12-23 The Age: Media union waives Assange’s fees

 

The Age reports that the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance in Australia have waived Julian Assnge’s fees for a year.

 

Australia’s media union has waived Julian Assange’s fees for a year after MasterCard cancelled his credit card. …

Louise Connor, the union’s Victorian secretary, said Assange had been a union member since 1997. She said Assange had not breached the journalists’ code of ethics and that he continued to protect his sources and publish in the public interest.

 

 

2010-12-29 ‘NPR Fesses Up to WikiLeaks’ Coverage Blunder, Now It’s Everyone Else’s Turn’

In response to today’s correction from NPR of their Wikileaks coverage, Matthew L. Schafer at Lippmann Would Roll has compiled a list of other news outlets who should follow their example. While NPR’s correction focused on the number of cables published, 1,942 instead of roughly 250,000, Schafer points out other errors that media outlets should avoid:

Moreover, many outlets used phrases similar to “document dump” to describe WikiLeaks’ publishing, which likely leads to the misconception that WikiLeaks did cavalierly publish all 250,000 cables. According to a LexisNexis search, on 397 separate occasions, newspapers around the world used the phrase “document dump.” …

It’s worth mentioning that often the word “release” is not attributed. That is, the articles do not say to whom the release was made. A release by the website to the public? WikiLeaks’ release of the documents to the newspapers? Thus, a newspaper may say that it was referring to WikiLeaks release of all cables to its newspaper partners, but this is far from clear.

2010-12-28 FireDogLake: Manning-WikiLeaks Resource

The wonderful database of research into the Manning-Wikileaks prosecution evidence is growing at FireDogLake. They have given us the basic timeline of events, they merged all of the published portions of the chat logs into one version, and then documented everything that Lamo and others had said about the contents of the logs that were not contained in previously released versions here, and they have collected the key Wikileaks-Manning articles here.

They are now working on compiling transcripts for each video/audio Adrian Lamo interview. Already complete and well worth reading are the June 17th, 2010 interview with Glenn Greenwald, parts one and two, and several other key interviews. Thanks once again to FireDogLake for exemplary journalism, because in their own words:

The transcribed data will be used by Marcy Wheeler, Glenn Greenwald and others to try and piece together what actually happened — and hold journalists to a higher standard of more responsible coverage. We’ll also use it to work up a more detailed and extensive timeline of events.

Because it doesn’t appear that the New York Times and other marquee media outlets are going to stop printing Adrian Lamo’s ever-evolving gibberish like it was gospel until they are all able to see, in painful obvious detail, how his story keeps morphing over time.

2010-12-27 WikiLeaks named the top newsmaker of 2010 by Al Jazeera, Postmedia and canada.com.

Wikileaks is named the top newsmaker of 2010 by Al Jazeera and senior editors atPostmedia Network newspapers and canada.com.

“Assange’s organization indisputably demonstrated the emerging power of social media, while illustrating the risks governments run when they say one thing in private and another in public,” said Marlon Marshall, managing editor of the Regina Leader-Post.

“This was a game-changer in terms of citizen journalism, as well as marking a shift in the balance of power between government, big business and the collective citizenry via social media,” agreed Patricia Graham, editor-in-chief of the Vancouver Sun.

2010-12-23 Bloomberg: WikiLeaks Joins Forces With Lebedev’s Moscow-Based Newspaper Novaya Gazeta

Bloomberg announced that Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow newspaper controlled by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev, will collaborate with Wikileaks to publish material specifically about Russia.

The weekly newspaper is known in an industry dominated by state-run companies for its critical reports of the Kremlin and investigative coverage of Russian affairs.

Novaya Gazeta received unlimited access to the WikiLeaks database, which has a “wide range” of materials, including documents about Politkovskaya’s murder as well as information about Russian politicians’ ties to organized crime, Nadezhda Prusenkova, a Novaya Gazeta spokeswoman, said by phone from Moscow. The newspaper will start releasing materials next month.

President Dmitry Medvedev said the documents published by WikiLeaks don’t hurt Russia’s interests and that the Russian authorities don’t care what’s being discussed in diplomatic circles.

 

2010-12-16 FAIR: Media paint flattering picture of U.S. diplomacy

FAIR summarizes the cablegate coverage in the US mainstream media, concluding:

These conclusions represent an extraordinarily narrow reading of the WikiLeaks cables, of which about 1,000 have been released (contrary to constant media claims that the website has already released 250,000 cables). Some of the more explosive revelations, unflattering to U.S. policymakers, have received less attention in U.S. corporate media.

 

After listing a very good summary of essential cablegate revelations that have been largely ignored by the US media the article finishes with a reminder of the statement from the NY Times explaining why they had published some cable information:

The “duplicity” of other countries can be illuminated by the cables, while the U.S.’s secret wars are evidence of “diplomacy.” That principle would seem to be guiding the way many U.S. outlets are interpreting the WikiLeaks revelations.

From Wikileaks to Wikileaks World

Now that most of the mainstream media have finally figured out who Anonymous is and that Wikileaks is not “one lone hacker”, some seem to think it is an organization populated by 16 year old boys shouting “Pew! Pew! Pewpewpew!” at their computer screens. And by “Wikileaks” they mean this whole movement we are watching.

We had a look at the origins of Wikileaks. It is possible to follow a shadowy tale from there to last summer, and watch journalists, IT people of all sorts, activists and politicians get involved. But the last three weeks have seen an absolute explosion in the numbers of people in this movement, and solidly in the movement, not just watching.

All of the support from people like EFF, Anonymous, the Pirate Party, etc., was pretty predictable, there is a lot of idealistic crossover and most people were already quiet supporters. But this is so much bigger. Last summer, there were really only a scant handful of people who were vocal supporters of Wikileaks. So scant that media could talk about a “microcosmic organization” and commenters could say “It’s always the same three names.” or “They’re like a cult”. It was truly scary on November 28th when Peter King decided he wanted the organization declared a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda and all of its supporters hunted down. Just 11 days later, that seems a laughable idea. Since the release of the cables, the Wikileaks twitter went from less than 200,000 followers to almost 500,000 and Wikileaks facebook went from 147,015 on November 23 to almost 1.2 million right now.

Who are all these people? Besides the usual internet suspects, all of the best journalists in the world have figured out which side they want to be standing on. Idealistic young people who want a job so righteous that it deserves to be protected by constitutions and laws. Also, journalists who want to work for Wikileaks, the new coolest media outlet in the world. And journalists who are just afraid of being shown up for the hypocrites they have been so far. But these were also the people we expected to join, sooner or later. It is still so much bigger.

One of the most wonderful additions I have seen is the amount of people from the legal profession getting on board. Possibly the world’s most hated profession is actually populated by a lot of very intelligent people of deep integrity and high ideals. People who believe in the law and everything it stands for, and people who have been horrified by the attitudes of politicians who think if something they don’t like isn’t against the law, then they’ll just change the law. The law is supposed to be above politics, it is not a political tool. When Assange said “It’s very important to remember the law is not what … powerful people would want others to believe it is. The law is not what a general says it is. The law is not what Hillary Clinton says it is.” it seems to have struck a chord with many people in the legal profession who have been feeling that way for some time.

The other professionals that I have seen in overwhelming numbers are professors and others associated with academia. Again, this is probably something born of frustration, people who love knowledge and the transmission of knowledge who have had their profession, like the legal profession, curtailed and under attack. To suddenly be of use again, to find a movement that values truth and intelligence, is like finally coming home for a great many people who have been so frustrated with the anti-intellectual feeling of the last several decades. Academia has also been on the front lines of the attack from the US government, with students at Columbia University told by the US State Dept that discussing Wikileaks on Facebook or Twitter would hurt their chances of a job in the future. Joe McCarthy could not have said it better.

With the arrest of Assange, we are seeing human rights activists around the world, sympathetic and hopeful before, but genuinely concerned now. Today the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said “I am concerned about reports of pressure exerted on private companies including banks, credit card companies and Internet service providers to close down credit lines for donations to Wikileaks, as well as to stop hosting the website,” pointing out that this could be interpreted as an attempt to prevent Wikileaks from publishing, in violation of its right to freedom of expression.

We are at the point now where any petition in support of Wikileaks looks like a Who’s Who of intelligent thoughtful professionals the world over, while people of all ages around the world are engaged in any way they can. As the battle lines are being drawn, look around at who is standing where. It is a very interesting and telling thing to observe.

Wikileaks Art From @DaliRau

Free for sharing from the amazing Dali (who also did the logo for WL Central).