I'm been thinking about airships today, after I finished Jean-Christophe Valtat's Aurorama. The book itself is decent but a bit disappointing. An absolutely killer set-up--alternative history that takes place in an Art Deco, steam-punk pastiche of about seven or eight different European cities (dubbed New Venice) located near the North Pole, with anarchist revolution, police in top hats and capes, and garbagemen wearing Carnival-style bird masks--that is somewhat marred by Valtat's decision to wear his politics on his sleeve (I'm starting to think that this is near-universal prediliction of modern French male writers, particularly when they decide to go "slumming" into genre fiction) and a plot that doesn't really get going until about 200 pages into the thing. Also, Valtat is French but wrote this in English, which means that the dialogue is pretty stilted at times. But the cover says this is the first in a series, so I have hopes.
Anyhow. The story features an airship, which reminded me a number of other books/stories that have airships (short story by M. Chabon in a McSweeney's collection, that huge thing by Pynchon a couple of years ago, Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy). And then I did some (very cursory) research at the local Borders and online, and realized that steam-punk is rife with airships or zeppelins or whatnot. Which in turn provoked the question: what it is that is so appealing about airships? I mean, they seem to touch a chord with so many readers of these books, and they certainly do so with me, but maybe in a manner that makes me distrust myself: that nostalgic, romanticizing part of me that wants to remember all the beautiful aspects of a world I never lived in and to ignore the day to day drudgeries and evils of that world.
Airships are a part of modern technology that we have passed by, mostly because we found something that does what they do, but only better. Thus they appeal to folks like me, who are conflicted about modernity: they flatter our conservative side, the idea that once things were more elegant, more civilized, more interesting, but also celebrate some of the fundamental aspects of the modern human being. They speak to a breaking of barriers, a lifting of ourselves out of the ordinary--or the seemingly necessary--that technology makes possible. They take us off our earth-bound lives, let us seen things anew. This is what modernity promises. But then it gives us lots of other things too--pollution, a rat race that seems it can only get faster, crazy new ways to kill ourselves. Airships seem to signify a moment that we have lost, when we could have put a stop to some of the really pathological elements of the modern world. They are all things good about technology and none bad. Crystal goblets, jazz music, urbane and witty dinner companions. They don't emit exhuast, or don't seem to. Like luxury liners, or the Orient Express, they allow us the image of cosmopolitan travel, but at a sane pace, and for the right reasons. It is significant that villains almost never come from airships. Indeed, in both the Pynchon and Valtat works, they allow for a kind of utopian vision of democracy as joyful and only slightly dangerous anarchy.
The lie of the steam-punk zeppelin is that the brake on innovation was ever possible. Modernity doesn't respect the kinds of limits that the airship represents. The whole point of the modern world-view is that limits are intolerable: that is its demonic genius, both what is wonderful and horrifying about it. The airship suggests, pleasantly, that our world and that our technology didn't have to be like this. But of course it did, once we accepted that world's, and its technology's, basic premise: things can always be better. It was not inevitable that the airplane would supplant the airship, but it was inevitable that something would. Which is why trains and steamships, despite their similarities to the airship, do not feature so prominently in these alternative universes. We know why they've largely disappeared as travel technologies. Not because of some dramatic disaster in New Jersey 80 years ago, but just because they were too damned slow. They are, to use some Barthean terminology, history, and not myth.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Egypt, social media, and democracy
At a certain point, the protests in Egypt provoked the same question that almost all popular uprisings in the past five or so years have provoked, which is whether, or how much, their success is due to the use of the new media. This idea goes back to 2001 protests in the Philippines, in which the role of the cell phone has been much commented upon. These protests resulted in the resignation of the sitting president. Social media were credited for promoting political protests in Belarus, in Madrid, and the election protests in Iran in 2009. Tunisia's recent regime change has created the same sort of debate, this time in regards to wikipedia. Claims about the importance of Twitter, and Facebook, and text messaging, in spreading the word and in coordinating massive public actions have also produced push back, most notably in an essay by The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, who dismissed the idea that social media played much of a role in the Iranian protests. In fact, both he and the Net's most famous skeptic, Evgeny Morozov, have even suggested that the social media may have helped police track down and arrest protest leaders.
It's a silly argument, in a way. Of course social media play a role in any modern political mobilization, just as the mass media play a role, and also traditional media, and of course also interpersonal communication (also cars, and various other forms of technology). Social media play a role in modern life. The question is, what sort of role do they play? That seems to be obvious, but the problem at this point is that so many people are so invested--emotionally and professionally--in the idea that new media have created a fundamental break with how things worked in the past (the past defined as about 2001). So we don't ask specific, answerable questions that could be asked by some solid empirical research: say, a series of interviews among opposition leaders about how social media were used to create public meetings, whether media networks overlap with interpersonal networks, and to what extent, etc. The legwork involved would take time, of course, and effort, and would probably come out sounding not nearly so dramatic as the claim that new media are the best tool for controlling a population ever invented, or the tools for constructing a brand new, democratic universe.
But revolutions happened before Twitter. There were democratic possibilities before smart mobs and texting. So the first, fundamental issue has to be not whether Twitter or Facebook are decisive for creating popular opposition: they obviously are not. The question now has to be: now that they are playing role, what character do they give to the new political movements. But as long as we have the evangelists and the dystopians making large claims and counter-claims about the Direction of History, we're never going to figure that out.
It's a silly argument, in a way. Of course social media play a role in any modern political mobilization, just as the mass media play a role, and also traditional media, and of course also interpersonal communication (also cars, and various other forms of technology). Social media play a role in modern life. The question is, what sort of role do they play? That seems to be obvious, but the problem at this point is that so many people are so invested--emotionally and professionally--in the idea that new media have created a fundamental break with how things worked in the past (the past defined as about 2001). So we don't ask specific, answerable questions that could be asked by some solid empirical research: say, a series of interviews among opposition leaders about how social media were used to create public meetings, whether media networks overlap with interpersonal networks, and to what extent, etc. The legwork involved would take time, of course, and effort, and would probably come out sounding not nearly so dramatic as the claim that new media are the best tool for controlling a population ever invented, or the tools for constructing a brand new, democratic universe.
But revolutions happened before Twitter. There were democratic possibilities before smart mobs and texting. So the first, fundamental issue has to be not whether Twitter or Facebook are decisive for creating popular opposition: they obviously are not. The question now has to be: now that they are playing role, what character do they give to the new political movements. But as long as we have the evangelists and the dystopians making large claims and counter-claims about the Direction of History, we're never going to figure that out.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
The theology of net neutrality
This past semester I advised a student on an independent project concerning net neutrality. This was maybe not the best arrangement for the student, since I didn't really know all that much about net neutrality (we don't have a new media currently on the faculty, which is why I had to do). It was great for me, though, as it allowed me to learn a little more about a subject that seems to be generating a great deal of discussion and debate recently.
For whose unfamiliar with the phrase, net neutrality refers to a policy proposal that would forbid internet providers to charge different rates to different customers. The providers want to do this based on the reasonable market principle that some people or companies (Google, ABC news, Youtube) use a lot more bandwidth than others (ie., me). It just makes sense, so goes this reasoning, to charge the former a higher rate than the latter. But defenders of the status quo argue that this sort of pricing policy would lead to tiered service--so that some users, like wealthy and large corporations--would be able to buy extra-speedy access, while the rest of us would be left with a more slower and degraded system. They argue that the government should step in and ensure that providers can't differentiate service between haves and have-nots. Network neutrality proposals would also ensure that providers couldn't use their control over service to block ideas, or sites, or content that they don't like.
To anyone of my political persuasion, net neutrality seems like a no-brainer. Of course you want to keep the internet free of censorship, whether by governments or corporations. Of course you want to keep access to, and transmission of, information on the internet as equal as possible. It is one of the major selling points of new media culture that it more closely resembles a truly democratic public sphere than anything we've had for a long time, maybe ever. Opponents of net neutrality must be either crazy, then, or in the pay of the only people who would appear to profit from a hierarchical net: internet providers and maybe, other large corporations. That's the sort of attitude that the folks at the Daily Show are taking here.
It's one thing to point out that one's opponent's views are colored by the economic interests, and also maybe certain social contexts that make them blind to some aspects of a problem. That is only to observe that they are human. It's another thing to use that observation to excuse oneself from the necessity of having to engage in those arguments. One of the things I found out in the course of looking into the debate a little more closely is that the opponents of net neutrality can't simply be dismissed as dupes of neo-liberal orthodoxy or Big Media lackeys. There are some good arguments against the government creating the sort of regime that net neutrality proponents support. First, many NN opponents point out that when governments involve themselves in regulating markets, they introduce biases that stifle competition, hamper innovation, create massive and often highly ineffective government bureaucracies, and ultimately work against consumers and precisely those market outsiders that otherwise would have challenged the powers of entrenched interests. Significantly, this is what happened in the nineteenth century, say NN opponents, when government intervened in the railroads because of very similar worries to what neutrality advocates are worrying about now. Then too, the opponents point out, given the rapid and dramatic changes in new media culture over the past twenty years, any potential regulatory regime might be addressing a world that now longer exists by the time that it will be implemented. Remember when the danger seemed to be that Microsoft was going to take over the world? And then it was AOL-Time Warner? And then Google? And now Facebook? There is a reasonable worry that by creating a set of rules designed for a specific media environment, the government locks us into that environment, and the sort of dynamic culture that we've seen through new media will calcify. Moreover, given that things seem to be changing so radically, and so unpredictably, whose to say that the dangers of the current media world won't be solved by a simple shift in direction or emphasis, or simply the introduction of new technologies?
But then here's the thing. For every piece of history that the opponents of NN can pull up, defenders of the idea have a corresponding example of how monopolies or oligopolistic situations create market failure. Or they interpret the lessons of the past in a different light. Their historical lessons also seem pretty plausible. And because it is so difficult, or impossible, to predict what we are going to see in the next decade, even the next several years, its really a matter of faith as to which side you are going to believe. If you go into this debate suspicious of modern corporate capitalism, then the faith in technology and the market to solve any and all problems seems naive, at best. If you approach it with a distrust of government intervention, then the desire to create legislation to address that problem that does not even seem to exist, at this point, can feel like just another example of the left trying to control the creative forces of humanity. It is this clash of theological positions--belief in the goodness of the market on the one side, and belief in its ultimate destructive nature on the other--that makes the debate so unedifying. People are predicting futures that they don't really have much of a handle on, and they use past events simply as ideological justification for their position (notably, there are few if any historians involved in the argument, from what I can tell. That's probably because most historians, of whatever political persuasion, realize that whatever its value, history makes for a poor predictive device.)
All of which would just be another example of intellectual follies if not for the fact that this decision--either for or against net neutrality--probably will have a fairly major impact on our culture. And it is very possible that one of the two sides is correct: we could end up stifling one of the great instances of communal creative energy in modern history, either through action or inaction. And there does not seem to be a way for us to reliably and reasonably justify which path to take, at least not based on any clear empirical evidence.
For whose unfamiliar with the phrase, net neutrality refers to a policy proposal that would forbid internet providers to charge different rates to different customers. The providers want to do this based on the reasonable market principle that some people or companies (Google, ABC news, Youtube) use a lot more bandwidth than others (ie., me). It just makes sense, so goes this reasoning, to charge the former a higher rate than the latter. But defenders of the status quo argue that this sort of pricing policy would lead to tiered service--so that some users, like wealthy and large corporations--would be able to buy extra-speedy access, while the rest of us would be left with a more slower and degraded system. They argue that the government should step in and ensure that providers can't differentiate service between haves and have-nots. Network neutrality proposals would also ensure that providers couldn't use their control over service to block ideas, or sites, or content that they don't like.
To anyone of my political persuasion, net neutrality seems like a no-brainer. Of course you want to keep the internet free of censorship, whether by governments or corporations. Of course you want to keep access to, and transmission of, information on the internet as equal as possible. It is one of the major selling points of new media culture that it more closely resembles a truly democratic public sphere than anything we've had for a long time, maybe ever. Opponents of net neutrality must be either crazy, then, or in the pay of the only people who would appear to profit from a hierarchical net: internet providers and maybe, other large corporations. That's the sort of attitude that the folks at the Daily Show are taking here.
It's one thing to point out that one's opponent's views are colored by the economic interests, and also maybe certain social contexts that make them blind to some aspects of a problem. That is only to observe that they are human. It's another thing to use that observation to excuse oneself from the necessity of having to engage in those arguments. One of the things I found out in the course of looking into the debate a little more closely is that the opponents of net neutrality can't simply be dismissed as dupes of neo-liberal orthodoxy or Big Media lackeys. There are some good arguments against the government creating the sort of regime that net neutrality proponents support. First, many NN opponents point out that when governments involve themselves in regulating markets, they introduce biases that stifle competition, hamper innovation, create massive and often highly ineffective government bureaucracies, and ultimately work against consumers and precisely those market outsiders that otherwise would have challenged the powers of entrenched interests. Significantly, this is what happened in the nineteenth century, say NN opponents, when government intervened in the railroads because of very similar worries to what neutrality advocates are worrying about now. Then too, the opponents point out, given the rapid and dramatic changes in new media culture over the past twenty years, any potential regulatory regime might be addressing a world that now longer exists by the time that it will be implemented. Remember when the danger seemed to be that Microsoft was going to take over the world? And then it was AOL-Time Warner? And then Google? And now Facebook? There is a reasonable worry that by creating a set of rules designed for a specific media environment, the government locks us into that environment, and the sort of dynamic culture that we've seen through new media will calcify. Moreover, given that things seem to be changing so radically, and so unpredictably, whose to say that the dangers of the current media world won't be solved by a simple shift in direction or emphasis, or simply the introduction of new technologies?
But then here's the thing. For every piece of history that the opponents of NN can pull up, defenders of the idea have a corresponding example of how monopolies or oligopolistic situations create market failure. Or they interpret the lessons of the past in a different light. Their historical lessons also seem pretty plausible. And because it is so difficult, or impossible, to predict what we are going to see in the next decade, even the next several years, its really a matter of faith as to which side you are going to believe. If you go into this debate suspicious of modern corporate capitalism, then the faith in technology and the market to solve any and all problems seems naive, at best. If you approach it with a distrust of government intervention, then the desire to create legislation to address that problem that does not even seem to exist, at this point, can feel like just another example of the left trying to control the creative forces of humanity. It is this clash of theological positions--belief in the goodness of the market on the one side, and belief in its ultimate destructive nature on the other--that makes the debate so unedifying. People are predicting futures that they don't really have much of a handle on, and they use past events simply as ideological justification for their position (notably, there are few if any historians involved in the argument, from what I can tell. That's probably because most historians, of whatever political persuasion, realize that whatever its value, history makes for a poor predictive device.)
All of which would just be another example of intellectual follies if not for the fact that this decision--either for or against net neutrality--probably will have a fairly major impact on our culture. And it is very possible that one of the two sides is correct: we could end up stifling one of the great instances of communal creative energy in modern history, either through action or inaction. And there does not seem to be a way for us to reliably and reasonably justify which path to take, at least not based on any clear empirical evidence.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
The real point of wikileaks
At our Christmas party, a good friend pointed out that one of the most important things that establishment media has managed to do in the whole wikileaks story is to make Julian Assange the major character. In this way, we spend our time debating a) whether he is a vile rapist or an heroic destroyer of state and corporate hierarchies, or: b) whether he should have released all of the information that he did, only one some of it (ie., the stuff that we would want released.)
But arguing over what Assange should have done, versus what he did do, rather misses the bigger point, which is that whether we like this or not, the future that we see in terms of information is going to look a lot more like the wikileaks world than what preceeded it, absent some sort of radical (and frankly unlikely, because ultimately unworkable) regime of censorship. It doesn't depend on the moral code of a single computer hacker from Australia, no matter how brilliant he might be. To that point, the point needs to be emphasized that young Bradley Manning (An Oklahoma Boy! A gay, Oklahoma atheist who is now an international celebrity for attacking American global power! You would have to live here to know how weird it is to write those words) is at least as important to the story as Assange. Think about this: Manning was a Private. He told people he was downloading some Lady Gaga music. They patted him on the head and let him walk out the door. But then, what were they supposed to do? I'm guessing that he's not the only disaffected young person currently in the employ of the American government. They can't possibly keep tabs on all of them. They can reduce the ability of such people to access important information, and that in turn will also hamper their responsiveness and their ability to draw on the resources of everyone who is not planning to send classified information to international whistle-blowers.
In short, wikileaks needs to seen within a wider cultural moment, one that includes both a set of understandings about our relation to power and the current tools available to those who wish to challenge that power. A good place to start with this is Assange's own argument:
"Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes,
we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite not merely for prefer-
ment or favor within the regime but as the primary planning methodology be-
hind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power."
Let's drop the pejorative terms for a moment and recast this. Modern bureaucratic institutions operate under a certain degree of secrecy as a general operating procedure. Within an information economy, power will often accrue to those who are able to get information about other people or groups, while minimizing the amount of information that they allow others to gather about them. If I know something about you (for example, a "tell" that you give off when you are trying to lie), and you don't know that I know it, then that information may prove valuable to me at some point. So a premium is put upon gaining information, and keeping from others what information you have. This is true of individuals (as Erving Goffman long ago realized) and is it true of institutions: all institutions, note, and not simply authoritarian ones. All other things being equal, secrecy is a rational communicative strategy.
What complicates the picture is that in some cases openness is also a good strategy, both for individuals and for organizations. (To be sure, this is something that new media prophets have trumpeted since the early 1990s, but after all they can't be wrong about everything.) Openness allows information from the environment to enter into the organization, which can then respond to it. Completely closed systems are notoriously short-lived because they cannot adapt to inevitable changes in the environment which, unlike their internal workings, they cannot control.
This push and pull between secrecy and openness is part of the communication dynamics of any person or group. To the extent that the entity opts for greater secrecy, then it can increasingly be described by Assange's description of "authoritarian." This gives it certain strengths vis-a-vis competitors but also creates certain weaknesses (witness the fate of the old Soviet Union).
What wikileaks seems to portend is an information environment in which the secrecy option is impossible. If pressed to its logical limits, wikileaks presents two options for the state or corporation that wishes to keep secrets. One, clamp down on information flows so tightly that nothing gets out, which means clamping down on them so severely that the organization itself cannot operate. Two, give up the strategy of secrecy. Acknowledge that the war of information--in which you try to get information on others and keep them from getting anything from you--is simply impossible. You will lose that power, of course, but because everyone is playing by the same rules you also don't have to worry about the power of others. It is a frankly utopian scheme, of course, but utopias can be influential as ideals rather than actual destinations.
The October wikileaks releases were interesting primarily because so many of them had so little practical impact: they were essentially diplomatic gossip. They embarrassed the US government but little more than that. Compare this to the video released of the helicopter attack on civilians in April: documentary evidence of what seemed to be an actual war crime. Yet in the long run, the former will be more important than the latter. Governments can always deal with isolated scandals. First, so few of the population actually pays attention. Second, precisely because it is a localized incident, it can be declared an "issue," solutions can be created. But think about the position of an American diplomat now. Is anyone every going to write memos as frank and revealing as those? I think that this sort of communication will, at best, be severely curtailed. Defenders of the diplomatic core say this is precisely the problem, but again, I don't know that simply decrying the event will actually solve anything. Now everyone nows this is a possibility: that some pissed-off little weasel working in some low-level bureaucratic job will get her hands on the snarky note you wrote about David Cameron and then it's on the front page of the New York Times. And this will still be true even if the feds manage to shut down wikileaks. You can't shut down the whole web.
Assange clearly believes that this sort of world is, when all is said and down, going to be a better world than the one we live in now. He doesn't buy the idea that they are good secrets and bad ones, and that we only need to be about exposing the latter. Any time that you keep information hidden, you are in the end not doing it for anyone's benefit but your own, and even if you don't end up using it for nefarious ends, you could. The best thing is to shine a light on it all. That ideology, obviously, is not his alone. A variation of it comes through in almost every public announcement that Zuckerberg, or any of the Facebook people, make. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it is mirrored in many of my students' attitudes to privacy, which seem lackadasical at best. If they are not actually proponents of information sharing, they are remarkably unconcerned about businesses or states gathering information on them. They seem to think that it will be done anyhow, so why worry?
The question is whether the idea of identifying secrecy with power is correct. After all, power was able to use many of the techniques and ideologies of freedom in the early modern period to exercise new forms of control over populations. It is not clear at all that it cannot use the craze for openness to similar purposes. I am reminded of something from Eugene Zamyatin's dystopian novel We. In Zamyatin's new world, all of the houses in the city are built of glass, the better to allow the police to look in and check on what you are doing. But of course, we may not need the state, or even the corporation, to do that. We may end up policing ourselves.
But arguing over what Assange should have done, versus what he did do, rather misses the bigger point, which is that whether we like this or not, the future that we see in terms of information is going to look a lot more like the wikileaks world than what preceeded it, absent some sort of radical (and frankly unlikely, because ultimately unworkable) regime of censorship. It doesn't depend on the moral code of a single computer hacker from Australia, no matter how brilliant he might be. To that point, the point needs to be emphasized that young Bradley Manning (An Oklahoma Boy! A gay, Oklahoma atheist who is now an international celebrity for attacking American global power! You would have to live here to know how weird it is to write those words) is at least as important to the story as Assange. Think about this: Manning was a Private. He told people he was downloading some Lady Gaga music. They patted him on the head and let him walk out the door. But then, what were they supposed to do? I'm guessing that he's not the only disaffected young person currently in the employ of the American government. They can't possibly keep tabs on all of them. They can reduce the ability of such people to access important information, and that in turn will also hamper their responsiveness and their ability to draw on the resources of everyone who is not planning to send classified information to international whistle-blowers.
In short, wikileaks needs to seen within a wider cultural moment, one that includes both a set of understandings about our relation to power and the current tools available to those who wish to challenge that power. A good place to start with this is Assange's own argument:
"Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes,
we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite not merely for prefer-
ment or favor within the regime but as the primary planning methodology be-
hind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power."
Let's drop the pejorative terms for a moment and recast this. Modern bureaucratic institutions operate under a certain degree of secrecy as a general operating procedure. Within an information economy, power will often accrue to those who are able to get information about other people or groups, while minimizing the amount of information that they allow others to gather about them. If I know something about you (for example, a "tell" that you give off when you are trying to lie), and you don't know that I know it, then that information may prove valuable to me at some point. So a premium is put upon gaining information, and keeping from others what information you have. This is true of individuals (as Erving Goffman long ago realized) and is it true of institutions: all institutions, note, and not simply authoritarian ones. All other things being equal, secrecy is a rational communicative strategy.
What complicates the picture is that in some cases openness is also a good strategy, both for individuals and for organizations. (To be sure, this is something that new media prophets have trumpeted since the early 1990s, but after all they can't be wrong about everything.) Openness allows information from the environment to enter into the organization, which can then respond to it. Completely closed systems are notoriously short-lived because they cannot adapt to inevitable changes in the environment which, unlike their internal workings, they cannot control.
This push and pull between secrecy and openness is part of the communication dynamics of any person or group. To the extent that the entity opts for greater secrecy, then it can increasingly be described by Assange's description of "authoritarian." This gives it certain strengths vis-a-vis competitors but also creates certain weaknesses (witness the fate of the old Soviet Union).
What wikileaks seems to portend is an information environment in which the secrecy option is impossible. If pressed to its logical limits, wikileaks presents two options for the state or corporation that wishes to keep secrets. One, clamp down on information flows so tightly that nothing gets out, which means clamping down on them so severely that the organization itself cannot operate. Two, give up the strategy of secrecy. Acknowledge that the war of information--in which you try to get information on others and keep them from getting anything from you--is simply impossible. You will lose that power, of course, but because everyone is playing by the same rules you also don't have to worry about the power of others. It is a frankly utopian scheme, of course, but utopias can be influential as ideals rather than actual destinations.
The October wikileaks releases were interesting primarily because so many of them had so little practical impact: they were essentially diplomatic gossip. They embarrassed the US government but little more than that. Compare this to the video released of the helicopter attack on civilians in April: documentary evidence of what seemed to be an actual war crime. Yet in the long run, the former will be more important than the latter. Governments can always deal with isolated scandals. First, so few of the population actually pays attention. Second, precisely because it is a localized incident, it can be declared an "issue," solutions can be created. But think about the position of an American diplomat now. Is anyone every going to write memos as frank and revealing as those? I think that this sort of communication will, at best, be severely curtailed. Defenders of the diplomatic core say this is precisely the problem, but again, I don't know that simply decrying the event will actually solve anything. Now everyone nows this is a possibility: that some pissed-off little weasel working in some low-level bureaucratic job will get her hands on the snarky note you wrote about David Cameron and then it's on the front page of the New York Times. And this will still be true even if the feds manage to shut down wikileaks. You can't shut down the whole web.
Assange clearly believes that this sort of world is, when all is said and down, going to be a better world than the one we live in now. He doesn't buy the idea that they are good secrets and bad ones, and that we only need to be about exposing the latter. Any time that you keep information hidden, you are in the end not doing it for anyone's benefit but your own, and even if you don't end up using it for nefarious ends, you could. The best thing is to shine a light on it all. That ideology, obviously, is not his alone. A variation of it comes through in almost every public announcement that Zuckerberg, or any of the Facebook people, make. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it is mirrored in many of my students' attitudes to privacy, which seem lackadasical at best. If they are not actually proponents of information sharing, they are remarkably unconcerned about businesses or states gathering information on them. They seem to think that it will be done anyhow, so why worry?
The question is whether the idea of identifying secrecy with power is correct. After all, power was able to use many of the techniques and ideologies of freedom in the early modern period to exercise new forms of control over populations. It is not clear at all that it cannot use the craze for openness to similar purposes. I am reminded of something from Eugene Zamyatin's dystopian novel We. In Zamyatin's new world, all of the houses in the city are built of glass, the better to allow the police to look in and check on what you are doing. But of course, we may not need the state, or even the corporation, to do that. We may end up policing ourselves.
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