"..the coming age of involuntary transparency..."
My, what a nice turn of a phrase.
Assange dumps all your trade secrets on the net? It's not a crime, nope, you're just being "involuntarily transparent".
Orwell would have been proud.
My, what a nice turn of a phrase.
Assange dumps all your trade secrets on the net? It's not a crime, nope, you're just being "involuntarily transparent".
Orwell would have been proud.
Orwell would have been proud, indeed.
The problem with "involuntary transparency" as practiced by wikileaks is that there are inherent limitations of scope and thus inherent discrimination in application.
When Stalinism came to power, he was extraordinarily critical of it's centralization of power and of what he saw as a tyrannical subversion of democratic socialist principles.
If ever there was a man in history who left a clear blueprint on where he would side in a struggle between multinational corporations and governments, and an idealistic whistleblower organization, it's Eric Blair.
It's important to point out that the citizens of 1984 had their actions monitored at all times, yet the government operated in total secrecy. What we're discussing here is a situation in reverse.
And on that note, if you have not read it, no matter your politics, I cannot recommend "Homage To Catalonia" enough. Orwell was truly one of the most gifted writers of the 20th century.
This discriminatory coverage has the potential to create a false portrait of reality. And that has consequences. Imagine two magazine covers, one photoshopped and immaculate the other completely "honest". To most uncritical observers the "honest" cover will appear vulgar and ugly in comparison. Only a few people will take the time to appreciate that the perfect cover is an utter lie. How do such dynamics play out in society, business, and geopolitical relations? In a wikileaks future a brutal dictatorship that can maintain utter control over its media image might be able to appear better than an honest and open, though flawed, country of liberty and consensual governance. Indeed, this is already a problem to some degree today. Idiots who don't know better imagine that life in dictatorial regimes might be exactly how the regime and its sycophants portray it (all the more believable without any dissenting voices), whereas every gritty aspect of life in western democracies and every flaw down to the least consequential is revealed in gory high-definition detail.
To me wikileaks specifically seems very much biased by the "point spread" problem, of judging America and the west by a much higher standard than the rest of the world. There's nothing wrong with holding America to a higher standard, but there's everything wrong with losing sight of the fact that the standards are different and then falling into the notion, as so many have, that, say, America is as bad as the Iranian regime, or that American troops are no better than the Taliban. The consequences of such discriminatory judgments and of such imbalanced worldviews are dire indeed.
The more I read supporters of wikileaks in this event the more evident it is that it all depends on who you think "deserves it" As long as its somebody you don't like who's ox is getting gored, life is good.
If this is truly the "age of involuntary transparency", then this problem will solve itself. Sooner or later we'll get around to dumping in public something you find precious. At that point, you'll be up in arms about cyber criminals.
Perspective and context are wondrous things. Many times instead of trying to find the general rule we're just happy that one group we like is leveling the score with another group we don't like. Once that is accomplished, we all can be quite nimble with the details of which principles we're upholding and the rationalization for our positions.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. —George Orwell (1946)
"On 25 November 2009, WikiLeaks released 570,000 intercepts of pager messages sent on the day of the September 11 attacks."
Clearly a gross invasion of privacy for many individuals involved.
"In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaigns, the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks"
An astoundingly clear violation of an individual's privacy. One gives up a certain level of privacy when entering public life, but that was ridiculous.
"After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008."
If anyone's the "little guy", it's the British National Party, a hard-working group of political idealists fighting for what they believe in against tremendous odds. Of course they also happen to be a bunch of openly racist jerks, but they're also an oppressed minority.
How on earth do you square that with opposing what wikileaks does? Liber-authoritarian? Is it just because they published Sarah Palin's email? (BTW, it's illegal to conduct public business over private email, that's why the leak was noteworthy).
It wasn't meant to be a snarky point, but a serious one: it's a very nice turn of a phrase. It's neat how we invent new phrases to couch certain concepts either pro or con.
I love language and the study of how we communicate. Watching little phrases like this appear and then either grow or die (to me) is extremely fascinating.
EDIT: A terrific example of this is the oldie "mistakes were made" Note how the sentence actually has no subject -- "mistakes" seem to have made themselves. Cool stuff.
http://www.mistakesweremadebutnotbyme.com/
Time to go get it I guess.