Wikileaks

as leaks come and go, for now most are superfluous, shallow comments on international leaders and the good stuff is yet to be seen. by having an action hero portrayed as the savior of the poor, and the state lockdown on it, we have the perfect distraction maneuver.

during this past month, behind the distractions, a lot of internet liberties are being taken away. starting with net neutrality, continuing with the mafiaa is taking down websites via copyright claims (something that wasn’t legal and was completely unseen before), entire countries are blocking websites, google is now filtering results based on copyright claims too. and using wikileaks as an excuse, new laws are being made to outlaw such websites and undermine internet horizontal design. the wikileaks dns company deleted the record via some powerful lobbying (it’s back up in switzerland ), not soon after the amazon cloud hosting service had canceled their account, again after some lobbying.

thanks to wikileaks, we might lose the “free for all” internet like it used to be. online freedom of speech can now be outlawed easily in terms of “national security”. it’s over. it started with people giving away their data to private companies (google, amazon, facebook, twitter), in such high volumes it can be used for high resolution personal analysis. then, with the “great firewalls” of china, australia and some other countries. service providers do packet filtering depending on the protocol being used, effectively stopping certain online activities. now, using the reichtag fire wikileaks, we lose the remaining freedom online. you can be revoked of your online citizenship by arbitrary lobbying. wikileaks.org is gone. their dns record was deleted thanks to some powerful people. soon, probably ip addresses will be seized too, rendering any “dangerous” website useless.

alternatives exist, such as running other dns services, but it would be naive to think it would do anything. we use a private infrastructure to go online (usually owned by the service providers and telecom companies). it’s only a matter of time until this “hacker heaven” becomes outlawed and turns into another television channel. you are still “free” to choose your website, like your channel on tv. out of sight will be the right to broadcast and speak your mind.

it will be interesting to see what countries choose an open, public net and what countries choose a privately held, privately produced, web. my guess? all western countries will go for the private one, and nobody will even notice. after all, youtube is still up, we can still watch our cats flushing the toilet. we’ll slowly boil like a frog in a pot .

just a small prediction. the current wikileaks leak, cablegate, will, like every other before it, have no effect in every day life. ambassadors will be identified as a few “rotten apples”, some minor heads will roll, and life will resume its course.

the fantasy remains that humans are driven by facts. my opinion is that they aren’t, and more facts only feed the background noise. sometimes i feel we are being given a matrix-neo-like savior figure (assange), which deviates our focus from core questions. facts are essential, but useless at the current state of things. no law, no religion, no government or company responds solely to facts. they respond to their own inner delusions, biases and habits, therefore, we must engage both the rational and irrational of organizations.

but it serves also as part of the system, like neo was, to create fables of victory around the permanence of ruling class ideology. as heads roll, the world will remain essentially the same.

i am still wondering who is behind wikileaks, and there is some editorial bias in the leaks they put out. search wikileaks for israel, for example. this is not a conspiracy theorist perspective, i favor incompetence in turn of conspiracy, but there is a great risk that our focus shifts from core issues to superficial arguments about how good or bad certain aspects of government are, forgetting that systemic issues will remain unaddressable that way.

i would be interested in industry leaks, since corporations rule the world these days. but i guess corporate control on communications is so tough, any employee would risk a much greater deal by “leaking” anything.