How Wikileaks shows the truth about our democracy

This is the most important editorial to appear so far on the Wikileaks affair, by John Naughton in the Guardian:

John Naughton:

“‘Never waste a good crisis” used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

And as the backlash unfolds – first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly “discovering” that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook – the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.” Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates.

The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American, British and other Nato governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates – who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly – and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this.

Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.

The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to rent “virtual” computers – again located somewhere on the net. The terms and conditions under which they provide both “free” and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud computing – one day it will rain on your parade.

Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic Compute Cloud the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a US senator who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be “asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information”. This led the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson to ask whether “Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in the company running the New Yorker’s printing presses when we are preparing a story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us”.

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, “Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure.” What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.

Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.

But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won’t work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.”

4 Comments How Wikileaks shows the truth about our democracy

  1. AvatarJon Husband

    The problem is that they cannot face their electorates – who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly – and tell them this.

    Such a sad … and obvious … state of affairs, Networks (eventually) make culture and politics explicit.

  2. AvatarTom Crowl

    Technology & The Decision Landscape
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXdhGQOwm54

    (I just realized that this is a more appropriate post upon which to make the comment below, sorry for the duplicate.)

    Some general thoughts on how the Internet is changing our relationship to secrecy, privacy… and each other:

    HOW the Web evolves… how WE determine its evolution is critical for the future of civilization.

    There are NO issues more important than those revolving around the development… the evolution of this new LANDSCAPE.

    And that’s vital to remember. We are constructing a landscape which then shapes everything that comes after it… and is built upon it.

    Its more akin to the air, water and sunshine than it is to the invention of the printing press.

    And it may well be the first human created artifact to assume that level of evolutionary importance.
    That’s a pretty bold statement.

    And I’m spinning with some tentative ideas here in early stages. But let’s consider the history of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for a moment.

    Let’s look at its beginnings! No, that’s not with the telegraph or telephone… not even the printing press or clay tablets…

    The first ICT was perhaps a bird call constructed out of a leaf made by a hunter to notify his mates of where the prey was…

    And the first journalism was Ooga running into camp and announcing she’d just seen the first spring sprout on a favorite berry bush.

    There was no gatekeeper, no intermediary… ICT AND journalism were BOTH strictly peer-to-peer.

    And if the message was false, misleading or dangerous… the onus certainly didn’t fall upon the air through which the information was transmitted!

    Everything changed with the move to settled agriculture and the need for structures to accommodate ’social organisms’ larger than Dunbar’s Number (natural human community size).

    Both the technical limits of then available ICT as well as natural cognitive limits were actually triggers for a problematic and still continuing disconnection (and tension) between the individual’s functional social network and the social organism of which he was a part.

    I believe these were the critical social/technical factors enabling the rise of Authoritarianism and class structures.

    How Would Hunter-gatherers Run the World? (Psst… They DO!)
    http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-hunter-gatherers-run-world.html

    On Creating Communities (Part 1)
    http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/08/on-creating-communities-part-1.html

    ICT has made a lot of progress since then… but it’s never been able to completely overcome those problems associated with the rise of Authoritarianism:

    1. Loss of proximity (physical, social, psychological) allowing the class isolation essential to its existence.

    2. Cognitive limits associated with Dunbar’s Number facilitating rationalization by all sides of the intractability and/or desirability of the situation.

    And in many cases ICT has actually assisted the Authoritarian impulse (controlled media access, propaganda, etc.)

    The progress that we’ve made in governance to date has largely been the result of technologies to address these issues… e.g. legislatures and juries to introduce horizontally structured power centers to counter-balance hierarchical structures, etc.

    THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WEB IS THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE IN PEER-TO-PEER RELATIONSHIP SINCE THE MOVE TO SETTLED EXISTENCE!

    In many ways its a direct challenge to the premise of government itself… that of empowered association for mutual benefit…

    There’s a potential in that to bypass existing structures completely and/or construct competing mechanisms for the same purposes.

    While other innovations have vastly improved our ability to communicate… this is the only one that offers the potential to re-establish this fundamental peer-to-peer empowerment and directly confronts the proximity problem (not only physical, but also social, psychological proximity).

    In my piece “On the Birth of the Global Social Organism”…
    http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-birth-of-global-social-organism.html

    I make the remarkably presumptuous statement:

    “Only when the gap in wealth and status approaches that level which would be considered fair within a Dunbar’s number-sized social network in daily contact… only then can we consider the possibility of a healthy, scaled social organism*.

    (*A self-recognized and internally governed economic/political grouping organized for basic survival decisions and actions.)

    Moreover, it may be that the rapid expansion of ICT and the nature of the Ultimatum Game (e.g. terrorism and complex civilizational vulnerabilities generally) makes this first assertion no longer just a nice ideal but a survival necessity.”

    It could be considered a meaningless statement with fuzzy terms like “fair” and “healthy”… but I’m ready to try and defend it…

    This very definitely does NOT suggest NO stratification as a workable goal! That doesn’t work. And frankly reward for innovation, hard work, etc… are keys to a successful civilization.

    But it does imply several things…

    1.We are moving through a period where governments are going to have to deal with some fundamental alterations to the assumptions under which they’ve so long been able to operate… or ultimately they’ll be bypassed (this isn’t a threat… its an observation.)

    2.We can count on an increasingly urgent ‘Justice Imperative’ with teeth coming from multiple, sometimes unexpected places and peoples.

    3. We must address (and empower) fundamental mechanisms of interaction and counter power imbalances between the individual and large institutions both public and private… the citizen’s role as a stakeholder becomes more urgent over time not less.

    4. We must face up to the realities of a fundamental change in the nature of privacy and the futility of (most) secrecy… both never much use to hunter-gatherers. See David Brin’s “The Transparent Society” for more on this.

    5. We MUST provide an environment and tools that encourage a CAPABLE electorate. Don’t fool yourself that current mechanisms of political marketing and the simplifications urged by party identifications are good for governance. THEY ARE NOT! They are good for Parties and candidates.Technology and the Social Sciences have provided powerful tools for ‘decision manipulation’ (lizard-brain targeted advertising). These must be exposed and countered… at least in the area of political decision. We cannot afford an electorate whose critical faculties are intentionally de-based.

    6. Some institutions need to shrink. Especially those involved with capital allocation (financial services, banking and credit creation)

    see: On Social Energy, Enterprise and Expanding the Technology of Money
    http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-social-energy-enterprise-expanding.html

    7. And finally, of course, we need the catalyzation of the Commons-dedicated Account Network. A fundamental of speech and association in a peer-to-peer landscape. (its the ‘trickle-up’ path to better governance.)

    BTW, this network has important implications for the future of journalism… its a tool for restoring that direct peer-to-peer connection between the content creator and his/her consumer… its the pragmatic and necessary path to Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans”…

    CATALYZE THE NETWORK!

    These are just quick speculations which undoubtedly need editing and refinement. But no time like the present to start the process.

    LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/culturalengineer

  3. Pingback: Wikileaks, Hypocrisy, and Sunshine (2 of 2) « Volatility

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