St. Michael Trampling the Dragon (Raphael, 1518)
There is war in heaven (cyberspace, or, as some of us call it, the Metaverse) -- and on earth too, with heaven.
The WikiLeaks Revolution is about a war for power on the one hand between organic institutions established over the centuries harnessing new electronic social media, and on the other, the Internet-dependent hackers, who want to anarchically replace those institutions by force. It's not only a war about who controls the Internet, but who controls the world.
That's because the world is wired now -- and will become more so when we get the Internet of Things.
The people winning this war (first the now-established hackers Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Craig Newmark, Jack Dorsey, etc. and then later the more anarchic hackers like Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum) call Web 2.0 "disruptive technology" because it disrupts old institutions and businesses -- and disrupts everyone but them, and has enabled them to grow extremely wealthy, at least "in bytes" or power over others with code.
Even they may be made slightly uneasy at the power of technocommunist anarchy which they've helped to unleash in WikiLeaks, however, which now confronts institutions of civil society that emerged from -- and despite! -- the scholarly socialism of Tim Berners-Lee and other pioneers of the early Internet and miraculously managed to do business on their collective farms -- Amazon, Paypal, Visa, etc.
Those commercial mavericks of the Internet are now all rejecting the claims of "openness" and "social justice" of WikiLeaks and moving to shut down its server or payment channels because *they don't want to support crime, which is not about openness, but conspiracy*. (Like the Russian essay by Anton Koslov about the difference between zagovor, or "conspiracy" and dogovor, "agreement").
Of course, the Gov 2.0 "Goverati" like Beth Noveck (at the White House Office of Science and Technology, and a long-time theorist of collectivist Internet ideologies that she calls "democracy) disclosed their radical hands, and paved the way for something like WikiLeaks, by wishing to "blow up Congress," and putting up proposals to have "the crowd" decide when documents should be declassified, without the CIA having any veto power over this (!)-- all while maintaining a web site where comments are heavily moderated or finally closed.
(I'm not seeing Lawrence Lessig comment on WikiLeaks on *this* round, although he supported it earlier this year -- maybe he wants to get elected to Congress, his latest gambit. Of course the bright red lines of his own technocommunist ideology of "code-as-law" and "sharing" and "information wants to be free" run directly to the WikiLeaks philosophy.)
Property and Good Governance, Not Rights
The war is, of course, about the very definition of both crime and human rights. The left and the "progressives" like Rebecca MacKinnon and scores of "thought leaders" like NYU's Jay Rosen and the Berkeley Center's Jillian York are trying to portray this as a "media freedom problem" -- if corporations can shut down "speech" (even if it involves stolen, classified documents), so the theory goes, "all of us" are in danger of losing our "rights". Baloney.
I call foul on this, of course, because it isn't about rights, but about property, about a government's good governance in keeping secrets, and about crime. The files belong to the People of the United States through their elected representatives, and the president's chosen appointees who guard these secrets (diplomats). There are institutions to work through the disclosure of what is made classified, through Congress, FOIA, the media, even Gov 2.0, the movement to make government more transparent legally. And that is how it should be done fairly, democratically -- liberally -- instead of with coercion and theft, like WikiLeaks.
Earlier this year with the first round of war-related WikiLeaks, the classic human rights groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First have quietly, and seemingly without a lot of conviction, made some protests against the harm that may be caused by WikiLeaks to human rights activists or others who help the U.S. or get aid by the U.S. It's not their center of gravity. They have statements on the record, but the first one issued earlier this year was torn apart by griefer professor and WikiLeaks fanboi Peter Ludlow as "not really" being representative of these institutions and the Wall Street Journal somehow "concocted" their protest. They didn't fight back. I asked them to make a statement; they wouldn't. (For more on WikiLeaks from Ludlow in the Chomskyan vein, see his paper.)
Some of the human rights groups protested *again* with this latest leak, stressing the harm to come to sources, and perhaps that helped both news media like the Guardian and even WikiLeaks itself to redact some (but not all!) of the names of people who could be harmed. It was terribly important to the WikiLeaks anarchist supporters like Ludlow to bludgeon and batter this very thin protest by the liberals and "progressives," because that is the real enemy of extremism -- as Lenin said, "social democracy is social fascism". Terribly important -- because these muted by rightful voices spoke the truth about WikiLeaks -- that it is antithetical to human rights because it uses coercion and destroys institutions of liberal democracy. Deliberately, as part of a radical anarchist agenda.
These extremists say they are fighting "authoritarian states" -- i.e. the U.S. which they imagine is "authoritarian" -- so they reason: the liberals ostensibly very close to them in ideals who uphold states and respect them while remaining critical are a lot harder to fight. But WikiLeaks has basically paralyzed them with fear of political incorrectness. WikiLeaks has to paralyze the liberals; Bolsheviks who dissemble about fake rights fear real rights like a silver bullet. So they adopt the language of "rights" to drown out the legitimate protests about their *overturning* of rights in their own secretive and coercive organization. That is how it has always been done throughout history by extremists, going back to the French Revolution and the Jacobins and earlier.
That's why others without a history of human rights professionalism can now suddenly invoke "free speech" and "freedom". Jillian York, writing for Al Jazeera (where else?!) rants about the "danger to net freedom". Of course, Al Jazeera -- and Jillian -- would do a lot better worrying about the real threat to Internet freedom among the Middle Eastern dictatorships that harass, jail, torture and kill bloggers and journalists and block the Internet. But no. We're in for another one-sided diatribe cloaking itself in rights-speech which is really about power: it's a rationale for why revolutionary anarchism of the info-kind should prevail in the war in heaven.
Jillian is even waxing rabid, imagining that the U.S. is going to flip the "Internet kill switch" like China sort of did on Google. Her coverage of the Chinese hack earlier this year perpetuated several geek religious tenets -- "we may never know" who did the hack, and " the U.S. is just as evil" (moral equivalence) because it monitors people, too on the Internet:
This will likely add additional fuel to the calls for more national attention to be paid to cybersecurity. In Google's blog post of yesterday, it was noted that the aforementioned attacks were not leveraged only at Google, but rather, at least twenty other companies were targeted, as were the accounts of human rights activists based both inside and outside of China. The possibility that the Chinese government is complicit in attempts to hack into US computers to track human rights activists is noteworthy. The fact is that we'll probably never know the facts, nor do we know the limits of US government activity to collect information on those that are seen as a threat. While none of this is particularly new, it is a reminder of the immense challenges that lay ahead for promoting a free and open Internet.
Many of her cohorts went around downplaying the Google hack, claiming it was "students" or lone hackers somehow unrelated to the communist state. No amount of evidence presented to these geeks that what was done couldn't have been done without state/military help would keep them from dodging the square assignment of responsibility to the state. Ironically, it's WikiLeaks that now clinches this story, as a Chinese official admitted to masterminding the Google hack because he didn't like what was shown about him in search, and it is reported in the cables.
The Terms of Service and the Abuse Report
Jillian inevitably perpetuates the slur against Senator Lieberman -- who is centrist and Jewish and therefore a constant scarecrow of the left -- as somehow "causing" Amazon's action by "placing pressure" and "chilling" speech. Of course, if one of "her" senators called Comcast to inquire about violations of her sacred "Net Neutrality," that wouldn't be legislative overreach, that wouldn't be a "chill on freedom of association," it would be "doing one's duty". So in fact, Lieberman, who is ELECTED is doing his due diligence and asking about a possible threat to national security that perhaps Amazon was not aware of.
We all know how Silicon Valley's creations work, Jillian. They default to letting everybody steal and copy content and letting everybody lie and defame and harass first. ONLY when you file an "abuse report" will they sit up and take notice about any TOS violations -- maybe. They claim that the "large scale" or their operations prevent them from doing anything else but...allow their platforms to abuse copyright and other laws to gain traffic and ad-clicks to enrich them lol. So it takes a complaint sometimes like Lieberman's for them to wake up to actual TOS violations and to see how bad for business something WikiLeaks is -- not because they are craven slaves to the corporate-state military-industrial complex blah blah, but because they are an institution of civil society -- a business, interested in complying with the rule of law and having a good reputation. A big company that isn't participating in anarchic revolution doesn't have a reason to undermine the U.S. government and facilitate the exposure of its diplomatic secrets. And that's ok. Paypal, Visa, server companies in Europe, domain registrars -- they are doing the same thing -- refusing to take part in crime and refusing to join the ecstatic, radical self-serving politics of the scurrilous Pirate Party. That's ok to be doing. The Pirate Party cannot get us paid or feed us.
You may not be able to stop the copying of files, and indeed, once they are exposed journalists may feel they have a duty to put them in context and point out their harm (like me); but you don't have to participate in crime and facilitate it.
Jillian also hysterically invokes the (now reversed) position that Columbia University's SIPA took when it disseminated the warning from a SIPA alumnus who said that if students wanted to get jobs in government, they shouldn't be copying and linking and discussing
Disseminating that pragmatic message isn't a State Department or even a Columbia University position -- it's just exposing, a la WikiLeaks itself, the old-boy network's workings. Yes, it's ok to tell people who want to serve in government that their response to WikiLeaks visible on the Internet might be one of the ways they are judged to be fit for the job or not. And that's ok. Institutions get to do that.
Yes, Genies Can Go Back in Bottles: Overcoming Binary Mentalities
There's a certain induced confusion about WikiLeaks genie "not being able to be put back in the bottle". This is a certain electronic helplessness fostered in the geeks' war for power. Of course it can be -- the Internet isn't some Singularist robotic monster not controllable by organic human institutions. The war for power over the Internet -- and life -- wants you to belive that you "can't" stop" copying, theft, crime just because it is digital. Of course, you can mitigate it, squeeze it, dry it out, and eventually it does become disabled.
Just because you can't do everything doesn't mean you can't do something. In the microcosm of Second Life, for years we have heard the claims of hackers that "nothing" can stop them from breaking digital rights permissions or logging on to servers even when they are hash banned. In fact, this is one of those claims that the script kiddies of the anarchic 4chan-style Internet movement furiously spread to try to make a self-fulfilling prophecy, but which doesn't mean the grownups can't quietly move forward and disable the crime. If you ban enough people, disband groups, cut off payment sources, seize back leased property that is used for criminal actions (like servers) and increasingly make it clear that outlaws are not welcome, eventually they go away.At least they are reduced in number and power.
Yeah, it's maybe a bit easier to do this in the walled virtual garden of Second Life, and yet in the larger walled garden of the civilized Internet, which is made up precisely of services like Amazon or PayPay, it's possible, too. This is a war that you fight not by giving up and thinking in 0/1 or binary win/lose, 100 or nothing mentality. You keep building up the wall of shame, if nothing else, because organic institutions under the rule of law ultimately are more important to humanity's survival and prosperity than "code-as-law," that has often been more destructive of human civilization than not (destroying, for example, the music and news business, and now headed for destroying the diplomacy business). And some thinkers like Mort Zuckerman have gone further, proposing a "Cyber Defense Administration" precisely because our nation is so dependent on the Internet to guide everything from banking to railroads to education. Of course, we already have the Joint Cyber Command and even Obama has called for a White House office, but Zuckerman and others would go further:
The task is of such a scale that it needs nothing less than a souped-up Manhattan Project, like the kind that broke the scientific barriers to the bomb that ended World War II. Our vulnerabilities are increasing exponentially. Cyberterrorism poses a threat equal to that of weapons of mass destruction. A large scale attack could create an unimaginable degree of chaos in America.
We should think of cyberattacks as guided missiles and respond similarly—intercept them and retaliate. This means we need a federal agency dedicated to defending our various networks. You cannot expect the private sector to know how—or to have the money—to defend against a nation-state attack in a cyberwar. One suggestion recommended by Mr. Clarke is that the government create a Cyber Defense Administration. He's right. Clearly, defending the U.S. from cyberattacks should be one of our prime strategic objectives.
The methods for how to fight cyber-terrorism and anarchal Bolshevism can and should be debated. But I do think that debate begins with a discussion of the definition of what the WikiLeaks phenomenon is, and an accurate and true one.
I call the WikiLeakers and specifically Assange not just anarchists, but Bolsheviks, and not for some hackneyed "Red-baiting" McCarthyist impulse, but because it's a very precise label.
Bolsheviks believe themselves to be the avante-garde of a world revolution of their making, without the consent of the governed. They believe that the old order has to be smashed by force -- eggs have to be broken to make the omelette. They believe the ends for their cause justify the forceful and lawless means. They believe in "expropriating from the expropriators" -- as they believe private property is ill-gotten. They are conspirators, and operate in secret, without accountability, even while carrying around the banner of "Transparency". (Sort of like the Communists of the last century claimed to bring land to the peasants and power to the soviets, or local councils, but did neither, as they collectivized them and put them in the thrall of a centralized totalitarian power run by state terrorism.)
The Wall Street Journal has a very revealing article by L. Gordon Crovitz that highlights the little-seen, real aspects of Assange's ideology. As with all very visible and violent revolutions, those applauding them or expecting to take advantage of them seize on the WikiLeaks propaganda (their slogan is "We open governments") as justification, and Assange's "propaganda of the deed" (like all terrorists) is that he is making a better world, opening government that is duplicitous and secret. We could just focus on his wrongful analysis, myopically selecting the United States as the worst example in the world of closedness, when it really should be China or Russia or Saudia Arabia, but it's precisely an infantile acceptance that the "U.S is the most powerful" that spawns that belief, and that's hard to dislodge. I think it's more important to question the nature of the movement itself, and the duplicity in its ideology.
Far from "working for openness" as some kind of global good, in reality, Crovitz shows from his past writings and other analysts like Aaron Bady, Assange is preaching the opposite of what he claims (or, as I would say, he has the cunning Bolshevik plot within the external socialist revolution packaging).
Unlike like the Gov 2.0 "progressives" working peacefully for legal openness, the extremist Assange is for what I would define as a Leninist "the worse, the better", seeking to cripple and destroy the hated United States, not make it better:
In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance." He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he writes. "Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," he writes, and "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."
His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—"conspirators" in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, "We can marginalize a conspiracy's ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."
Then, as Bady points out, discussing layers of mediation in a conspiracy with "octopus legs" (like the Algerian resistance to the French):
This, Assange reasons, is a way to turn a feature into a bug. And his underlying insight is simple and, I think, compelling: while an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to “think” as a system, to communicate with itself. The more conspiratorial it becomes, in a certain sense, the less effective it will be as a conspiracy. The more closed the network is to outside intrusion, the less able it is to engage with that which is outside itself (true hacker theorizing).
Assange's "killer app" is to make the "security state"(as the liberal democratic state America is always disparagingly called when it defends itself against the *real* security states like Russia, Iran, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, etc.) -- turn in on itself and make it close up like a clam, and make the state function against its liberal values to use illiberal methods to stop illiberal assaults. This is the Palestinians' gimmick; Assange has scaled it and perfected it for the social media age.
Everybody can become part of the conspiracy by downloading the "insurance" file, a coded file that can be triggered to detonate more discrediting files if "something happens" to Assange. And everybody is drawn into the conspiracy unwillingly, too -- not only journalists reporting on it, but readers reading about it. That's what the Bolsheviks were good at doing, too, turning liberals into radicals, turning the disinterested into the engaged or else they were the enemies of "progress".
The Wall Street Journal might be discarded by the left as merely protective of corporate power (which Amazon and Paypal might represent to them, although they are new kinds of corporate power that aren't "as evil").
Soda Straw View of Events
So if you don't want to hear it from Crovitz, hear it from the New Yorker. Raffi Khatchadourian can't help but gush a little admiration for this info-revolutionary poster boy, but even so, as Bady points out, you can see what I would call "some Marxist internal contradictions." The secretive, paranoid, and unaccountable atmosphere of WikiLeaks reeks from this article -- it's not a transparent non-profit with a board or 990s working for "social change"; it's a conspiracy.
This revolution is supposed to be about the new, the authentic, the raw, the open, the transparent, right? Yet our hero is shown in the New Yorker profile not only hiding his tracks, but worse, endlessly editing a tape and mischieviously inserting into it tendentious framing and wording. So Bady concludes Robert Gates was right (and I think he was right too) -- that WikiLeaks is a pin-hole straw-like view on events.
Even if the soldiers should be prosecuted for indiscriminate killing of civilians, when a proper and thorough organization could -- and should -- be done, the straw is indeed a straw concocted maliciously by anarchists, and for a purpose which undermines the war against insurgents who are far, far, less "discriminate" in their killing of civilians, as the war's body count amply illustrates -- the overwhelming majority of people killed in Iraq (and for that matter, in Afghanistan) are killed by terrorists, not by the U.S. or its allies. As Raffi admits, the unit that killed civilians was itself under attack by insurgents mingling with civilians to commit their deadly deeds.
The Moral of the Story
Second Life is a microcosm for real life that few outside of the experiment want to acknowledge, but I'm always astounded at its predictive power. Last year, we faced a WikiLeaks-like event -- an anti-crime vigilante force (what would be in Assange's mind that authoritarian and illegitimate United States) compiled a secret data base on users, documenting their "griefing" or crimes against the TOS, making profiles of actual and imagined criminals. The one of the griefing gangs, the b-tards, related to the anarchist Anonymous/4chan site (which is also part of WikiLeaks -- basically hired by WikiLeaks to do their attacks on other people), infiltrated the Justice League United (JLU), as the spandex-clad Second Life superheroes called themselves. Just as WikiLeaks was later to do with the State Department, Anonymous in Second Life stole all their files of the JLU. They then published them on various torrent sites.
I wrote about it on Typepad and also disclosed the plan for coding a real-time knowledge base with the JLU profiles. For that, I suffered a "DMCA takedown" notice, as if it were copyrighted material (it wasn't) of a business nature (there wasn't any business, it was a plan for how to take away people's civil rights). I was no friend of the b-tards, who I also criticized, and for which I'm also griefed frequently in SL. Typepad removed the material from my site and the Alphaville Herald, which celebrated the "Wrong Hands" operation by the b-tards and Woodbury University -- something I didn't do. They fought Typepad and eventually won (because it wasn't an authentic DMCA issue) -- then quit Typepad. I didn't bother to fight it because it wasn't interesting.
The revelations showed that either those who were already known as griefers were validated as such, and those who weren't and were mistakenly included still had to explain why they hung out with griefers so much. The operation ultimately led to the end of a relationship between a Linden Lab staffer and the JLU, over issues of conflict of interest (and he was subsequently dismissed, possibly for other reasons); the Woodburies themselves were all banned for their griefing later anyway, and their action against a company-supported vigilante group seen for what it actually was: an effort to distract from their crimes. We were all supposed to gasp at the threat to our civil liberties from keeping secret files, salivating on cue from Alphaville Herald propaganda, but not focus on the threat to our freedom and property by the constantly griefing and anarchal Woodburies. No thank you. We don't need either.
The story of Julian Assange is going to play out no differently than the story of Tizzers Foxchanse of the 4chan-invaded Woodbury University or the Emerald viewer hackers in Second Life. Servers will be seized. Payments cut off. Accounts closed. Third-party viewers -- the analogy of mirror sites -- will be blocked if they don't comply with regulations. The effort to distract from the anarchic crimes of WikiLeaks itself by supposedly pointing to worse crimes in secret files (they aren't there) will fail.
And so on. Organic humanity and its institutions will rein in the Internet when it doesn't serve people. WikiLeaks is not serving people. You would definitely not want to live in a world run by Julian Assange. It is merely the first, very visible battle in a long line of previous skirmishes by hackers in a war for power in the Metaverse. The nature of that future Metaversal government matters, and its nature is predicated on how the revolution behaves now. Revolutionaries willing to cut corners and commit crimes and harm people and democratically-elected governments along the way of obtaining "justice" will not be just when they come to power. The history of communism shows us that; technocommunism is not magically different just because it is in cyberspace.
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