Well, it’s been difficult not taking sides on the WikiLeaks’ scandal and, more precisely, Julian Assange’s dubious ethical standards. In the article I wrote for Tikkun Daily last month, I focused on the two aspects of this issue that progressive minds and Internet enthusiasts should remain aware of once the scandal dies down: it seems to me that the intra-governmental reaction to the information leak is indicative of what certain democratic government think the Internet should not do, and that, contrary to the average surfer’s perception, big private companies are the ones who own the online places where we hang out, receive our information, and store a lot of valuable information on. Users are dependent on privately-owned companies to manage their personal information as well as how they receive information with which they process reality. The major problem to this is that those services aren’t equally dependent on us; they actually depend on the economic and governamental status quo. Every time the Internet shows its truly “horizontal” potential, the more obvious the power struggle.
Online social protest has huge potential to help real-world social activism, but between its logical shortcomings (mostly based on the fact that its mechanics are just being shaped) and structural powers attempting to control the medium, we have to observe and analyse how big shakes like the WikiLeaks infowar shape online democracy.
About two months after Malcolm Gladwell’s notorious (and notoriously dismissive) proclamation, “The revolution will not be tweeted,” we find ourselves in the middle of the Wikigate scandal. There is a metaphysical lesson in there, I’m sure.
Now that WikiLeaks — legitimately or otherwise — has leaked a massive amount of confidential information, and now that different agencies of control — legitimately or otherwise — are trying to punish its founder and indirectly intimidate those who might attempt something similar in the future, a different kind of battle is being shaped: the battle over who gets to control the digital space. From our point of view, this means: who gets to voice their opinion online and how will online protest techniques be shaped? How can we make them have the largest impact possible? In the near future, protesting online will become as important as following causes or donating money, and social media will play a big role in shaping how those protests are expressed, as well as their effectiveness. This is something that progressives need to keep an eye on.
As Peter Marmorek pointed out in “The WikiLeaks Infowar,” as soon as the information leak first began, first-world governments — but most actively, the government of the United States — quickly went through great pains to pressure big companies to formally stop letting people support, get access to, or donate money to WikiLeaks. Mastercard and Visa don’t allow clients donations to be made, PayPal blocked those accounts that had previously given money to WikiLeaks, and online retailer Amazon hosted WikiLeaks for less than a week: as soon as the nonprofit media site posted its exposé, the financial sites cut it off.
By the end of the article you’ll see that he clearly thinks that Internet-based social activism is effective only when it requires 1) less effort, 2) less personal involvement, and 3) less hierarchical organization than when it does not. Following this logic, we could say that it’s easy to retweet someone else’s message about a rally happening somewhere, and it’s easy to like it on Facebook and say you will be attending the event, but when it comes to actually making phone calls, and printing out flyers, and organizing meetings, or putting our personal freedom at risk, our motivation to participate quickly fades. Problem is, Gladwell explains, that real, radical social movements have always required high-risk actions and close ties among their members, not to mention a strong organizational component. Gladwell concludes that social media today is useful only for small-scale, low-involvement social participation.