Wikileaks and the battle for middle earth begins

December 4th, 2010

In an erudite and compelling post John Naughton (What the attacks on Wikileaks tells us) brings from the shadows and into the foreground, some of the key issues that the current deluge of material from wikileaks has unveiled.

Naughton makes 4 keys points… [1] The first confrontation between the old order and a non-linear world, [2] The lying of political elites to electorates, [3] This is a wake up call [4] The entropic decline of our political systems. He also says this,

Like most people, I’ve only read a fraction of what’s been published by WikiLeaks, but one thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they comprehensively expose the way political elites in Western democracies have been lying to their electorates.

And,

What WikiLeaks is exposing is the way our democratic system has been hollowed out. Governments and Western political elites have been shown to be incompetent (New Labour and Bush Jnr in not regulating the financial sector; all governments in the area of climate change), corrupt (Fianna Fail in Ireland, Berlusconi in Italy; all governments in relation to the arms trade) or recklessy militaristic (Bush Jnr 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 in a really effective way, their reaction is to try to silence the messenger — as Noam Chomsky pointed out.

Why is it a battle for middle earth, or indeed all earth? Because I believe that we as a humanity are beginning, as I argue in my my forthcoming book No Straight Lines: making sense of a non linear world, to renegotiate the power relationships of how we work, trade, live, govern, educate ourselves. We are at the toxic tail-end of our industrial society, the literacy that accompanies the web, the ability to engage in the world in a different way means we, as a society, begin to ask bigger questions about that society.

For example Douglas Rushkoff points out that,

But like literacy, the open source ethos and process are hard if not impossible to control once they have been unleashed. Once people are invited to participate in say, the coding of a software programe, the begin to question just how much of the rest of our world is open for discussion, formerly esoteric subjects such as Urban Design or Monetary Policy become much more central as the public comes to recognise the power of these planning spcialities to establish rules through which society actually comes into existence… we become more conscious consequently, and more aware or how our day-to-day decisions can be better aligned with larger issues.

This leads to the idea that a Gestalt Switch has been triggered, in No Straight Lines, I write,

I wonder whether we are once again after a period of time taking matters into our own hands. I ask this question as John Keane in The Life and Death of Democracy refers to Charles Malik [1], who was renowned as someone who profoundly believed in the principles of human rights. How do we, asked Malik gain the rights of humanity on a global scale? Indeed, Malik believed that if humanity felt that the various institutions of governance failed us we would take matters into our own hands – and we did. Yet in many ways, that was still confined to regions and countries. Is it possible this time around that through communications connectivity the scope changes perspective? “This new galaxy of media has no historical precedent,” says Keane. It is: “a new world system of overlapping and interlinked media devices that integrate texts, sounds and images and enable communication to take place through multiple user points, in chosen time, either real or delayed, within modularized and ultimately global networks that are affordable and accessible to many hundreds of millions of people scattered across the globe”[2].

I sense the possibility of history in the making. In today’s world the powerful are often “feeling the ‘pinch’ of the powerless”. Politics as a consequence has become viral, even visceral, which implies that traditional frameworks of governance have become somewhat outdated, and consequently ineffectual. Therefore Keane concludes, in the age of networked communications, combined with organisations that are constantly monitoring the motives and actions of various powerful parties, “combine into something of a Gestalt switch” which makes us think differently about how we perceive power and who wields it.

As Frantz Fanon once famously said, “A people will only be free when the control their own communications”. I am not for a free-for-all anarchist existence – but I do think we are forcing a conversation about trust, power and control; who has it, and how it is wielded now and in the future.

[1] Keane, p.733

[2] Keane, p.738

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