The Wikileaks Question

[Plutonia]

To be brutally frank we have not, in any way, been empowered. We KNOW a lot more (subject to applying the caveat of redacted bias) but we have no more POWER. If I'm wrong, please tell me how you will use the WL cables to empower the disenfranchised demographic, of which, most of us here probably regard ourselves.

A lazy conclusion.

Power imbalances rely on information asymmetry:

In economics and contract theory, deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry. [LOL] Examples of this problem are adverse selection and moral hazard. Most commonly, information asymmetries are studied in the context of principal-agent problems.

Here's an example of power accruing via strategic information asymmetry.

"Internet is making information asymmetry go away so fast"



And here's a group of netizens who are feeling empowered to act in their own interests: http://crowdleak.net/

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." - Abbott Joseph Liebling

[barracuda]

Barracuda? Jeff? Anything to say about this language?

What I'll say is that I don't object to fractious exchanges, but the barbs are getting too personal from both sides. So please dial it down.

I'd say the obscenities cross the line, and request that JackRiddler cease and desist on that account. It's unacceptable, no matter the state of the argument. I can't imagine this topic would suddenly become more interesting minus the inclusion of Alice, no matter if I disagree with her or not.

[Plutonia]

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@slow_dazzle




Found at new Anonymous cablewiki site.

[DrVolin]

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To the main spectacle, that of the latest Coalition being assembled to assault the new Axis of Evil of (1) Wikileaks, (2) Irresponsbile Investigative Journalism and (3) Too Much Internet Freedom, there has been a parallel attack on Wikileaks as a supposed psyop front (based on "Spidey Sense" but near-zero evidence).
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The position that Wikileaks is not a psyops front is based on no more evidence, and perhaps merely on the lack of Spidey Sense. Under those circumstances, and given the experience of the past 40 years, since Watergate at least, a sort of skeptical agnosticism as to the nature of Wikileaks should be the obvious position. The gnostic approaches, both of them, to Wikileaks rely on something very like faith. They are belief in the absence of evidence, and perhaps even in the absence of the possibility of evidence. I don't mean to be Jesuitical about this, but I really don't see the upside of belief in this case.

Someone else (sorry, can't remember) wrote something that caught my eye on the last page. Normally, the government would not be so concerned about what the public actually knows. This is very true. One of the foundations of modern propaganda is that one should control how people react to information, rather than control the information to which they have access. The second is a battle lost in advance, the first is a battle won before the war begins. Viewed from that perspective, the official reaction to Wikileaks is odd, unless it was planned. Not that this is actually evidence, one way or the other.

[vanlose kid]

that would be the Knight Foundation, which you could have found out if you'd have bothered to find out about wikileaks instead of relying on your J-wysense. – but, to quote c2w?, i'm sure you can dig up some smut by
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or anyone else of the same background "convictions" regarding the all-powerful j-w.

What the hell? You really put "LOSE" in your name, kid.
Barracuda? Jeff? Anything to say about this language?

why don't you tell me what difference you see between the grand thesis of "the all-powerful j-w" in the writings of Duff and his ilk (which are (1) what i find offensive (2) i did not seek out) that have been posted here by AtK that, according to her "express" her views and her views? what is it about that language that you don't find offensive?

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[crikkett]

offensive?

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Yes, you. Offensive. Live up to your name & get lost.

[JackRiddler]

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After consideration I must agree freely that my last post to Alice made hurtful use of profanity. The profanity was completely unnecessary to the points I was making. I went back and, without changing the meaning, deleted that language (marking the edit points). Not because it can be undone, or because it can be thrown down a memory hole, but because it was mean, and I don't know how else to try making up for it. Someone else reading it needn't be subjected to it. It's true this language doesn't bother me usually but it's also true I should know that it hurts others who don't share my attitude about it. In that moment I didn't care. I hope Alice and anyone else who found it hurtful will consider accepting my apology for it. Given irreconcilable differences and elements of her worldview that I find infuriatingly irrational and prompt strong repulsion in me, I will for both our sakes strive to stay away from responding to Alice's posts, a strategy that was working for long stretches of time.

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[Wombaticus Rex]

3. “Audience and Attention are Renewable Resources.”

Most of the internet traffic we get is kids, people without jobs or people who are bored at work. Clay Shirky has written on this “Cognitive Surplus” of idle human brains in front of computer screens that makes Viral Marketing possible. He argues, eloquently, that we can start using this Surplus for bigger and better things, but I don’t think it’s going to last long enough for that to happen. Actually, it’s already over. Most of the people who are bored at work this year will be unemployed in 12 months, or working somewhere with way less free time.

Also, Shirky won’t discuss is the fact that for most of the world, “Cognitive Surplus” is a luxury that simply doesn’t exist. (White Privilege is like that.) Even here in the United States, economic conditions continue to deteriorate. Every foreclosure, every lost job, every bill past due in America is having the direct effect of reducing this Surplus. The middle class has been DEVASTATED and no matter what business you think you’re in, that’s your customer base getting eroded right before your eyes. The “Cognitive Surplus” bubble is deflating very quickly right now.

http://www.audiblehype.com/blogs/busine ... edia-lies/

[vanlose kid]

*fixed

[why don't you tell me what difference you see between the grand thesis of "the all-powerful j-w" in the writings of Duff and his ilk (which are (1) what i find offensive (2) i did not seek out) that have been posted here by AtK that, according to her "express" her views and her views? what is it about that language that you don't find] offensive?

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Yes, you. Offensive. Live up to your name & get lost.

*chirp, chirp, chirp*

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[AhabsOtherLeg]

Something worth thinking about REALLY hard folks...

How have we been empowered to effect change? Tell me that please. Map me out your strategy for translating (sorry) the WL cable releases into change. What are you going to do? Lobby your elected representatives? Vote accordingly? (I know, I know)

...To be brutally frank we have not, in any way, been empowered. We KNOW a lot more (subject to applying the caveat of redacted bias) but we have no more POWER. If I'm wrong, please tell me how you will use the WL cables to empower the disenfranchised demographic, of which, most of us here probably regard ourselves.

If anyone has been waiting for Wikileaks or Assange to empower them towards effecting change in the world then they were never going to do anything anyway. It's that simple. It's a stress test - here is the information you wanted, here is the solid admitted proof - what action will you now take? If your reaction is to do nothing - that has been the reaction of society at large and the press so far - then we tacitly accept being lied to, misled, sold out, and used, don't we? We accept illegal drug testing on African children, government inquiries that are inquisitive in name only, the directed murder of political opponents, and the sponsorship of violent ganster regimes in foreign lands.

But Wikileaks isn't just being read by us, here, who knew about all these things already. It's being read by everybody, more or less, worldwide. And yes, their votes may change, the direction of their lobbying might be swayed, and etc.

For the rest of us, we look at the documents we have, the operations that we now know about for certain, and we look at what they relate to, and then we fire in the FOIA requests, in their multiples of dozens, until we hit on something they are not able to deny or hide anymore, under their own laws. Of course, they can always hide the worst stuff. But there are things that point towards the worst stuff that can be got through FOI. There is circumstantial evidence.

Maybe it sounds like just playing a part in their game (and maybe it is) but it's worked surprisingly well in the past, to an extent (not a great extent, I admit). But every little helps.

Our other choice is to do fuck all.

[vanlose kid]

...

If anyone has been waiting for Wikileaks or Assange to empower them towards effecting change in the world then they were never going to do anything anyway. It's that simple. It's a stress test - here is the information you wanted, here is the solid admitted proof - what action will you now take? If your reaction is to do nothing - that has been the reaction of society at large and the press so far - then we tacitly accept being lied to, misled, sold out, and used, don't we? We accept illegal drug testing on African children, government inquiries that are inquisitive in name only, the directed murder of political opponents, and the sponsorship of violent ganster regimes in foreign lands.

But Wikileaks isn't just being read by us, here, who knew about all these things already. It's being read by everybody, more or less, worldwide. And yes, their votes may change, the direction of their lobbying might be swayed, and etc.

For the rest of us, we look at the documents we have, the operations that we now know about for certain, and we look at what they relate to, and then we fire in the FOIA requests, in their multiples of dozens, until we hit on something they are not able to deny or hide anymore, under their own laws. Of course, they can always hide the worst stuff. But there are things that point towards the worst stuff that can be got through FOI. There is circumstantial evidence.

Maybe it sounds like just playing a part in their game (and maybe it is) but it's worked surprisingly well in the past, to an extent (not a great extent, I admit). But every little helps.

Our other choice is to do fuck all.

this.

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[Joe Hillshoist]

Something worth thinking about REALLY hard folks.

Ok, we now know a lot about what the inner machinations of government, albeit some of the releases have possibly been redacted etc. But here is my, possibly cynical, question.

How have we been empowered to effect change? Tell me that please. Map me out your strategy for translating (sorry) the WL cable releases into change. What are you going to do? Lobby your elected representatives? Vote accordingly? (I know, I know)

But seriously, what has changed, apart from knowing a few more details, many of which were already available through various sources? Now that the cables have been released, what are you going to do next?

To be brutally frank we have not, in any way, been empowered. We KNOW a lot more (subject to applying the caveat of redacted bias) but we have no more POWER. If I'm wrong, please tell me how you will use the WL cables to empower the disenfranchised demographic, of which, most of us here probably regard ourselves.

I have been thinking hard about this, and a few things. Ahab pretty much summed everything up nicely tho.

But IMO, I have been empowered by wikileaks. I actually forgot about it tho. Its good to not go online for a while, cos your brain catches up. being online all the time is a bit like tripping, you get exposed to too much info. I have been meaning to come back since JA got arrested, just to see the response, but needed thinking time.


I forgot to mention the ACMA (? - whatever the org that decided the internet blacklist was) blacklist earlier this year when all this JA is a spook wikileaks is a scam stuff started. It wasn't till I was watching the media circus on telly that i remembered.

But thats a clear example of where myself and a whole bunch of other people people were empowered by wikileaks. They published info that we didn't have access to, and thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands had access to it, or copied it - it became something that people talked about.

The info did. Wikileaks didn't, cept when they added to the list. Briefly.



To me thats interesting in itself.

I mean in many ways its fair enough, cos this is a story. Wikileaks is a story in terms of whats happening culturally.

They are the latest iteration of stuff like cryptome.

Some people talk about how that place is purer than wikileaks in some ways. Maybe - they have heaps of documents

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and I have no idea of more than a tiny amount of them.

When JB/Wombat penned that article about 911 truth he talked about how the brand structured itself to fit a media niche. To take time and energy in the publics mind.

Wombat talked about whats essentially an evolutionary conflict in the 911 truth movement, attention instead of physical survival is what drives that conflict tho. Attention is a resouce. (Its a simpler thing than getting resources while avoiding becoming one in some ways.)

In that sense wikileaks is the next step in an evolutionary conflict. Wombat talked about how the simple catch phrases "inside job" and "CD" became a more powerful meme than the more complicated narratives that raised more questions (imo). In a similar sense wikileaks is "inside job" to cryptome's more complicated narrative. Cryptome's like providing a link to history commons and saying figure it out for yourself.

Both of them rely on other people using that information.

If anything Assange is being quite smart around publishing all this stuff. It generates publicity and cements the idea of public access to documents in the public mind. - You know what would be the ultimate irony, if he and the two girls cooked this all up as a way of controlling like the situation. "I'm gonna get busted anyway, may as well do it on my terms."

That would be cool, and leave me thinking, wow thats a zen warrior move.

I very much doubt its the case. - Anyway he has certainly done well with the publicity before he got into the legal trouble. And the process has momentum. heaps f people see whats happening to him as a political attack on free speech and an open society. They ignore the implications of the fact that he's been charged with sexual assault.

This could change the way people see the world. Depending on the effective use of the info they supply of course.

Frankly if wikileaks is a scam them it has already fucked up because when it published the blacklist it probably killed the internet filter here. How that serves the needs of power is beyond me. (See that thing on the disappearance of information asymmetry Plutonia posted above.) I reckon if Conroy had got away with that filter then the rest of the world would follow quickly.

If its a CIA set up, thank you CIA for helping me (and heaps of others) protect our internet freedoms.

[Plutonia]

The “Cognitive Surplus” bubble is deflating very quickly right now.

Some perspective re deflating bubbles:




Unemployed people have lots more cognitive surplus than full-time+ workers.

And the disaffected/ripped-off, once-privileged middle-class (in the US) may well find themselves highly motivated share their surpluses. Or not. There's always the rest of the world.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

The internet blacklist was not intended to be limited to Australia either. It was intended for the Netherlands too, and later the globe, no doubt.

But it got revealed, and then it got discussed openly, and then it got laughed out of the legislature. That is the difference that openness, even forced openness makes. People will put up with massive amounts of concerted abuse - but not if they know about it.

So the blacklists were repealed, for the time being. And that respite from secret, not-very-discriminate censorship, however temporary, is not nothing,

It is a fuck of a lot. If Gordon Duff had achieved a real measurable change like that - or Sibel Edmonds, or Alex Jones, or Constantine, or Jeff Wells for that matter - we'd nearly all be ecstatic about it. Or John Young.

Then we'd all start asking questions about how it was achieved and the connections behind it, which is fair enough. But nobody did ask that, because apparently nobody has cared about Wikileaks until it got super famous.

In the meantime, useful, valuable things have been done,and a heavy price has been paid. People have been murdered, jailed, silenced already for the release of these documents, and the mass of others pre-dating them. The least we can do is read them .

That is the LEAST we can do.

[JackRiddler]

Hope springs eternal.