Wikileaks forces hidden power to reveal itself
Any ideas that people had about free expression on the internet, about the value of a free press, about transparency and accountability, about unbiased educational standards, are all being called into question. Political figures who endorsed the value — and the necessity — of journalists pushing through government censorship are now calling for their government to censor journalists.
But this is what I mean. Five-hundred words in, and I still haven’t listed a day’s worth of facts, or addressed the content of the Wikileaks documents, or done much more than amass a collection of links. The only coherent picture I can make out of it all is exceedingly cynical about governments, media and corporate institutions, and overly idealistic about the people donating to Wikileaks, finding ways to circumvent the restrictions that the dominant power structures are imposing and becoming vocal about their dissatisfaction with a system that prizes largely pointless secrecy over truth and accountability.
In fact, the main reason I’m posting this is that the first time I thought about posting about it, I actually questioned whether doing so was in some way dangerous. And the fact that the atmosphere out there is such that it dissuades people from even entering a discussion — that the rhetoric from the government and politicians is having a legitimate chilling effect on the debate — is reason enough to get involved, even in a minor way.
This reaction by obscured or hidden power structures sees to be have been anticipated by Assange beforehand, described in essays from 2006.
The fear and passivity that the transborder state-corporate response is instilling among the public is visible -- not least in the above post, but even among my own friends. Some are quite concerned that they've donated in the past to Wikileaks, an organization that, so far, has been charged with no crime, is responsible for no deaths and is cooperating with major media corporations, but has troublingly exposed an obscured arrangement of violent global power. These events and reactions also expose the other side of the obscured power arrangement: an overwhelmingly passive and intimidated public, deeply worried about upsetting the normalcy of their everyday.
