Editor's Blog
The war between secrecy and transparency has been going on for decades, but it recently erupted into a massively public stage with the current war between multiple world governments and Wikileaks.
Whether you think Wikileaks is good or bad is up to you, but it is really besides the point, as is whether the Governments succeed in suppressing the information (which seems unlikely given the entire point to the internet is to ensure function even under massive damage, and suppression attempts previously have basically been treated as damage and simply routed around) because this is simply a highly visible battle in an eternal war between accountability and avoidance of it.
Secrecy has been the norm for much of the human race’s history. It’s the primary tool that we developed to avoid accountability. Way back when we were living in tribes, accountability was the norm, because in a tribe, with limited members, everyone knew everyone else, and everyone knew everything about everyone else. There were very very few secrets, and those secrets were generally minor, a child might hide the fact that he was the one who broke a spear that his father favored, or a couple might hide their relationship for a time. Such personal secrets mattered little to the safety of the tribe, and were thus ignored.
But other kinds of secrets could not be long concealed. If a tribe member stole from other tribemates, such a secret would soon be discovered, and the thief held accountable. A hunter who regularly refused to share his kill would be refused a share when others killed. The tribe understood that they had shared responsibilities as part of the tribe, and that those responsibilities led to rewards as part of the tribe. Deny the responsibilities, you were denied the rewards.
That’s what made cooperation worthwhile. A hunter who shared his kill would still be fed when he didn’t make a kill that day. A gatherer who collected berries would still eat if they were too sick to go pick that day. But someone who refused to assist the tribe would not long be allowed to remain in the tribe, and would thus lose the benefits of being part of the tribe.
But that changed when we began agriculture, because we began forming larger communities, and we began to have societies in which it was impossible to know everyone, or to know about everyone. Thieves could go for years without being caught, and accountability became impossible to maintain beyond a limited group of peers. Hammurabi’s laws were one of our first recorded attempts to reintroduce accountability to the larger collective, as all laws since have attempted to do.
But those laws can only be applied to those who are caught and forced to be accountable, and thus secrecy became the primary tool of avoiding accountability. A person could amass vast wealth by avoiding accountability, and derive enormous benefits from the collective society without having to ever contribute to it.
And so it has been throughout the ages, a constant struggle between attempts to enforce accountability, and attempts to avoid it at all costs. Depending on your ideological beliefs, you may not agree with me on which side is which in this current war on Wikileaks, but it illustrates a trend I have been observing for years that makes me believe that the future is going to go to transparency, and a return to a society in which accountability is restored.
We are already seeing a start towards this with the vast archives of news footage that are available to the media, which covers decades of historical data, but which goes largely unused by the majority of current media news people. There are exceptions though, such as The Daily Show, which makes a point of hunting down previous media appearances by political figures, and contrasting their current statements against the positions they have held in the past, usually pointing out rampant hypocrisy. While this has so far had little effect on the political landscape, it does show that we are increasingly able to review the “record” and could, if voters actually cared about such things, have been able to hold those politicians accountable for the swinging door of their political stances.
However the real importance of that example is to illustrate how it is possible to create records which cannot be disputed. Those videos Stewart shows reveal what was actually said and done in the past, not what someone claims that they said or did, or what their faulty memory recalls them saying or doing. It’s a cold hard factual record of reality.
The same goes for all the cables and other documents that Wikileaks has, or plans to release. Like those video tapes, they are cold hard facts that might prove impossible to hem and haw about, regardless of whether they are really harmful or not. They are truth, unvarnished by opinion, personal viewpoint, or faulty memory.
This is what makes such records so valuable, and why there are so many efforts ongoing to prevent them from becoming available to the public. They may contain absolutely nothing that might convict anyone of a crime, they might contain evidence so damaging it could collapse governments, but because there is such an effort to prevent their release, it is proving something I have been saying for years. Suppression DOES NOT WORK. It might delay the inevitable, but it will not prevent it forever.
Take for example this little tidbit. Yes, we have conclusive evidence that Bell Labs knew about magnetic recording for 60 years, and suppressed it. Think about that. Think about what might have happened in WW II if computers had been able to use magnetic storage media, about how much different the Space race might have been with 20 years of magnetic media computer development. And yet, in the end, despite this suppression, magnetic media did come about, and changed the world. We can only speculate about what might have been, but despite that sixty years of suppression, inevitably, the technology still made it out of the shadows and into widespread use.
Now, let’s contrast that with what is happening over Wikileaks, and what do we see? For one thing, we’ve seen that a lot of promises about neutrality have been empty air. Amazon caved to pressure and evicted Wikileaks, So did EveryDNS. Even the Swiss, famed for their “Neutrality”, has shut down Wikileaks bank account. And what has been the practical result? When I last checked, Wikileaks is still functioning, and checking the news about it lead me to this interesting story about how numerous peer to peer networkers are working to create a “shadow net” mirror of the ICANN registry scattered across hundreds of servers worldwide, basically bypassing the centralized control of DNS names by any official governmental agency.
And this illustrates a VAST difference between the world of 60 years ago, when Bell labs could successfully sit on a technology and delay it, and the world of today in which the entire world is connected via millions of computers and billions of communication lines. Bell Labs could control information because there were extremely few channels by which that information could leave their control. It’s more or less ceased to matter whether the information Wikileaks is planning to release ever is or not, the attempts to prevent their release has ALREADY started the creation of solutions that will ensure that the current efforts to suppress will not be able to succeed in the future.
But there is more evidence in my belief that transparency and accountability is the inevitable end result of this war between secrecy and openness, despite the seemingly endless pockets of various industries trying to ensure that nothing will ever threaten their profits. Take the ongoing war over net neutrality, in which the telecoms are desperately trying to make sure the rules get rewritten in favor of their pocketbooks. It’s understandable that they recognize that the future of networking devices is most likely going to be wireless, and that they are trying to carve out empires for themselves in which they can wring every penny of profit out of their customers while preventing those customers from having other options, but that will merely provide even more incentive for such technologies as Roofnet, a wireless connection architecture in which wireless devices ignore centralized broadcast structures (which telecoms depend on) to communicate directly with each other, creating daisy chains from device to device until they connect to the larger internet. Given that such a network is far cheaper to establish than the older, traditional network of broadcast towers, and that with the new wireless technologies which can broadcast over miles and other advances in the sensitivity of antennas, and that these new technologies also offer a massive boost in speed over existing wireless networks, which do you think is going to have a larger market penetration in developing areas? The massively expensive, centralized cell services of the telecoms, or a much cheaper, massively decentralized network that grows as fast as you turn on individual networked devices? A move to tiered services and massive fees for the telecoms now is little more than a death warrant in the near future as it locks them into a technological path that appears to be at the end of its life expectancy.
And such a decentralized network is going to be impossible to control, making it even less likely that information leaks like Wikileaks will be able to be prevented.
A third factor is the utter failure of the recording and movie industries to prevent file sharing. Despite many new measures, billions in prosecution efforts, and a very limited number of “major successes” like the case against The Pirate Bay, it should be pretty obvious that on the whole, anti-piracy measures have been a complete, and utter failure. I was working for SONY when the multi-billion dollar CD/DVD anti copying scheme that they had spent years working on proved vulnerable to a $1 Sharpie pen. Since then, I’ve seen no real evidence than any new DRM or Intellectual property protection schemes have been any more successful, but a lot of hype about the damage being done to the profit margins of companies that base their business models on being gatekeepers between an artist and their audience.
I could also go into the proliferation of cameras, and their effects, but David Brin did a wonderful job doing that already in The Transparent Society, so let me simply sum it up with this. We’re rapidly putting cameras into every corner of our world, and those cameras are already making massive numbers of records, which are in turn creating a proliferation of “real life” shows like America’s Dumbest or It Only Hurts When I Laugh. Add in the massive sales of the Kinect, and the inevitable rise of VR, and I’m sure you can see that our entire world is soon going to be as subject to the same kind of “playback” that Jon Stewart does regularly to politicians. Add in the possible use of Quadcopters as Remote Telepresence and the likelihood of your not being on camera pretty much full time, and by your own choice, is going to be pretty slim. You are going to want your life on camera, because it will be your primary defense against being on everyone else’s cameras, as well as your passport to the many wonders of VR/AR.
And the end result of all that loss of secrecy? As I stated above, a return to that early tribal ability to ensure accountability. When everything is recorded, when your every action can be proven, your every word verifiable, you will basically have exactly what James L. Halperin writes about in The Truth Machine, a way to ensure that everyone you meet is telling the truth, a way to ensure that anyone who sexually harasses you is caught, that every crime is solved, and every contract honored. It will redefine the world that we have known, and eradicate the ability of a select few to escape accountability.
But for now? It really doesn’t matter whether Wikileaks is stopped or not. It’s just the opening salvo in the final war between unaccountable elitism, and accountable equality, and there is only one real possible outcome, though there may be many partial victories for those who seek to remain unaccountable. It may take decades, but the future will belong to Transparency.
46 Comments
Dear @Sir, @Madam,
On the Road to Freedom:
©MINDCON’S THEORY OF INFOWAR AGAINST CIVILIANS!
PLEASE HELP THE VICTIMS!
http://mindcon.wordpress.com/
Yours sincerely.
The problem is that information does nothing. We have info that 9/11 was inside job, that there was no WMD in Iraq, that all ruling elite (including so-called “Conservative Christians”) belongs to closed Satan-worshipping clubs, and so on, and so on, and so on. Yet did it changed ANYTHING? No, it didn’t. You should read Assange’s interviews. He explicitly states that freedom of press in West is possible because words mean nothing. So, this “transparency” of yours will only hurt privacy of ordinary working class citizens, making their info to be available to police state that is modern-day U.S. This won’t do shit to powers that be. In fact, it will only make them stronger. You don’t have any clue, do you? Luckily, this guy has:
“The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be “free” because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.” —Julian Assange
You are focused only on western power, I am looking at the balance of power across the world. As powerful as the “West” is, it is in decline, and becoming ever more vulnerable to the rising power of other nations and the rejection of the “oligarchy’s lock down on power”
America, despite my hopes that it will survive as a nation and not collapse into anarchy, is nonetheless an empire on it’s last legs.
And read the last line again. There may be many partial victories for those seeking to avoid accountability, but these will be temporary victories. Regardless of short term repression, in the long term transparency will outcompete secrecy. The sole “solution” that would enable secrecy to remain dominant is total stagnation, which is impossible.
Like I said, transparency won’t do a damn to curb corrupt elites. Because to harm elites, info is not enough – you must be part of the elite and have specific resources to project power. On other hand, anybody can harm an ordinary person. Think of airport security scans that leak into YouTube or the whole cyber-bullying issue. You can cyber-bully ordinary citizen, but you can’t cyber-bully high class fat cat, who lives in gated community and has security apparatus on his payroll. Assange can give corrupt people bad PR, but in the end, he is still a super-empowered journalist. He has no power of his own and, “double agent theory” aside, no hidden agencies to back him up. You won’t see Assange running for presidency, for example. He is a heroic vigilante, not a political alternative.
As for the whole West-East shift, I agree with you on this point. However, Assange yet to release any interesting leaks on Eastern behemoths like China and Russia. And contrary to his opinion, I don’t think that it will help if he will. Neither China, nor Russia have problems with being perceived as “bad guys”. They are officially Realpolitik states, without specific ideology. In the West (which is Realpolitik de facto, but not de jure), people wrongly think that their governments don’t lie, cheat, torture, etc. In the East, nobody has these illusions. I mean, if we trust polls, if Stalin was alive today, he would win presidency in Russia, and we are talking about a guy who killed 62 million people. And despite anti-Mao stance of CPC, he is just as popular in China, and he killed even more. And in terms of foreign policy, Russia obviously plays “fear equals respect” card. If Assange leaked that Putin is secretly plotting WW3 nuke-fest or something, such stuff would only boost his popularity both inside Russia and abroad.
IMHO, Wikileaks is distinctively Western phenomenon. In the East, leaks of that sort are usually by-product of power-struggle, and are considered to be okay. But Western citizens have a very idealistic, ideology-fixed view of the world (“good Western democracies” vs “bad Eastern dictatorships”). Assange is going to smash this illusion (it will be “good Western dictatorships” vs “bad Eastern dictatorships”), but Realpolitik and tribalist approach won’t going anywhere any time soon.
What is also important, is that Assange himself, as individual, is a product of Western culture, a “freedom fighter”, a “white hat hacker”. He is driven by ideology. In the end, he is just as naive as people he tries to enlighten. People with his skills and background, if raised in the East, won’t start something like Wikileaks. Check Assange’s interview on TED:
http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html
He says that modern-day hackers are Russian mafia types who hijack credit card accounts or stuff like that. It is interesting to know that the whole cyber-warfare issue DoD is so vocal about is a counter-action to Chinese and Russian activities. Russian “mafia state” special services tolerate and even nurture criminal hacker underground, seeing it as useful black ops asset and sort of clandestine contractor. I won’t be surprised if China does the same. Eastern counterpart to Assange is a mix of mafia “black hat” cracker and black ops freelance on KGB payroll, cyberpunk-style. I am not saying that it is necessarily “bad”, but it is not what you expect from technological progress. If there would ever be Russian Wikileaks, it would be run by some sort of KGB Colonel. Just like KGB creates fake political organizations to lure dissidents, and was doing that since times of Lenin (google “Operation Trust”) and even Tzars (google “Zubatov”). I can expect same from the Chinese. Modern-day dictatorships are very tech-savvy, and have no problem with hiring skilled criminals (even enemies) to do the job for them. That’s why they thrive in hyper-connected world, while old school ideology-driven and deception-based authority (like modern-day Western regimes, or like old Soviet Union) are doomed.
It will be cool to imagine scenario where the United States transforms into some “truth-friendly” society, but if I had to bet on something, I would bet on “anarchy” scenario. It is the most plausible and likely outcome. When Soviet Empire collapsed, 1/6 of Earth’s landmass was sent to mafia-run hellhole for more than ten years. We can only imagine what will happen when American Empire collapses and dollar plunges down, and this WILL happen sooner or later. In the end, the big winners are BRIC and SCO, and they have some very, ugh, “unique” approach to the whole “democracy and transparency” issue.
I was very happy to read this article just minutes before Brad Blanton’s new book, The Korporate Kannibal Kookbook, arrived at our offices from the printers. Chapter 9 is entitled “The Truth Machine: How We Can Know What Is True” and is based in part on Halperin’s book. See http://orgyofgreed.com for more information!
Mike
that blurb isn’t saying anything I haven’t been saying for years, but I will point out something you might have missed.
Historically this is nothing new. It’s the final stage of the cycle of repression that usually happens priori to a major social upheaval.
The economic crisis is happening because we have hit a crisis point in the economy of scarcity. Scarcity requires that a material remain scarce to retain value. The problem is that we’ve run out of things that are scarce. The Industrial Revolution has relentlessly eroded the scarcity of nearly everything. Even Gold and Diamonds have become relatively common compared to their pre industrial status. We’ve been more or less costing along on a economy of artificially maintained scarcity.
But real value has been shifting from material based resources, which are steadily losing value, to non-material resources. Examine the different behavior patterns of companies based primarily on non-material wealth (like software or electronics) and those based on material resources (like oil, or industrial manufacturing). This attempt by corporations to take over government and rewrite the rules to protect their profits IS BECAUSE THOSE PROFITS ARE VANISHING. This is their last desperate attempts to survive in a world in which their chief cash cow is rapidly vanishing.
The same goes for the “anti-piracy” moves. The Companies behind the majority of the anti-piracy legislation are those who’s models are based on gatekeeping. They build a wall between their “customers” and their “clients” and charge both sides to allow access. The Music industry has made it’s fortune for decades telling people what to listen to, and then charging them for the privilege of getting to listen. With the internet providing an alternate path for musicians to reach their audience, more musicians are reaching an audience. That may not mean that any one musician will reach the levels of income enjoyed by the biggest of the “Rock Superstars” of the last century, but FAR MORE artists will reach SOME level of success without the intervention of the music industry. The same is starting to be true of the “movie” industry as well, as the massive success of web productions like “The Guild” shows that the “big budget” of Hollywood is not needed to succeed. We’re moving away from the day when a massive studio and budget is needed to make a successful “movie”
The same thing is about to happen in manufacturing as we begin to switch from subtractive manufacturing (i.e. whittling a block of material down to make a product) to additive manufacturing (using a 3d printer to build a product up from nothing). Additive manufacturing will utterly destroy the “assembly line” factory in short order, and make products so cheaply and so quickly that they might as well be “free”
As more and more technologies erode the need for massive investments to produce a “product” the last vestiges of “value” will vanish from material wealth. All this “Corporate Cannibalism” is a symptom of this decline in the “real value” of material wealth, and a desperate attempt to prevent technological change from rendering the majority of these corporations extinct as their “product” loses it’s last value.
I understand your views, but fail to share them, because again, you are focusing on an entirely different phenomena than I am.
You still see a “top down control” structure, but what I am discussing is a “bottom up erosion of top down control structures”
Does Russia and China hire hackers? Sure they do. Would their version of Wikileaks be a KGB style “Black Ops” misinformation cold war era spy program, I’m pretty sure they would be.
But I’m not referring to such things, I’m pointing out the proliferation of technologies in the hands of the masses that will, after some pretty nasty and repressive dictatorial efforts to prevent and suppress, eventually result in a backlash against those repressive efforts and result in the transparency I am talking about.
Did I say it would come without “temporary victories” for the side of repression and secrecy? No. I am fully expecting some very harsh and large scale efforts to prevent transparency. I would even say it is likely that a LOT of people are going to die because of those efforts. But those efforts WILL INEVITABLY FAIL. It may not happen in 1 year, or ten, or even twenty, but EVERY DICTATORSHIP EVENTUALLY FALLS TO BE REPLACED BY A SOCIETY OF MORE OPENESS.
Is anything you said incorrect? No. I quite agree with your assessments. But you are looking only to a certain point in time, while I am looking BEYOND that point in time to the even further in the future eventual result.
REPRESSION DOES NOT WORK IN THE LONG TERM, NO MATTER HOW SUCCESSFUL IT MAY BE IN THE SHORT TERM. That is the essential fact I am pointing out.
It may be ten, twenty, or fifty years away, and it may go through some of the most horrendous nightmarish repressive regimes inbetween, and you and I may not live to see it, but it will STILL be the end result.
Are you racist and/or learned history by watching Hollywood movies?
The problem with “technology empowers people” worldview is that it works only in first stages, when tech is still immature and uncontrolled. Think of Internet, for example. In the “geocities age” it was some free-for-all informational bazaar. Early Web 2.0 gave hopes of “community-building utopia”, which failed to happen. Now, with Facebook, Google and Apple running the show, it is just an expanded version of television. And during election protest in Iran, U.S. State Dep actually ORDERED Twitter around, like it wasn’t “enlightened free communication platform”, but was some sort of army brigade. The truth is, technology is what makes power projection possible. From gunpowder, radio and combustion engine – to robotics, nanotech, AI and Web 3.0. Sure, you can use just the same tech to weaken power projection – like encryption. But it won’t give you the power, it will simply weaken the ability to track you, but not remove it completely. A knife is a best password recovery tool.
We were talking about Assange, but check the news, he is under arrest – under false accusations of rape. The accuser is CIA-funded cut-out with record of working in Sweden’s anti-communist groups. Good old HUMINT. Assange was a master hacker, but did his tech savvyness saved him? In the age of good old TV and phone, he could evade special ops for decades. Now, in the transparent society, he is like an ant under the microscope. Britain, where he was arrested, is just what you propose: Orwellian surveillance state where your every move is recorded by cameras and various sensor devices. Can citizen use such info? No, because they don’t have resources to do that. Can governments, corporations, etc, use such info? Absolutely. And that’s just the beginning. We don’t have efficient facial recognition, or AIs that can understand text. When they are online, expect “1984″, since not just your every move, but your every word will be tracked. In the old times, such surveillance would require impossible amount of resources and personnel. But new tech will bring the costs down.
You write:
“those efforts WILL INEVITABLY FAIL … EVERY DICTATORSHIP EVENTUALLY FALLS TO BE REPLACED BY A SOCIETY OF MORE OPENESS … REPRESSION DOES NOT WORK IN THE LONG TERM, NO MATTER HOW SUCCESSFUL IT MAY BE IN THE SHORT TERM”
…but capslock shows that you ain’t so sure about it yourself. Really, such assertions should be backed up with something more than upper case letters. You just repeated the mantra of the same idealistic ideology that has driven American Empire for the last half-a-century or so. Kind of “democracy is a universal value that will sooner or later triumph over older, archaic forms of governance”. But guess what, it failed to work – even in United States itself. It was just a nifty way of saying “American corporations will triumph over Chinese corporations”. In fact, America’s nemesis, USSR, had the same mantra (“communism is a universal value that will sooner or later triumph over older, archaic forms of governance”), with exactly the same meaning (i.e. “let’s build a good old fashioned Tzars’ empire”), but it also failed to work. Sure, empires do fail, but they aren’t replaced by more benign societies, they are replaced by other empires. Power vacuum, left by demise of Western civilization, would be quickly filled by Chinese, Russians, Muslims, etc. So, the future question is “Communism or KGB or Caliphate”. Like I said, when you pull out that “democracy vs tyranny” concept, you just repeat OLD question – the question of Cold War, entire “Evil Empire” stuff. Which is strange, since you don’t consider U.S. to be beacon of democracy, and therefore don’t have to repeat this patriotic, but false propaganda.
Sorry, without some empire to back it up, nobody will take democracy seriously as something valueable. Modern West is not democratic, but it spreads democratic propaganda to whitewash its image, and some people, like Assange, take it seriously. But without U.S. empire, nobody will use democracy as political argument any more. Never forget that freedom-loving non-violent NGOs we all adore (like Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders) were CIA-backed, state-funded tools to subvert and conquer Third World. During Yugoslavia Wars, Doctors Without Borders were actually used by CIA to smuggle weapons to Albanian guerillas. So much for “peaceful”, “non-violent” and “neutral”, I guess. Or do you think that all this “Chinese dissidents” issue (check newsreel about Nobel Peace Prize) is because China violates some human rights or something? Or, better yet, Khodorkovsky trial in Russia – we have around a week before new verdict comes out. From what media and NGOs tell us, he is some sort of freedom-loving dissident who is wrongly oppressed by KGB. But if you check his story, he is was a mafia oligarch, oil tycoon and former richest person in Russia, who get his fortune through crime and whose “democracy promotion” was trying to sell Russian oil assets to British Petroleum and other such Western corps and trying to take over Russian government. “Democracy promotion” is just a soft word for “regime change”. U.S. needs democratical political system so that it can insert its own actors in it, and needs liberal economic system so that it can take over important assets or bring down dangerous competitors.
That’s why CIA funds various NGOs, which in turn produce “freedom narrative” that inspires guys like Assange. When you read about “popular protests against governments” somewhere in Iran, Venezuela, Russia or elsewhere, we are talking about “soft power” projection and black ops, not about genuine opposition. Think of “color revolutions” in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine and attempts to spread them to Moldova, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and even Russia proper. When they happened, people rejoiced: or, that’s so cool, new tech and social networks can bring down corrupt post-Soviet governments. Now, we know for sure that it was just a U.S. operation to overthrow local regimes and replace them with puppet governments which would allow U.S. bases on its territory – even if public at large don’t want it at all. Good Cold War style powerplays. If tomorrow, some state in Europe, Latin America, Africa or Asia would be replaced via “non-violent Internet-based revolution”, don’t be so quick to celebrate, it is 100% likely that it is just CIA attempt to overthrow popular-backed government with pro-American dictator with good PR. Or, in future, attempts of Russia and China to do the same: recent revolution in Kyrgyzstan, for example, is believed to be KGB job. At first, the most benign, peaceful and enlightened regime in Central Asia EVER was overthrown via Internet revolution by United States, which wanted additional bases to supply Afghan War. Then, five years later, this regime was overthrown by same type of revolution, but Russia-backed, who wanted to deny Americans access to Manas Air Base, located there. You see, to do such feats of “Internet-based freedom movement” you need to be superpower in your own right. Guys like Assange cannot overthrow governments, because to do so, you need to have billions of dollars of cash, thousands of armed thugs, powerful security services, moles inside state apparatus, etc. Assange has none.
History is not a saga of evolution from tyranny to democracy (U.S. narrative), nor it is a saga of evolution from tyranny to communism (U.S.S.R. narrative), it is a saga of empires fighting each other, and using various tech to improve their power. Now, some empires ARE more soft than others, but that is not time-dependant issue. Soviet Union was more dictatorial than Russian Empire, and Islamic Republic of Iran is more dictatorial than Iranian Monarchy. There is absolutely no signs that future empires would be more benign than empires of past or present. But they WILL be more powerful and WILL have more control over individual, because modern technology allows to do it, and above all – “transparency technology”. Before Orwell’s “1984″ with telescreens, transparency issue was picked in other dystopia – Zamyatin’s “We”, where people lived in glass houses so that everybody can see what everybody else is doing. The only times they were allowed privacy was during sex (the book was written in 1920), but in modern age, this is not the issue, as many leaked sex videos show. In fact, any old-school dystopia had total transparency as primary pre-requisite.
The conclusion is simple: technology doesn’t make empires more friendly, but it does make them more powerful. We need to face reality: dystopia is hard, because maintaining control is resource-consuming. But technological advance brings dystopia costs down, and that means sooner or later, full-fledged dystopia won’t be only possible, but viable and efficient. It is hard to build “1984″ in stone age, or medieval times, or even industrial age. But with nanotech and AIs? Easy. And practical. You can bet that real Singularity will look like “Half-Life 2″ – the only thing we don’t know is whether it will have Russian, Chinese or Muslim logo on it, or probably all three at the same time.
The entire “tech is your friend” issue that is in the core of Humanity Plus ideology is simply wrong. Tech gives POWER, and the most tech-obsessed people today are people who want POWER: generals, dictators, terrorists, mafia, spies, etc. In his TED interview, Assange says that “black hats” are inferior to “white hats”, but that’s just hubris and wishful thinking. Sort of Hollywood cliche where hero always triumphs over supervillain. In real world, villains are more dedicated and “driven”, and therefore more strong. Churchill was a great leader, but he is no match for Stalin or Hitler. Russian hacker community is considered to be strongest in the world – and this community is completely devoid of “white hat” values, and sometimes even openly hostile to them. Check interviews with Kaspersky (creator of AVP). He is said to be rare Russian “white hat” hacker – in reality, he is simply a rich businessman, not “white hat” virus-fighting vigilante. He gives some very disturbing info about world’s strongest hacker community. Like it is not just “okay”, but “heroic duty” to rob and harm Westerners in this subculture. Or like it is nurtured by black ops guys. Or like it attracts best brains, because crime pays more than honest IT security work.
A couple of links to back my claim:
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-merchant-death-versus-the-reset-4423
But as has also been alleged in the state’s relationship with the prolific and talented Russian hacker community, the Kremlin might be prepared to turn a blind eye to a variety of activities if, at times, the covert interests of the state are being served in other areas—such as helping Moscow develop its own cyberwar capabilities.
Or, even worse:
http://www.rferl.org/content/Russias_Silicon_Valley_Dreams_May_Threaten_Cybersecurity/2219756.html
James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the biggest global cyber-threat isn’t warfare but financial crime, which “almost always leads back to Russia.”
One of the latest examples was an Eastern European cybercriminal network made public last month, when the FBI charged more than 60 people in various countries with stealing tens of millions of dollars from American banks. The Zeus Trojan virus used to steal bank-account passwords is believed to have been developed by Russian criminals.
Carr says such software worms “provide the platform” for the state to conduct cyberespionage or attacks. Since the programs can operate from servers outside Russia, they also provide the Kremlin with the crucial benefit of plausible deniability.
Lewis believes the Kremlin is failing to prosecute the majority of known hackers because it wants to maintain a pool of them to draw on when needed.
“You have a state that’s relatively active in controlling communications and dissident groups,” Lewis says. “And yet they say they’re unable to control these patriotic hackers. There’s a disconnect there. You’re a police state, but you’re saying these guys are just outside your control.”
Just think about it for one second. Smartest hackers in the world work for a POLICE STATE (or mafia state – it is hard to distinguish police and mafia in Russia) – and enthusiasticly so. They actually help KGB to use Internet to control pro-democratic dissidents, whom they probably hate and despise (democracy is so unpopular in Russia that no democratic party managed to pass 5% election barrier). You follow wrong idea that if person is smart, he should share your values. So, if he is smart, he is a good guy. And tech is an instrument of good guys vs. evil backward tyrants. That’s a dangerous myth. Stalin was smarter than Churchill, Putin was smarter than Bush (or any other Western leader), and those “black hat” hackers in Moscow are smarter than Assange. Hell, even current Russian president Medvedev – “tech-savvy soft pro-Western liberal” – wasn’t it the same dude who squashed U.S.-equipped, U.S.-trained Georgia with tanks in 2008? Unfortunately, smartest people on the planet are not the good guys. And all those cool technologies you write about (nanotech, AIs, uploading, cyborgs, etc) – it will be them (or people like them) who will use it. Because they are smart. Because they have the money and connections. Because they have both mafia and police state on their side. And what do you have? Some thinkers and bloggers who write online and meet on some summits and conferences that decide nothing. Assange is many times more powerful than guys like Max More or Kurzweil, but even he ended up in jail in no time. You said it yourself: days of Western civilization are numbered. West, being dictatorial, at least SAYS that democracy is good. Eastern powers don’t. They despise Western softness and naivette and consider it to be “weakness”. And they ARE smarter than us. Taking that into account, do you really think that Singularity will be benign? What proof, other than empty hope and wishful thinking, do you have to back this statement? And, no, capslock doesn’t count.
Anonymous described position from his own, very unique point of view. Let say Russia is populated with brainless monsters which wants to nuke somebody. In reality we have special anti-corruption resource whose creator became quite popular person in spite he is studying in USA . He became a newsmaker. Couple years ago situation were different – any publication in internet would stay there. Today radio, tv and newspapers does not ignore it anymore. In fact calling for help in blog or intenet mass media is the only hope for many Russians. So far Assange published information against American bureaucracy but in his interview he promised to publish few thousand documents on Russia in two month. Internet is becoming more and more inconvenient for ruling elites throughout the world but in a various manners. Witchhunt against Assange is the sign of continuous social degradation but only option they had is total censorship. I guess it’s too late.
You guys are so funny. Both “corporate cannibals” and “anti-coporate freedom fighters” will mean nothing when Western civilization melts down due to monetary default, which, as everybody knows, is only a matter of time. You both are trying to fix some irrelevant device on the ship that is beyond repair and sinking. China is a number one digital piracy haven in the world. Yet it is also a communist dictatorship. Go figure. Better learn Chinese, Russian, Arabic and Spanish if you really want to thrive in future world.
The new meme seems to be “peak everything”. It is pretty clear that a finite planet isn’t going to support an exponentially increasing population forever. That is, I think Malthus was basically correct. The only reason we haven’t hit a wall on food sooner is that we use fossil fuel subsidies to boost agricultural output (both by fertilizers and by tractor fuel) along with the enclosure of the commons and consolidation of small farms to increase yields which are gains that we’ve already claimed and shouldn’t count on.
So while I agree in theory that 3D printing is reducing the value of stuff and that information is the new source of value, I also recognize that we’re running out of raw materials to use as the base for that process. We can’t eat information, we can’t use it to clothe or shelter us. We can, of course, use it to get to work since now the work can come to us, instead of us going to work. And that’s a great thing. And the food and shelter will always need come first.
Even assuming we find a way to mine our landfills and reclaim the last century’s worth of consumer culture crap, it is still insufficient to meet the needs of exponential population growth. Until that problem is addressed, there is literally nowhere to go as an economy but down the tubes.
Transparency allows us to see the connections that the ruling elite have; the people that you believe orchestrated 9/11, got us involved in a WMD goose chase, etc. With this transparent knowledge, we can make INFORMED consumer decisions that DO make a difference. Like you said, the current structure of America is based on contracts, loans, shareholdings, etc. For example: You find out that a certain unnamed political group orchestrated and act of terrorism to make consumer’s more complacent and controllable through fear mongering. You then find out that these people are financed by their shareholdings in certain companies. You are then free to not give them your money, spend it elsewhere, and insure that their stock (financial backing) is ultimately one-person weaker. This political organization, I’m assuming, would also loose your vote making their ruling status weaker as well.
And sure, one person might not make a difference but if this information is widely available to the entire world, the entire world can make INFORMED consumer decisions based on their personal ethics. As you so poignantly pointed out, the power is in the money.
As far as privacy is concerned, do you have a social networking account? Bank account? How about g-mail? Do you go out in public? Do you file taxes? Any information that you want to be kept secret is already out there for anyone with the know-how to access it. I’d much rather do away with the illusion of “privacy” and know what these so-called “social elite satan worshipers” are up to and where their funding comes from…
Note: I think that Satan worship, deistic or otherwise, should be considered a completely valid form of religious belief and shouldn’t be made into a negative connotation. This is true for every major religion and we shouldn’t pick on the smaller, less popular ones.
No, the use of Caps lock is because this website doesn’t have text editing to allow boldface.
I am arguing history. You are arguing paranoia. Sadly the two do not have much to do with one another.
No dictatorship in history has lasted forever. No dictatorship in the future will last forever. History has shown an increasing level of accountability and transparency in each cycle following a dictatorship.
I can see your paranoia, I am simply looking past it to the eventual end result.
If you think we are running out of raw materials then you are not looking at the state of such research as graphene and programmable matter.
It doesn’t matter if we “run out” of things like rare earths, (a recent news item I read, filled with vague worries that “we won’t be able to make touchscreens in ten years!) Between graphene and Qdots, we’re unlikely to be USING touchscreen similar to today, but will instead be using graphene screens that are both camera’s and pixels, which can SEE our fingers without the need of a single “rare earth” needed in their manufacture.
Then there’s programmable matter, which several electronics companies are working on. If you’ve never read Josh Hall’s explanation on “Utility Fog” I recommend looking it up. While his exact vision does not appear to be likely in the near future (10 to 15 years) there are other projects which could deliver similar results within that ten years, though more limited. It still means an end to the current concept we have that “once something is made it will ALWAYS be that something” and replace it with the concepts of a malleable item that can become whatever we wish, and that ONLY exists in that form for the time we need it.
The last thing I want to address is your misconception that the world’s population is still in exponential growth mode. It’s not. In fact the evidence appears to be that more developed countries have not just slowed down, but have actually started falling in population due to falling reproduction rates. America is one of the few exceptions due to immigration. Brazil even recently published a study based on their own country, showing that as the modernized infrastructure progressed into the less developed areas of their country, it corresponded to a drop in reproduction rates. It seems that just the availability of TV ALONE created a measurable decrease in births.
That means that even if we were to stop aging today, the current population is unlikely to continue to grow exponentially as the rest of the globe modernizes. It also overlooks the fact that sex and procreation are unlikely to remain synonymous for much longer, as the continuing advance of medicine is going to eventually produce methods to have risk free sex with no possibility of conception except via conscious choice.
working to “fix” something? No. I’m merely observing the reality that is happening. I do not see any way to prevent the “collapse” of the monetary system, nor do I see a need to. It’s a collapse that has to happen because we have reached the end of the Economy of Scarcity. It’s doomed, and nothing anyone, even the Chinese, Russians, Arabs, or Spanish can do to save it.
The problem here is that you and many others see this as a bad thing, and I do not. The Economy of Scarcity has to collapse. It’s not viable to maintain anymore. Material wealth is losing value. The future is going to belong to non-material wealth, and involve non-material value creation. The two economies, scarcity, and abundance, are fundamentally incompatible, and cannot co-exist.
As for learning new languages? Why? by the time such fears as yours can come true we will have two way translator devices that are 100% accurate.
Your problem is that you only allow yourself to see a negative future. The problem a lot of futurists have is that they only see a positive future. I see neither, I see negative effects, and then I see their after effects, and the after effects of those aftereffects, and so-on until they reach a stable state. Dictatorships are not stable states. You are discussing the creation of an unstable state, and then failing to look beyond it to when a stabler state is resumed.
“I am arguing history. You are arguing paranoia.”
That’s called “Ad hominem”. And no, it is not any more convincing than capslock or boldface.
“History has shown an increasing level of accountability and transparency in each cycle following a dictatorship.”
History has shown us that XX century was the bloodiest century in human history. And if we extrapolate trends, XXI will be even more bloodier. And XXII will be even worse – if humanity survives to see it, of course.
“No dictatorship in history has lasted forever.”
No society in history has lasted forever. However, some of more efficient (and brutal) ones lasted for several millenia. And all known societies in history are dictatorships, but some are sincere, and some are hypocritical. Hypocrisy won’t live long in the age of hyper-connectivity, as Wikileaks case shows. However, people like you still cling to state-run hypocritical illusions, doctored by powers that be to look more benign. You are naive and idealistic. On the other hand, you can call me cynical and paranoid, which is just the other way of saying “realist”. Anyway, if you want to believe official state/corporate/MIC propaganda, that’s your problem, not mine. And, certainly, wide-eyed idealism is neither crime nor defect. I just wanted to say that it is more practical to view world as it is, without veil of political idealism. But of course, “practical” doesn’t mean “good”. I don’t think we will find any agreement here, realism and idealism don’t mix. Well, at least I enjoyed the conversation.
Wait, are you talking about Transneft leaks and Medvedev’s twitter account? You cannot be serious. Transneft leaks were done through Navalny – old tried-and-true cut-out Kremlin infodump, active since 2000. Since when business leak wars, which were existing since times of Yeltsin-era takeovers, can be compared to Assange’s work? It is like comparing Khodorkovsky to Ron Paul. And Medvedev’s tech-savvy image is carefully crafted in Kremlin to cater towards liberal audience both in Russia and in West. “Liberal progressive Medvedev” and “authoritarian dictatorial Putin” is just good old “good cop, bad cop” game. Don’t buy this shit, it is the oldest trick in the book. It is three years already, yet Medvedev didn’t shown any liberal tendencies. Words and proclamations don’t count. BTW, I just noticed, you talk “we have”. Are you Russian? What are you doing here then? Spying for Kremlin?
“Economy of Scarcity” and other post-modern neo-Marxist stuff exists only in political lexicon of Western countries. It doesn’t mean anything outside of dying Western world. You can debate about “end of scarcity” or “post-scarcity economics” because countries like U.S. no longer produce anything, they just print money or make banking shenangians. Countries which have any actual contact with physical reality (whether through industry, like China, or through energy, like Russia and Muslims) can only laugh at such theories. Scarcity exists because there are limited resources on planet Earth. And they are not replenishable. Oil is running out, gas is running out, rare metals required for modern computers and iPods are number one reason why Africa is still a war-torn hellhole. It is easy to talk about “post-scarcity utopia” from the behind of safe wall of Federal Reserve and U.S. Army. In reality, your well-being is bought with wars, poverty and starvation around the world. There aren’t enough resources for everybody. It is a zero-sum game. And the sum is getting lower and lower each year. Unless you invent some magic device which violates law of energy conservation, no “abundance economy” will ever happen. And even if it will happen (which violates laws of physics), it won’t solve problems with other types of resources and limitations: like territory, pollution, climate, etc. U.S. fights “oil wars” not because it is run by “evil neocons”, but because it needs access to cheap energy to sustain its economy. Or do you think cars and computers works because of magic?
As for other stuff like “translator microbes”, that’s not gonna happen. To properly translate speech, you need to understand it first. And to understand speech, you need to have AI that emulates human mind. And we can’t emulate human mind because we don’t know how the hell it works.
Anyway, I am not against your opinion, in “Democrats-vs-Republicans” debate you are pretty much correct. I am just telling you that it means nothing outside context of our culture, and our culture is becoming more and more irrelevant. How many people care about “Zeitgeist” in China?
>programmable matter
Where’s my jetpack? Or flying car? Or robot buddy? Or spaceplane to orbital city? Or food pill? Before dreaming about Star Trek style “hyperspace capacitors” and “tachyon reactors”, give us at least basic set of sci-fi stuff. Oh, wait, you can’t. You guys are crazy. Trekkie nerd circle-jerk is not a solution to world’s problems. Governments and corporations spend trillions of dollars to fix resource problem, and you just pull out sci-fi technobabble and pretend that you know the answer. You guys behave like cultists. Drexler himself stated that “engines of creation” style of tech cannot possibly work in physical reality, yet you keep talking about “utility fog” and even “programmable matter”. Jeez, go see the doctor or something.
>As far as privacy is concerned,
>do you have a social networking account?
No.
>Bank account?
No.
>How about g-mail?
No.
>Do you go out in public?
No.
>Do you file taxes?
No.
>…is ultimately one-person weaker
That’s the flaw in your analysis. One person means nothing when we are talking about hundreds of millions. Statistical anomaly. Ruling criminals are more likely to lose votes and profits due to bad weather on the voting day than to individual outrage.
>I think that Satan worship, deistic or otherwise,
>should be considered a completely valid form of religious belief
Nobody actually says that these people are bad because they kiss goat in the ass on their festivals.
However, these people:
1. pretend that they have nothing to do with these rituals and are actually Christians and atheists
2. are involved in human sacrifice, including children sacrifice
Google “Clinton Bohemian Grove”
So, even if satanism is OK, lying to voters and killing children is not. However, I don’t think that satanism is OK even without human sacrifice: these people plan to install chips in you to control or at least track all your actions, operations and financial transactions (the agenda transhumanists foolishly welcome) and install Revelations-style dystopic New World Order. If you are OK with being ruled by malignant hypocrites which want to turn you into slaves via high-tech “medical” implants, that’s your problem. But don’t talk for everybody. I, for example, don’t wanna be a remotely-operated meat puppet. Hell, you intellectuals are even worse than elites. Probably we need to call Putin or Bin Laden to fix things up, since it seems that our “great thinkers” have already sold us out to megacorps.
It is you guys who are racists, you believe that Eastern nations are “inferior” and will always be “below” and “under wise guidance of Western democracies”. In reality, it is the other way around. Modern Americans and Europeans are idiots. Future belongs to the East.
Wikileaks is not the future of teh internets. 4chan is.
Hey Valkyrie Ice,
This is an article that resonates really well with me. I have been trying to put something similar into words for a long time. Transparency is indeed going to win and consequentially, there are great wealth opportunities in riding the correct waves here.
I also share your more horizontal sentiment that our current societies, governments and economies are failing at dealing with the consequences of ‘informationization’ and the abundancies that come with an informational world.
Side-note: Be sure to check out Nassim Taleb’s upcoming work on what he calls ‘Antifragility’, heuristics that deal with an ‘extremistan’ (informational world): http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=469092998374&set=a.467743408374.246616.13012333374&pid=5537968&id=13012333374
Lastly, I would like to make one small remark about one of your comments: “The problem is that we’ve run out of things that are scarce.”. I think this is wrong, there are new scarcities, but they are much more abstract and less obvious than before. They exist on a new meta-level from our current monetary system. Kevin Kelly has described some of them and I’ve summarized some of them in an article here: Technology Acceleration Economics 101: http://synaptify.com/?p=613748
Dominiek
Since the majority of my articles published on this site have already presented the evidence for each of these things being developed, or explained why they have not yet arrived, I’ll simply say you have failed to do your research.
Actually I pointed out not to long ago that 4chan serves a valuable role as a “pioneer” into the realms of social acceptability. They push the boundaries, which in turn enlarges the center of “normality”.
*giggle* actually, you misunderstood me from what I see on your link.
The things that are no longer scarce are “material goods” Material goods are things derived directly from nature, without “added value” in human labor. While most material goods also include some “human value component” their value is primarily derived from intrinsic qualities. These kinds of goods are only valuable based on how rare they are. Steak and lobster are rarer than hamburger and chicken, thus Steak and lobster are “more valuable.”
Non material wealth works in the exact opposite manner. In limited quantities, it has almost no value. For example, take Windows OS. If Windows was only on a dozen computers, it would have no value, but because Windows is on MILLIONS of machines, it is an extremely valuable “non-material” product. It costs nothing to make a copy, nothing to manufacture. All it’s value is in the “human added value” of it’s programming, and in the extreme number of computers using it.
The same is also true of SOME forms of material goods, but not the majority.
And yes, there are many scarcities in non-material wealth, but they are primarily knowledge based scarcities, and those will likely be greatly reduced as we continue to improve computers and AGI systems.
“Money” is really just a simplified medium of exchange, it exists as a placeholder in the “status game” of the market. As the collective produces, money acts as a “IOU” to a particular percentage of the total production of the collective. As such, it plays a major role in determining “status” in the overall pecking order of the collective.
This “pecking order” is unlikely to cease to exist simply because the economy undergoes a phase transition from scarcity to abundance. It simply means that the medium of exchange will transfer from material resources to non-material resources and knowledge creation. As human needs are primarily material resource based, I expect the majority of human needs to cease to be part of the “Status Game” because they will no longer deliver any “status benefits” due to their loss of “value”. We will still have “wealthy” and “poor”, but that will be based on non-material wealth, not on material needs. Things like food, housing, medical care, security and education are no longer going to be “status indicators” and thus will be cheaply, if not freely, available to all.
If you are unfamiliar with him, I strongly suggest reading Henry George ( http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm ) , and once you have, read my blog post on government : http://valkyrieice.blogspot.com/2010/07/on-government.html
Actually, I would again have to direct you to my article on Graphene: http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/toys-tools/graphene-next
Rare earths? Screw em. The next generation of computers are not going to need them. Graphene is proving to be able to be the SOLE ELEMENT needed to make a functional computer. SILICON is what requires those rare earth elements. You are thus basing your arguments on a false assumption of unchanging technology.
And I will not even begin to refer to what will happen when Wellstone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_McCarthy) becomes a functional technology.
This is what I am talking about when I talk about the end of scarcity. We are developing technologies which will utilize the most common elements on earth and eliminate the need to use “rare” materials. If you continue to base your assumptions on inaccurate data, then you will reach inaccurate conclusions.
Actually, it will belong to neither.
The inevitable end result is going to be a single world government in which all nations are simply subordinate states.
I do not understand what are you talking about. I referred to insane death toll you gave and portraying Russians as brainless mob. I guess you are lying because of your racist views.
Believe as you will. I am simply pointing out what the evidence I have at hand shows me. If you have drawn different conclusions, so be it.
However, your entire series of posts have shown every sign of extreme paranoia, fear, and distrust. They also have the tendency to make the assumption that only negative consequences result from every action, and that once those negative results occur that they will remain unchanged for the entirety of future history. As someone who deals with a Bi-polar person, and with the negative circular reasoning that is the result of that chemical imbalance, I am simply making a statement based on the evidence you have given.
You are free to have your opinions, but I will not respond to your further posts, as I feel they are simply attempts by you to justify your paranoia. I deal with far to many paranoid conspiracy theorists to have any desire to feed yet another.
Here’s an interesting update:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/08/visa-down-wikileaks-suppo_n_794039.html
Just hours after MasterCard’s website was disabled by WikiLeaks supporters, Visa.com is now down as well.
Via its Twitter account (@Anon_Operation), Anonymous, an activist hacker group, claimed responsibility for the denial of service attack–part of “Operation Payback”–that brought down Visa.com.
“TARGET: http://WWW.VISA.COM :: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS http://bit.ly/e6iR3X ::: SET YOUR LOIC TO irc.anonops.net ::: #DDOS #PAYBACK #WIKILEAKS,” Anonymous tweeted. Shortly after it posted a tweet that read, ” IT’S DOWN! KEEP FIRING!!! #DDOS #PAYBACK #WIKILEAKS.”
Anonymous explains that Operation Payback is “an ongoing campaign by Anonymous against major anti-piracy & anti-freedom entities.”
MasterCard and Visa are among many sites that have been targeted–and taken down–by “hacktivists.” Websites belonging to Swiss bank PostFinance, Senator Joe Lieberman, PayPal, and Sarah Palin have also been disabled.
a.k.a. New World Order, Freemason/Illuminati wet dream for centuries. Sorry, folks, not gonna happen. Freemasons have pissed off too many people to actually rule anything outside U.S. and E.U. borders.
I will call myself conspiracy theorist if you call yourself coincidence theorist.
You obviously have failed to read any of my previous rebuttals of conspiracy theorists, or you would know I’m the last person in the world to push that BS.
No, the world will eventually become a single world government because we are one single fucking species, regardless of the differences that governments keep trying to use to prevent everyone from recognizing that fact. As the internet reaches into the entire globe, and more and more people join the world wide community that is becoming the norm for the internet, then people are eventually going to get fed up with governments trying to keep their people “separate” from the rest of the world and demand world citizenship.
I don’t know how many times I have to say this. THERE IS NO EFFING NEW WORLD ORDER. Megaconspiracies are completely alien to human nature, because they require vast numbers of people acting in ways that are counter to their own self interest, which cannot be maintained for vast periods of time.
There is no “East” or “West” in our future. There is only “HUMANITY” and “EARTH”
Keep dreaming about your “enlightened” revolution, under guise of “wise” elders and other “great thinkers”. Same old shit we heard for centuries. 200 years ago it could sound convincing. 20 years it could sound inevitable. But now your little empire is crumbling to dust. Pathetic. And no “nanotech” mumbo-jumbo will save you, since we both know that it’s a myth. Bluff doesn’t work in Internet age.
It does not important for me who hired Navalny. His activity is useful. He opened new site were everybody can report about corruption. But if you can explain how Navalny is connected to Kremlin or what it has to do with Medvedev’s public image, ok do it.
> What are you doing here then? Spying for Kremlin?
Lol, are you CIA spy?
Just check what he was doing before he started his blogging stuff. About his activities in Yabloko and NBP. And, more recently, about Kremlin spoiler-party NAROD, supervised by Belkovsky. Navalny was a frontman of this org, and he doesn’t even hide it. Today, he is being spin-doctored to fit another spoiler project. Typical. Think about it: if he was a “good guy”, why isn’t he arrested? Moreover, Navalny was exactly the guy who gave info to the police to jail Martzinkevich, leader of F-18. That’s right, he put one of opposition leaders into the jail. Of course, F-18 was an ugly org that shouldn’t exist on the first place, but it wasn’t Kremlin-run, that’s for sure. So, putting opposition leaders to jail is part of Navalny’s biography. Yet, nobody puts him to jail – even though he is supposedly “real opposition hero”. Jeez, you are so gullible.
>His activity is useful
To whom? You didn’t even know whom he is working for before I told you some basic wiki-facts. If Navalny, or any other “popular blogger” posed any threat to Kremlin, he would be either killed off, like Hlebnikov, or beaten to a bloody pulp, like Kashin. At the very least, his LJ account would be terminated. Which didn’t happen. That means Navalny is another “popular hero” with good Kremlin-funded spin – the role he already played at least twice in the past.
>Lol, are you CIA spy?
Sarcasm off. I asked first. You put official Kremlin spin on English-speaking board. Probably hoping that all Americans are dumb morons who don’t keep track of events in other countries. Who are you and why are you here? Are you from RTD movement? If the answer is “yes”, I am not surprised, Danila Medvedev is an old FSB stooge. I guess you are here on a “party mission”, right, comrade? Well, tell your boss you screwed it up.
This was interesting to read today. Someone else saying precisely what I’ve been saying.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-tapscott/macrowikinomics-thriving-_b_794954.html
Excerpt from the article:
The arrest of Julian Assange doesn’t change the new reality faced by governments and corporations that have always craved secrecy. Even if Assange is put behind bars for an extended period, others will be happy to take his place. Think of the whack-a-mole game at the arcade. Hit one on the head and another will pop up.
The WikiLeaks episode is just a hint of the world to come. We are entering an era of hyper-transparency. Courtesy of the Internet, people everywhere have at their fingertips the most powerful tool ever for finding out what’s really going and informing others. They are gaining unprecedented access to all sorts of information about governments, corporations and other organizations in society.
Assange has announced that WikiLeaks is going after private-sector corporations next, starting with the financial services industry. This will undoubtedly unleash a new round of whistleblowers keen to reveal what they see as evidence of duplicity and moral turpitude by their corporate masters.
But forced transparency goes beyond revenge by disgruntled employees. Customers can evaluate the worth of products and services at levels not possible before. Employees share formerly secret information about corporate strategy, management and challenges. To collaborate effectively, companies and their business partners have no choice but to share intimate knowledge. Powerful institutional investors today own or manage most wealth, and they are developing x-ray vision. Finally, in a world of instant communications, whistleblowers, inquisitive media, and Googling, citizens and communities routinely put firms under the microscope.
Overall this is a positive development. Whether you’re a government or company, when you’re increasingly naked, fitness is no longer optional. Survival will force you to get buff.
>Satanism
Where are you getting your information from? Sources please?
>…is ultimately one person
if hundreds of millions have the available information and hundreds of millions are outraged, then hundreds of millions will follow suite. If people don’t mind living under criminal authority then nothing will change, however, if the opposite is true then the public will do something about it. It all boils down to the comfort zone of the majority.
>As far as privacy
Then you have absolutely nothing to worry about except the voices in your head. You’re off the grid, congratulations.
Well, all what you said about Navalny is true but it doesn’t proof his connection to the Kremlin. Maybe he just does not like nazi(who the hell like them?). And why should i care if he worked with Yabloko and NBP?
>To whom? You didn’t even know whom he is working for before I told you some basic wiki-facts.
As i said it does not important for me. His anti-corruption activities is useful for every Russians because it saves our money. Motives might be important if he would do something illegal.
>Sarcasm off. I asked first.
I thought you are joking because questions are stupid.
Especially this one:
>What are you doing here then?
Reading articles and posting comments sometimes. What is wrong with that?
>Are you from RTD movement?
I am not member of RTD.
>Navalny, or any other “popular blogger” posed any threat to Kremlin, he would be either killed off
He is living in USA.
>You put official Kremlin spin
You looks like conspiracy theorist. Everything is from Kremlin..
This is from Assange himself:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and
paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization
of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive
“secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in
decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are
nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their
nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass
leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them
with more open forms of governance.
Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he
has to know what’s actually going on.
**************************************
Translation? Attempts to “tighten security” and “prevent leaks” will cripple internal communications in repressive systems, hastening their collapse.
Will Wikileaks cause a reduction in transparency in the short term? Of course. However it comes at a high cost in organizational efficiency and functionality, which is turn limits their longevity.
Hammurabi’s laws were one of our first recorded attempts to reintroduce accountability to the larger collective, as all laws since have attempted to do.
>Where are you getting your information from? Sources please?
Like I said, google “Bohemian groove” for starters. Info of such kind is common knowledge today.
>if hundreds of millions have the available information
Statistically, only tiny fraction of those who have access to information can process it properly.
Here’s math:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXmz7Z5v0DQ
There’s probably less than a hundred of people on the planet that have at least a chance to get things right.