When WikiLeaks exploded onto
the scene a decade ago, it briefly seemed like the internet could create a
truly open society. Since then, Big Brother has fought back.
Every day now, we hear
complaints about the growing control of digital media, often from people who
apparently believe the concept was originally an unregulated free-for-all.
However, let's remember the
origin of internet. Back in the 1960s, the US Army was thinking about how to
maintain communications among surviving units in the event that a global
nuclear war destroyed central command.
Eventually, the idea emerged
of laterally connecting these dispersed units, bypassing the (destroyed)
center.
Thus, from the very beginning,
the internet contained a democratic potential since it allowed multiple direct
exchanges between individual units, bypassing central control and coordination
– and this inherent feature presented a threat for those in power. As a result,
their principle reaction was to control the digital "clouds" that
mediate communication between individuals.
"Clouds" in all
their forms are, of course, presented to us as facilitators of our freedom.
After all, they make it possible for me to sit in front of my PC and freely
surf with everything out there at our disposal – or so it seems on the surface.
Nevertheless, those who control the clouds also control the limits of our
freedom.
Hiding the remote
The most direct form of this
control is, of course, direct exclusion: individuals and also entire news
organizations (TeleSUR, RT, Al Jazeera etc.) can disappear from social media
(or their accessibility is limited – try to get Al Jazeera on the TV screen in
a US hotel!) without any reasonable explanation being given – usually pure
technicalities are cited.
While in some cases (for
instance, direct racist excesses) censorship is justified, it's dangerous when
it just happens in a non-transparent way. Because the minimal democratic demand
that should apply here is that such censorship be done in a transparent way,
with public justification. These justifications can also be ambiguous, of course,
concealing the true reasons.
In Russia, you may be sent to
jail for publishing things on the internet of which you actually strongly
disapprove. The latest example is of Eugenia Chudnovets, a kindergarten teacher
in Ekaterinburg, who was sentenced to five months in a penal colony for
reposting a video showing a child being abused in a summer camp. On March 6,
2017, the conviction was overturned. Chudnovets had been convicted under an
article prohibiting the "spreading, publicly demonstrating or
advertising of data or items containing sexually explicit images of underage
children," as she had reposted a video on a social network, showing a
naked kid being abused in a children's camp in the town on Kataisk in Kurgan
Region. The teacher herself explained that she could not let the flagrant
incident go unnoticed – and she was right. Because it seems clear that the true
reason for her conviction was not to prevent sexually explicit images of
children, but to cover up the abuse going on in public institutions that is
tolerated by the state.
Historical memory
However, we cannot dismiss
this case as something that can only happen in oppressive Putin's Russia –
we find exactly the same rationale in the first well-known case of such social
media censorship, which occurred back in September 2016 when Facebook decided
to remove the historical photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc running away from
a napalm attack. Days later, following a public outcry, the image was
reinstated.
Looking back, it's interesting
to note how Facebook defended its decision to remove the image: "While
we recognize that this photo is iconic, it's difficult to create a distinction
between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not
others." The strategy is clear: the general neutral moral principle
(no nude children) is evoked to censor a historical reminder of the horrors of
napalm bombing in Vietnam. Brought to extreme, this reasoning could be also
used to justify the prohibition of the films that were shot immediately after
the liberation of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps.
And, incidentally, a similar
thing happened to me repeatedly two years ago when, in my conferences, I
described the strange case of Bradley Barton from Ontario, Canada, who, in
March 2015, was found not guilty of the first-degree murder of Cindy Gladue, an
indigenous sex worker who bled to death at the Yellowhead Inn in Edmonton,
having sustained an 11cm wound on her vaginal wall. The defense argued that
Barton accidentally caused Gladue's death during rough but consensual sex, and
the court agreed.
Yet, this case doesn't just
counteract our basic ethic intuitions – a man brutally murders a woman during
sexual activity, but he walks free because "he didn't mean it." Rather,
the most disturbing aspect of the case is that, conceding to the demand of the
defense, the judge allowed Gladue's preserved pelvis to be admitted as
evidence. It was brought into court, the lower part of her torso was displayed
for the jurors (incidentally, this is the first time a portion of a body was
presented at a trial in Canada). Why would hard-copy photos of the wound not be
enough?
Speak no evil
But my point here is that I
was repeatedly attacked for my report on this case: the reproach was that by
describing the case I reproduced it and thus repeated it symbolically.
Although, I shared it with strong disapproval, I allegedly secretly enabled my
listeners to find perverse pleasure in it.
And these attacks on me
exemplify nicely the "politically correct"need to protect people
from traumatic or disturbing news and images. My counterpoint to it is that, in
order to fight such crimes, one has to present them in all their horror, and
one has to be shocked by them.
In another era, in his preface
to 'Animal Farm,' George Orwell wrote that if liberty means anything, it
means "the right to tell people what they do not want to hear" –
THIS is the liberty that we are deprived of when our media are censored and
regulated.
We are caught in the
progressive digitalization of our lives: most of our activities (and passivity)
are now registered in some digital cloud that also permanently evaluates us,
tracing not only our acts but also our emotional states. When we experience
ourselves as free to the utmost (surfing the web where everything is
available), we are totally "externalized" and subtly
manipulated.
So, the digital network gives
new meaning to the old slogan "personal is political." And
it's not only the control of our intimate lives that is at stake: everything
today is regulated by some digital network, from transport to health, from
electricity to water.
And this is why the web is our
most important commons today, and the struggle for its control is THE struggle
of our time. And the enemy is the combination of privatized and
state-controlled entities, corporations (such as Google and Facebook) and state
security agencies (for example, the NSA).
The digital network that
sustains the functioning of our societies, as well as their control mechanisms,
is the ultimate figure of the technical grid that sustains power, and that's
why regaining control over it is our first task.
WikiLeaks was just the
beginning, and our motto here should be a Maoist one: Let a hundred WikiLeaks
blossom.
