cartelopia By Aisha Yolah
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This year 2010 will always remain a reference point for those of us who had limited understanding at best or even outright hostility for the vistas opened up by the internet.
This is the year that a number of films told us the stories behind the making of powerful elements of this internet age such as FaceBook and other social networks. In tandem with the older, faithful email, these communication networks have not only bridged geographical distances but literally caused decades of separation between friends and relatives to evaporate.
Information change
This year too, the Oxford Dictionary launched its first online edition, while researchers discovered that contrary to their assumptions information technology with its video games, video streaming and messenger services has not completely discouraged good old fashioned reading culture. Instead, it has been found that people are actually reading millions of books online as e- books. Newspapers and print media have been struggling to fully understand and leverage off the impact of such new technologies to their advantage as physical newspaper sales dwindle. For researchers and scholars, the information pool has widened and broadened to such an extent that the ability to sift through it all is in itself a major test of academic abilities.
All of these tools epitomised by the digital technologies that make everything sharper, clearer, easier to access, and gadgets smaller and multitasking can, if you can afford it and be disciplined about it, indeed make lives richer. It seems appropriate that many of the internets’s pioneering protagonists who were not all military men or government officials envisioned the worldwide web as literally a borderless world where no state or political centre could assert ‘ownership’.
Democratic space and humanism
Those advocating the free access to knowledge of any sort e.g. Wikipedia, Open Source software and free computer antivirus and other specialised software are idealists in this vein. They believe the internet to be a democratic space where freedom of speech, ease of communication can actually serve the world’s people better than the age-old bastions of state and nation which separate us.
The idealism behind these schemes have come up hard against funding problems to keep them running and quite often been eclipsed by the more money-minded entrepreneurs, censorship or legal hurdles in some countries. The dominant narrative spewed out by the world’s most powerful media is that only certain non-western countries whose undemocratic governments require it, gag their people and others e.g.as China or Iran or Burma for instance.
But now with the coming of Wikileaks, we can now categorically confirm that the one country that has trumpeted the importance of free-speech ad nauseum, even to fellow western countries, the United States, is probably the least inclined to uphold it where its (perceived political and strategic interests are concerned). The leaking of hundreds of thousands of United States diplomatic cables has done two things.
Naked emperors
The cables’ substance has revealed much about the true nature of modern 21st century diplomacy, providing many unexpected revelations and also confirming age-old suspicions. From my ‘third-world’, developing country perspective, this is a major achievement. We have for instance always known that the ruling Houses of the Middle East’s autocracies, monarchies and dictatorships are more enamoured of self-preservation and the protective might of western allies, than the human rights of their own people or even the Islam they profess. We have always known this, rueing the spinelessness of Arab governments or so-called Islamic governments, who prefer to look the other way in the face of unspeakable violence committed by neighbouring governments (eg; Israel’s bombings and blockade of Gaza) or of so-called terrorists they themselves have spawned.
What we have never had is the independent, secret words of an ambassador or two telling us that (more democratic) Iran’s current predicament is as much to do with neighbouring monarchies’ fears of losing their present comforts as the West’s nuclear worries.
The latest revelations on locations deemed as critical infrastructure speaks to students of political economy eloquently of the nature of United States fears: no they are not worried about army bases or nuclear facilities. The real points of concern are purely economic - from pipelines, to communication networks and fibre-optic cables buried deep under oceans, to specialised pharmaceutical factories located in various parts of Europe.
Upsetting world order
Secondly, Wikileaks has caused reactions (main actor’s denials, government actions, and resulting corporate behaviour) that will remain reference points in future university courses on the role of the mass media, journalists, 21st century armies, diplomacy and ethics. This state of affairs that we live in where globalisation has not become the liberating force we thought it would – where corporate entities have become richer and bigger in the face of poverty and inequities that remain endemic have to change. It is the literal stripping of the diplomatic veil that is so profoundly empowering, away from the world according to CNN or for that matter the BBC.
Julian Assange, the 39 year-old founder of Wikileaks, whether seen as villain or hero, has been able to rock the boat, to change some of that power equation at least in the area of information available to the public about government behaviour and praxis. He and Wikileaks have done in one fell swoop what many magazines, journals, newspapers and broadcast houses around the world labour to do every day at great human and material expense. He has laid bare thousands of morsels of information which can serve as the building blocks for hundreds of stories and analyses and most importantly – perhaps enable much more INFORMED public opinion. Wikileaks has laid so much bare- embarrassing some at least - but fundamentally revealing some of the realpolitick and callousness that passes for ‘military strategy’ today. Most of this is done for mostly mercantile concerns disguised as ‘national interest’.
Universal citizenry, literally
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 with the aim of making available the world over, information that is labled ‘classified, censored or otherwise restricted’ of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Clearly the decision on what is thus significant is an editorial one which Assange as editor in chief makes in conjunction with his staff and a number of journalists of repute. This latest batch of material has been processed in collaboration with journalists from five distinguished media houses: the New York Times (US), Der Spiegel (Germany), El Pais (Spain), le Monde (France) and the Guardian (UK). The logic and method by which Wikileaks operates epitomises the best of the global information age where all human lives are supposed to be deemed equally precious, whether American , British or Iraqi.
The modus operandi of Wikileaks is an inspiring testament to a newer egalitarian world of few geographic and physical barriers. Assange’s ‘nomadic’ life-style was used as the reason by the British judge to deny him bail on Tuesday. Just as the full impact of the information uploaded by Wikileaks began to sink in world-wide, charges of sexual molestation allegedly committed in August this year, emanated from Sweden along with an arrest warrant.
Information mines
Wikileaks is today being starved of funding, services and space by ‘democratic’ governments. A video showing a United States Apache helicopter killing 12 people in 2007 in the streets of Baghdad, uploaded in April is an earlier example of the site’s content. The twelve people included two Reuters journalists. Another leak published in 2008 of standard operating procedure for Guantanamo Bay prisoners is another example of material which government spokesmen keep saying was already out there or known. Each of these pieces of information, not part of the most recent bombshells, can serve as the basis for a whole gamut of political and ethical discussions of most value to the very people in whose name such acts are carried out.
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