Reporters Without Borders: Internet Enemies (2011)

The year 2010 firmly established the role of social networks and the Internet as mobilisation and news transmission tools, especially during the Arab spring. New and traditional media have proven to be increasingly complementary. Meanwhile, repressive regimes have intensified censorship, propaganda and repression, keeping 119 netizens in jail. Issues such as national security – linked to the WikiLeaks publications – and intellectual property – are challenging democratic countries’ support to online free speech.

Publisher Reporters Without Borders, March 2011
103 pages

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Micah L. Sifry: WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency (2011)

The United States government is diligent—some might say to the point of obsession—in defending its borders against invaders, be they terrorists, natural disasters, or illegal immigrants. Now we are told a small, international band of renegades armed with nothing more than laptops presents the greatest threat to the U.S. regime since the close of the Cold War. WikiLeaks’ release of a massive trove of secret official documents has riled politicians from across the spectrum. The WikiLeaks organizers themselves “are going to have blood on their hands” (U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman), it is the “9/11 of world diplomacy” (Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini), they present “a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States” (U.S. Congressman Peter King). Even noted free-speech advocate Floyd Abrams says that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “may yet have much to answer for” and blames him for the certain defeat of federal shield-law legislation protecting journalists. Hyperbole, hysteria? Certainly. We heard much the same in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times (ironically, Abrams was the Times’ lawyer in that case).

Welcome to the Age of Transparency. But political analyst and writer Micah Sifry argues that WikiLeaks is not the whole story: it is a symptom, an indicator of an ongoing generational and philosophical struggle between older, closed systems, and the new open culture of the Internet. “What is new,” he writes, “is our ability to connect, individually and together, with greater ease than at any time in human history. As a result, information is flowing more freely into the public arena, powered by seemingly unstoppable networks of people all over the world cooperating to share vital data and prevent its suppression.” Despite Assange’s arrest, the publication of secret documents continues, and websites replicating WikiLeaks’ activities have sprung up in Indonesia, Russia, the European Union, and elsewhere. As Sifry shows, this is part of a larger movement for greater governmental and corporate transparency: “when you combine connectivity with transparency—the ability for more people to see, share and shape what is going on around them—the result is a huge increase in social energy, which is being channeled in all kinds of directions.”

Preface by Andrew Rasiej
Publisher OR Books, 2011
ISBN 1935928317, 9781935928317
211 pages

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Peter Lunenfeld: The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (2011)

“The computer, writes Peter Lunenfeld, is the twenty-first century’s culture machine. It is a dream device, serving as the mode of production, the means of distribution, and the site of reception. We haven’t quite achieved the flying cars and robot butlers of futurist fantasies, but we do have a machine that can function as a typewriter and a printing press, a paintbrush and a gallery, a piano and a radio, the mail as well as the mail carrier. But, warns Lunenfeld, we should temper our celebration with caution; we are engaged in a secret war between downloading and uploading–between passive consumption and active creation–and the outcome will shape our collective futures.

In The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld makes his case for using digital technologies to shift us from a consumption to a production model. He describes television as “the high fructose corn syrup of the imagination” and worries that it can cause “cultural diabetes”; prescribes mindful downloading, meaningful uploading, and “info-triage” as cures; and offers tips for crafting “bespoke futures” in what he terms the era of “Web n.0″ (interconnectivity to the nth power). He also offers a stand-alone genealogy of digital visionaries, distilling a history of the culture machine that runs from the Patriarchs (Vannevar Bush’s WWII generation) to the Hustlers (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) to the Searchers (Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google fame). After half a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now find ourselves with a vast new infrastructure for uploading. We simply need to find the will to make the best of it.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
ISBN 0262015471, 9780262015479
219 pages

Review: Jan Baetens (Leonardo Reviews, 2011).

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