In the process of industrialization, the people who mastered one technology tended not to be those who came to dominate the next technology. The stagecoach people didn’t produce motorcars. The motor vehicle people weren’t the ones who ended up producing trains. The train people weren’t the aviation companies and so on. I worry about that all the time in the platforms of journalism. That’s one reason I’m willing to experiment with new media and platforms as they come along.
To focus only on WikiLeaks is to miss the big picture of what’s happening with information — just like focusing only on Napter in 1999 would have led you to miss the bigger revolution in digital music. The original Napster was shut down in 2001, but its P2P heirs continue to share pirated files, and it paved the way for the rise of iTunes and Pandora — and the fall of Tower Records. Similarly, you can jail Julian Assange, but you probably can’t jail every 17 year old hacker whose blood is boiling because you just jailed Julian Assange — nor can you get a restraining order on every fed-up associate, manager, or cashier who wants to blow the whistle on you.
That Senator Liebermann & Co were able to pull Wikileaks from Amazon and Paypal (and now MasterCard have pulled them*) (Update - now Visa too) sans lawsuit, sans argument, sans any pushback that one normally expects is a scary thought to anybody who is not part of the US Establishment and who wants to rely on the Internet in a tough period.
*It would appear that one can still donate money to the Ku Klux Klan and buy porn via Visa and Mastercard….
The greatest threat we face right now from WikiLeaks is not the information it has spilled and may spill in the future, but the reactionary response to it that’s building in the United States that promises to repudiate the rule of law and our free speech traditions, if left unchecked.
Wikileaks and the Long Haul « Clay Shirky
One of the most insightful takes on the Wikileaks freakout by, no surprise, Clay Shirky.
It is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from pursuing stories that might serve the public interest - and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. Every honest reporter and editor in America knows that the fact that most news organizations are broke, combined with the increasing threat of aggressive legal action by deep-pocketed entities, private and public, has made it much harder for good reporters to do their jobs, and ripped a hole in the delicate fabric that holds our democracy together.
