Tom Watson

Blogging Still Matters

I was going to get around to a similar post in and about the joyous festivities of the semi-pointless holiday of New Year's, but the estimable Robert Stein beat me to it - and I don't think Bob will mind this particular quotation in full:

Generosity, a fading trait these days, comes back in the holiday season, with the revival of a tradition started by the late Al Weisel, who wrote brilliantly under the nom de plume of Jon Swift and was relentless in promoting the work of new bloggers across the political spectrum.

The reviver is Batocchio, who writes the Vagabond Scholar, where you can find what bloggers (including this one) consider their best posts of the year to comprise a fascinating mosaic of commentary on what we have been living through.

In this time of renewal, it also seems fitting to send best wishes for the new year to Joe Gandelman, who allows me to be part of his community of sanity on The Moderate Voice, a tireless band of resisters to online vitriol and viciousness.

To them all, may generosity make a real comeback in American life and give us less to blog about in the coming months.

Thanks to Batocchio for keeping the spirit - the very generous spirit - of Al Weisel alive (and I share the assessment of Joe Gandelman, another generous soul). May the sharing of links bring us all closer to the common understanding of our shared human struggle in the New Year. [Also, what Lance said.]

Book of the Year: You Are Not A Gadget

"Think For Yourself" would have been an apt subtitle for Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget, my pick for non-fiction book of the year and the most important piece of writing on technology and communications to be published in 2010. Instead, Lanier and his publishers went with "A Manifesto" and it certainly is all of that - bright, opinionated, often meandering, occasionally pedantic, happily confrontational and in its totality a bold red stop sign in the path of wired society's long march toward a thin, common identity.

Not that I wanted to stop at that particular intersection.

My 2008 book CauseWired chronicled the rise of online social activism and presented a generally (but not entirely) rosy outlook for a socially-networked world with access to information and the digital tools needed to change society. I chose to focus on the development of positive, collaborative platforms like Kiva, Change.org, GlobalGiving and DonorsChoose and the creation of networks to fight poverty, disease and genocide. And I saw the ascendancy of vast social applications like Facebook and Twitter as generally benevolent to the movement for social change; greater participation could yield more democratic structures, more authentic power from below - and if more individuals could see a wider view of the injustice in the world, more of them would organize to fix it.

Yet I've never embraced techno-utopianism or served time as a social media triumphalist; back in the 90s Jason Chervokas and I would regularly rail in @NY against a form of cyber-libertarianism that argued for a self-regulated technology industry and no societal restraint on anything digital. Where some treated "information wants to be free" as a physicist's formula, we saw it as a political slogan. Chervokas and I recognized that that the "freedom" some technologists were arguing for was merely a cover for seeking power; in a new world ordered by technology, who would be in charge? Fast forward to the socially-networked Internet of 2010, and it's no surprise that a few powerful players now control vast amounts of our identities and our content.

Nonetheless, You Are Not a Gadget was a head-snapper for a me. And the intellectual whiplash was worth the collision.

The central tenet of Lanier's manifesto is the idea that humanistic values are too often lacking in widely-adopted digital technology - that in using online services driven by algorithms and marketing (and what's better for the programmer and the advertiser), users naturally adopt a less complex online personality, a less nuanced identity. In CauseWired, I relayed the wisdom of my then-16-year-old daughter, who explained that Facebook wasn't your actual self, it was "your best you."

Fitting neatly into a Facebook profile is reductive, argues Lanier, who wonders "whether people are becoming like MIDI notes - overly defined and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer." Twitter limits in another way, by placing severe strictures of the actual form of communications. With each message limited to 140 characters (much less with a link and a hashtag or two) it often removes the gray space. The big issues can be reduced to a half sentence and a link, really very little more than a click on the Facebook "like" button. It becomes a fantastic echo chamber, a vast din of repetition with easily-delineated sides like a soccer match. No wonder every single politician and celebrity gravitates to Twitter - the control over the messaging is fantastic (indeed, the comical early mistakes some pols made on Twitter were the exceptions that proved the rule). Marketers now understand the on/off MIDI-like notational quality of short messages - they're paying six-figures for so-called "promoted" tweets and trends, which are just a fancy and expensive method for Twitter to lie to the very userbase that built the service. Or as Lanier puts it in discussing social networks like Twitter: "Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am."

Lanier's point is that by reducing personality and the wide sweep of human thought into chunks that can fit easily into databases and digested through clever widely-popular front end designs, the possibility for horrific "crowd-sourced" activity is that much greater. To put it simply, the good guys don't always win. Throughout history, they've often been shouted down by crowds. While it's impossible to argue with the sunny opening lines of the introduction to Yochai Benkler's seminal Internet text The Wealth of Networks - "Information, knowledge and culture are central to human freedom and human development" - and to sympathize with a point of view that argues that great access to those qualities improves the lot of mankind, Lanier's warnings also seem in tune with the times.

It's not crazy to worry that, with millions of people connected through a medium that sometimes brings out their worst tendencies, massive, fascist-style mobs could rise up suddenly. I worry about the next generation of young people around the world growing up with internet-based technology that emphasizes crowd aggregation, as is the current fad. Will they be more likely to succumb to pack dynamics when they come of age?

That kind of thinking flies in the face of a more utopian view of free information, embodied in hacker philosopher Richard Stallman's famous '90s proclamation that when "information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving." I'd naturally ask "what does generally useful mean?" and Lanier goes a step further, noting that the free flow of information also brings large-scale vitriol to arguments between semi-anonymous actors on the Net. "What's to prevent the acrimony from scaling up? Unfortunately, history tells us that collectivist ideas can mushroom into large-scale social disasters."

Lanier's "digital Maoism" may be the intellectual equivalent of crying "fire!" in a crowded theater, especially one filled with venture capital-backed tech companies, media conglomerates and telecommunications outfits all mining profits from the social gold rush (not to mention the trade press that loves them). And Lanier's is a particularly well-aimed attack on geek culture: "The new twist in Silicon Valley is that some people - very influential people - believe they are hearing algorithms and crowds an other internet-supported nonhuman entities speak for themselves. I don't hear those voices though - and I believe those who do are fooling themselves."

You Are Not A Gadget also warns against an Internet-based democracy, a world of governing chaos in which "superenergized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax code on a frantic, never-ending basis." The remedy is our current actual democracy - "the slower processes of elections and court proceedings" - which are like calming bass waves in Lanier's musical metaphor. They reduce "the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an overexcited state when too many rapid changes coincide in such a way that they don't cancel one another out." It's dull and it doesn't make a handy retweet. And it also argues against some of the aspects of the latest techie cause célèbre - Wikileaks, a secretive organization that claims it represents the interests of more open government but renounces public accountability. Three weeks ago, I wrote that I didn't think "Wikileaks advances the cause of more accessible government or international justice." And Lanier didn't win too many allies with his essay in The Atlantic last week that argued for more skepticism toward Julian Assange and his shadowy organization, while taking "nerd supremacy" to task for the near lock-step support of Wikileaks at the cost of traditional avenues of trust:

"The strategy of Wikileaks, as explained in an essay by Julian Assange, is to make the world transparent, so that closed organizations are disabled, and open ones aren't hurt. But he's wrong. Actually, a free flow of digital information enables two diametrically opposed patterns:  low-commitment anarchy on the one hand and absolute secrecy married to total ambition on the other."

In a spirited Atlantic response to Lanier's piece, Zeynep Tufekci (who by chance I happened to sit next to on the stage for our panel at the Personal Democracy Forum's Wikileaks symposium on Dec. 11) argued that he "makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations." In other words, those large organizations stand opposed to individual liberty - which the free flow of information can help to guarantee. And that idea also infused some of the criticism of You Are Not A Gadget, especially reactions to Lanier's dystopian view of a purely crowd-sourced social commons, his somewhat alarmist suggestion that "collectivist ideas can mushroom into large-scale social disasters."

Frankly, it's part of the deeply romantic view that so many technologists hold of the Internet (I'm not immune to this) and it's an especially American viewpoint. We tend to view corporations and big organizations and "the state" as monoliths, rather than collections of many individual humans working toward a loose common cause - and we tend to welcome the new frontier than disintermediation brings. In 1997, in a column for The New York Times, Chervokas and I wrote:

For more than 200 years Americans have been driven by the myth of the frontier, the feral, boundless space beyond known civilization where opportunities are infinite, where homesteaders can discard identities of birth and inhabit instead their own identities of mind, and where law is what you make it. This libertarian, romantic myth has informed a lot of the national discourse about the Internet -- America's new "freer, vast, electric world," to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman.

That "freer, vast, electric world" still holds tremendous promise, in my view. Questioning our direction does not mean losing that promise or ending the Internet experiment. Yet Lanier's point of tends to get lumped into naysayer's category. In a tweet today, NYU press watcher Jay Rosen posited that as they age, digital people tend toward the insight that "de-excites." Some keep going, he wrote, while others "become professional debunkers." Challenged by Jeff Jarvis, he named Jaron Lanier as one of the latter - but I think that's a bit off the mark. If you dig into You Are  Not A Gadget, the sense of wonderment at the possibilities of this digital age remains intact. Lanier is more than a professional debunker. And in my view, the very questioning of the impact of crowds and networks on the social commons is welcome.

"Next to the many problems the world faces today, debates about online culture may not seem that pressing," writes Lanier. "We need to address global warming, shift to a new energy cycle, avoid wars of mass destruction, support aging populations, figure out how to benefit from open markets without being disastrously vulnerable to their failures, and take care of other basic business. But digital culture and related topics like the future of privacy and copyrights concern the society we'll have if we can survive these challenges."

I agree. You Are Not A Gadget didn't change my thinking, but it made me a think a lot more. It's the book of the year for 2010.

Man of the Year: The Unemployed American

Time magazine's ritual exercise in slow-motion trendspotting and well-liquored (we presume) committee mongering has reached its merciful end. Verdict? Facebook visionary Mark Zuckerberg. Which is fine, I guess. Except that Time already honored Zuckerberg's social graph (sort of) with its much-shellacked  "you!" tinfoil cover back in ought-six. There was a lot of angst in one corner of the series of tubes over the failure of Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange to win the nod, despite triumphing in an online poll. But really, if you're going the route of exposing America's foreign policy secrets and failings being the year's biggest story, isn't Pfc. Bradley Manning the choice there, and not his publicist?

No, I think we need to move offline this year and away from the shiny and those "this changes everything!" moments that are intoxicating. I'm as guilty as the rest of the networked faithful preaching the gospel of digital transfiguration, but here's a reset button: the person of the year in this country (and very probably the next and the one after that) is the unemployed American.

After all, if you give the honor a year ago to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a man who never saw the current and ongoing financial crisis until it swept across our shares like a tsunami, you can certainly back those who suffer for his monetary policies. Time itself makes the case for one its finalists:

In early March, there were nearly 16 million Americans out of work, at least 5 million more jobless than at the peak of any of the previous three recessions. What's more, out-of-work were staying that way for longer than any other recession since WWII. In October, the average unemployed worker had been out of a job for more than 8 months. And while the unemployment rate dropped, the broader measure of job market health, the so-called U-6 — which tracks those who are working part-time but would like to work full time, as well as those who had stopped looking for work — continued to climb to a recent 17%. Most economists predict the situation won't improve anytime soon. Many believe the jobless rate, currently at 9.8%, will remain above 8% for another two years.

It's back to the 1970s, but with a less deliberative Senate, a meaner more conservative Republican Party and  no small share of malaise on the Democratic side as well. We're two years in, well past TARP, well past the frist stimulus, and now into renewed tax cuts that will continue to drive a trillion-dollar deficit that the GOP "hawks" pretend to care about. Some hawks. And frankly, some doves as well - two never-ending wars that bleed the national economy, bleed our international reputation, and bleed the soldiers whose oaths demand their attendance. The kids are noticing, at least around my house. Lance Mannion remembers another similar time:

I mean that we were sheltered from what was going on in the country by virtue of our parents being middle class or working class, which in those days, in Upstate New York, where most of the blue collar work was at the many nearby GE plants---most of the white collar and pink collar work was there too---where thanks to the Unions and GE’s manufacturing strength effectively meant middle class.

But we were also sheltered by our parents being responsible grown-ups with the attitudes and codes of parents of that time and that place, some of which were less than ideal, but one of them was the principle that adults did not share their feelings with children.

By then the Recession had hit.  I’m sure there were some kids in school who wondered why suddenly so many of their suppers featured tuna casserole or pancakes and scrambled eggs.  I didn’t.  There were six kids in our house.  I just took it for granted that my mother fed us what she was sure all six of us would eat.  I also knew she didn’t have time to make a big meal for eight every night.  I didn’t figure out until I was in college that my father’s salary was in the process of being effectively halved by inflation.

When one of us asked why we couldn’t go out for ice cream after dinner tonight or why we couldn’t have a toy or a particular item of clothing we just needed to have by this weekend if not right now and we’d have to wait for our birthday or Christmas, we accepted---because we had no choice but to accept it---my mother’s calm and patient reply, “We don’t have the money for it today.”

Chronic unemployment over a decade - the kind that breaks families and discourages a generation - will have a far greater impact on this society than a social networking site or some leaked government documents. Yeah, the unemployed American - man of the momen, man of the decade, man of the year. Cue the mistletoe.

Denial of Service, Denial of Speech [Updated]

On a cold morning in February, 1989 the telephone woke me at dawn with the news of a denial of service attack on the newspaper I worked for as deputy editor. Here's how that particular DoS worked, in technical terms for all you geeks out there:

Two men threw a pair of Molotov cocktails through the front windows of The Riverdale Press in the Bronx, gutting the newspaper's editorial offices and shutting down the building for five months.

Those men, like the group that declares it is defending Wikileaks  and its leader Julian Assange, were anonymous. And like the anonymous attackers of Amazon, Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, they were attempting to silence without consent or recourse the commercial speech of an institution they disagreed strongly with. They believed their cause was a just one, based upon a gross and unlawful insult, as well as their deeply-held beliefs.

In their case, it was the strong conviction that author Salman Rushdie should die for the religious blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, and that a newspaper that defended Rushdie's First Amendment rights in the United States to sell his book in any bookstore in the land must be silenced and shuttered. Who can doubt that these men (never caught) believed their cause was a just one, and that The Riverdale Press deserved to lose its editorial voice using the most expedient technology available (firebombs)?

Who can doubt that the Anonymous hackers and their supporters believe they are the righteous actors in today's battle over Wikileaks and free speech? They are every bit as certain of their cause as the men who blew up a Bronx newspaper. Yet an action that attacks the rights of self expression of others (in this case, commercial entities, like bookstores and credit card companies and newspapers) surely cannot serve, in any creditable way, to defend free speech.

On Saturday, I was privileged to take part in a "flash conference" in New York organized by the Personal Democracy Forum and its founders Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry. The discussion on press freedom, speech, distribution and modern power was far-ranging, respectful and deeply engaging. (Full video of the conference is here). I reitered my position that Wikileaks is anti-democratic and deserving of deep skepticism for its motives and structure; indeed, I was pleased to hear plenty of skepticism from my fellow panelists and the rather vocal audience. I also found myself agreeing that a distributed online outlet for whistleblowers - really a network of outlets - needs to be created and protected. And it needs to be transparent, in both governance and funding.

But I also heard a troubling idea resurfacing amidst the polite discourse: the position that a distributed denial of service attack is a form of accepted civil disobediance, that DDoS is merely a digital sit-in, the moral equivalent of lunch-counter volunteers in the south during civil rights. Nothing gets permanently broken, no long-term harm is done, and a political point is made - and all from the comfort of your keyboard, safely outside the reach of the big powers that be. At least, so the argument goes.

I strongly disagree, for two reasons:

1. Easy anonymity lacks courage and obscures ideas

Sure, it's easy to see how the Amazons and the MasterCards can lose an hour or ten of business and keep right on making money. It's fun and easy to sign up, run the software, and smash the heck out of a few servers for a while - then sit back and watch the fun on Twitter. Look at me, I'm walkin' across the Edmund Pettis bridge (and putting away a few zombies on XBox too).

The point of civil disobedience is the public act; the point of protest is the message. It takes courage to stand up against the powerful, and it takes commitment to speak. The great historic names of civil disobedience carry an emotional impact for a reason. We know about the sit-ins, the marches, and the many years on Robben Island. Those acts carry power because of their public quality. It's not a question of legality. Throughout the world, many forms of speech or public congregation will get you jailed or killed.

In her post defending DDoS as civil disobedience, the author Deanna Zandt asks the question: "how do I digitally throw myself in front of a tank?" My answer is simple: by using your real name in broad digital daylight, and by saying what you think.

 2. You don't stand up for free speech by using a muzzle

Amazon was down in the UK today, ostensibly in revenge for the incarceration of Assange on Swedish sexual assault charges and Amazon's refusal to host WikiLeaks after its release of the State Department cables. That means you couldn't purchase The Satanic Verses for a time - or my book, or any of the books written by the authors who spoke at #pdfleaks Saturday, or A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It's hard to make a less-convincing defense of free speech (or damage Wikileaks more by association) than to strike down someone else's speech. While it's fascinating to follow the discussion of legitimacy and DDoS, ultimately I agree with Micah's post on techPresident:

I believe nonviolent civil disobedience is a very powerful weapon and generally support people who try to practice it. But I am not sure that it is at all wise to go try to defend free speech by suppressing other people's speech, which is what a DDOS attack does to the target. 

Jeff Jarvis, who handled audience participation with skill at the PDF confab, posted a follow-up to the conference that laid out an amended version of his "Bill of Rights in Cyberspace" - there are lots of good arguments to be had there, but I cannot disagree in any way with the first two:

I. We have the right to connect.
II. We have the right to speak freely.

Cutting that right to connect - and quashing speech - through denial of service smacks of a secretive cyber warfare. (It's the flipside of the unfortunate reliance most of us have on commericial services like Facebook and Twitter, which could shut down out social graphs in a second if they choose to..a topic for another post). Today, Amazon and PayPal - tomorrow the website of the Personal Democracy Forum or Typepad, which hosts this blog. They're commercial entitities too and you might not like them.

"We can build new systems of human relations which depend not on secrecy but on connectivity," writes Mark Pesce in his incisive post on "hyperdemocracy" and the new press. And we can root for connectivity to win over secrecy in places like Burma, Iran and North Korea - as well as Wall Street, the State Department, and local government. That secrecy should be banished as well from the movement that supports ironclad free speech and radical transparency. And to me at least, denying Internet speech to anyone is a bad tactic - and even worse ethics.

UPDATE: Amazon's outage in Europe was due to a "hardware failure" and not a DDOS attack, reports Reuters.  The report also says that Anonymous has "changed its strategy and would now focus on spreading snippets of the leaked cables far and wide rather than on cyber attacks." Glad to see that path leading away from denial of speech.

Assange v. Obama

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is calling on President Barack Obama to resign. But I've got a better idea. It's time for Assange himself to go.

After all, if he truly believed in the original mission of the controversial site, he'd remove himself from the glare of international attention and let the clear light of day shine brilliantly on the government secrets WikiLeaks has exposed.

But Assange won't go. As he told a recent interviewer, “I’m a combative person. It’s personally deeply satisfying to me.” And it's now clear that his main goal is to discredit - and indeed, bring down - the administration of President Obama. As the sole face - the judge and jury of WikiLeaks - he's clearly operating on the premise of releasing what he considers the most damaging documents to the Administration.

WikiLeaks has certainly done good things during its short existence, and I am not in favor of punishing speech in any way (or, in the parlance of our insane right wing, assassinating Assange). I do not support informal Washington pressure on commercial interests to create a back-door to banning WikiLeaks; shame on Amazon and PayPal. Nor do I think an international manhunt is in order. I'm in favor of fewer government secrets and far more transparency in how government is run.

But I don't believe Assange is the harbinger of a new and better age. And I no longer believe that Wikileaks acts in the interests of societies of goodwill.

This pains me. It puts me squarely at odds with many of the progressive voices I know and respect, including James Wolcott, Al Giordano, Glenn Greenwald and Micah Sifry (who I shall quote in a moment). But there it is. 

At the risk of being labeled a tool of the government or an old media sap (I've been called worse), I don't think WikiLeaks advances the cause of more accessible government or international justice. While I don't favor U.S. sanctions against Wikileaks (speech is speech even if once-classified), I have abandoned personal support for the organization. I'm also distressed at so much of the American progressive support for Assange against our own democratic institutions, imperfect as they may be. I think Wikileaks is resolutely anti-engagement, anti-development, anti-cooperation, and anti-peace.

And virulently to its very DNA, anti-democratic.

Here's how Assange reacted earlier this year to a request from international human rights groups, including Amnesty International, worried that WikiLeaks' Afghanistan trove would cost the lives of aid workers in that war-torn land: "I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses. If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal."

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Taliban was reviewing WikiLeaks' release for the names of anyone who dealt with American forces, including international groups working to advance women's rights. Erica Gaston, program officer for the Open Society Institute's Afghanistan-Pakistan regional policy initiative told the Journal: "Our concern was that the Taliban had announced it was going through the data looking for names and that it would begin targeting that. It's a very real threat that they're making. They have demonstrated over and over that if they have the name of someone that has in any way been affiliated with the international community, they will find them, they will kill them in most cases."

Then there's the admittedly longish question from the "former British diplomat" during this week's Q&A with Assange in the Guardian, which essentially boiled down to "why should we not hold you personally responsible when next an international crisis goes unresolved because diplomats cannot function?" It was a serious question. Assange's answer:

If you trim the vast editorial letter to the singular question actually asked, I would be happy to give it my attention.

This is the new hero of so many in the open government movement.

***

In a scathing post lambasting the Obama Administration for considering action against Wikileaks, Personal Democracy Forum co-founder Micah Sifry quoted Secretary of State Clinton, drawing from her speech earlier this year on Internet freedom:

"...the issue isn’t just about information freedom; it is about what kind of world we want and what kind of world we will inhabit. It’s about whether we live on a planet with one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors."

Exactly. The key value being "one global community," with all the responsibilities and human failings that entails. Too many have come to worship at the altar of pure information, and to embrace Assange as some sort of anti-hero.

Accountability matters too. Our republic, flawed though it is and always shall be, is accountable to us. That mechanism may be slow and - at times - seemingly non-existent. But it's there. We elect our officials. We approve our budgets. We determine the national course, the state course, the local course. We speak.

We are only a "hierarchical, top-down, closed fortress organization" - as Sifry called the Federal government - if we give up our constitutional rights, or spend our time paying no attention.

Wikileaks is secretive, non-transparent, and answerable to no one - indeed, Assange seems to argue that status as a virtue. It is not. Who funds this organization? Who runs it? What are its guiding principles? How is it governed? How does it attempt to represent a social good that entitles it to pay no taxes? How does Wikileaks satisfy its accountability to the social commons? Where do we the people, plug in?

One of the founders of WikiLeaks, who now runs cryptome.org, another online depot for leaked documents, New York architect John Young, told Cnet this summer that he thought the organization had lost its original focus. 

I don't want to limit this to Wikileaks, but yes, they're acting like a cult. They're acting like a religion. They're acting like a government. They're acting like a bunch of spies. They're hiding their identity. They don't account for the money. They promise all sorts of good things. They seldom let you know what they're really up to. They have rituals and all sorts of wonderful stuff. So I admire them for their showmanship and their entertainment value. But I certainly would not trust them with information if it had any value, or if it put me at risk or anyone that I cared about at risk.

While arguing eloquently that Wikileaks should not be shut down by government or commercial intervention, Clay Shirky makes an important additional point: "Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to."

If WikiLeaks' supporters on the left didn't believe in representative government, in public engagement, in the role of a central Federal actor in the well-being of a nation - or in the orderly interaction of nations in the pursuit of world comity - I would understand their praise of a rising new leader, their embrace of a new world order based on digital distribution, free of the annoying friction of law and social convention.

But I don't think that's what they believe.

***

The British writer David Allen Green, who I first encountered through my friendship with Labour MP and government techie Tom Watson, wrote a short consideration of liberalism in the light of WikiLeaks and his view is very close to mine:

...But transparency is not the only liberal value. There are others, and these are important, too.

For example, there is the value of legitimacy: those who wield power in the public interest should normally have some democratic mandate or accountability.

However, no one has voted for WikiLeaks, nor does it have any form of democratic supervision. Indeed, it is accountable to no one at all. One may think that this is a good thing: that with such absolute autonomy WikiLeaks can do things that it otherwise might not be able to do. One could even take comfort that WikiLeaks represents the "good guys" and is "doing the right thing".

Be that as it may: one must remember that such self-assumed moral authority is conceptually indistinguishable from the vigilante. If transparency is important, then so is accountability.

[snip]

WikiLeaks remains a powerful but undemocratic and unaccountable entity that shows a general disregard for both the rule of law and the practical need for certain communications and data to be confidential. So, from a liberal perspective, there is a great deal to commend WikiLeaks, but there is also a lot that should cause a liberal to be concerned.

The latest "release" is clearly designed to be a threat to the United States and the Obama Administration: a secret memo listing critical infrastructure facilities around the world compiled by the U.S. As the brilliant government technology reporter Nancy Scola notes in New York magazine this week, Assange is deliberately telling a specific story to maintain interest.

This isn't an open government purist releasing information to the world - it's a narrative, a campaign, an agenda on open display. "For all that high-minded self-seriousness, he and WikiLeaks are now demonstrating a Gawker-like willingness to go for the gut reaction," writes Scola.

And Assange (the solo voice on WikiLeaks) is clearly taking aim at Obama. In a 2006 essay entitled "Conspiracy as Governance," Assange talked about forcing regime change through the mass distribution of a vast cloud of information: "An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself." In other words, he's going for Obama's political Achilles tendons.

Yes, the President's reputation with progressive Democrats is low right now, but I think it's a mistake to side with Assange against the Administration. And I tend to agree with commenter Hunter S. Tingly on Jay Rosen's excellent Public Notebook blog, where a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion is lighting up the wires:

What people don't realize is that the fallout from all of this isn't going to be a more transparent gov't, or a change in foreign policies that are "good" or "just". The fallout from this is that the current administration (sucky, but less sucky than the previous one) is going down. Obama & Clinton probably wont step down (as Assange is calling for), but Obama won't be re-electable. And the replacement isn't going to be something wonderful, the replacement is going to be the Hawks. The replacement is going to be the rightwing extremists that think they have a mandate from god to do _anything_ they need to in order to make the world fit into the four-corners of the box they call "good".

On his Rebooting the News radio show this week,  Rosen talked over Wikileaks and what it means to journalism and government with Dave Winer. It was an interesting back and forth. "I know we're being manipulated," argued Winer. Rosen said that there's "an anarchist element to what Assange is doing" but suggested that perhaps we need more anarchy.

That's a point of view I've got plenty of sympathy for. Hell, we need more radicals. We need an institution like WikiLeaks to reputably and freely publish material provided by whistleblowers - but a WikiLeaks with structure, governance, public participation, and real transparency of its own. Toward the end of the show, Jay broke into song. "Whose side are you on?" he crooned in a creditable folkie tenor.

And I thought, in the battle of Assange v. Obama, that's an easy one. After all, I voted for one of them.

UPDATES: Good additional reads and comments below.

Allison Fine: "Cablegate isn’t whistleblowing, it isn’t righting a wrong, unveiling unethical or immoral behavior. It is the theft of regular communications that makes it nearly impossible for the State Department to function."

Digby: "Right now the only people besides Wikileaks who have access to all the cables are the newspapers they've partnered with."

On Facebook, the estimable Dennis Perrin (one of my favorite bloggers) says I'm overly soft on Dems. Maybe so.

Greenwald makes the point that WikiLeaks hasn't made a huge "dump" of all the U.S. cables and sees this as exculpatory. Actually, I think it supports my narrative theory and Assange's goal of bringing down the Administration. He also approves of Assange's "commitment" to "harm minimization" but this this sounds like classic military "colateral damage" speak to my ear.

And Assange has been arrested and is being held without bond in the UK. I'm not in favor of espionage charges against Assange and WikiLeaks.

At Feministe, Jill Filipovic has a terrific piece - I agree that "it’s important to counter the “haha sex by surprise those crazy Swedes” media narrative with the fact that actually, non-consensual sex is assault and should be recognized as such by law." And just as strongly, I also agree that we don't know much yet about these charges, that we should withhold judgment on them, and that they bear very little on the public actions of Assange and WikiLeaks. Also, Lindsay Beyerstein.