The Revolution will not be televised by Gil-Scott Heron in 1974:
Cyberwar has been declared and the battle is underway. Julian Assange is sitting in Wandsworth prison almost living out some thriller while Anonymous pulls the plug on anti-Wikileaks sites with the mantra:
We are Anonymous.
We are the Internet.
We are Everywhere.
We are You.
In the first of no doubt many, luminaries from the internet world were mobilised and convened at a flash conference “Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom’ yesterday. It wasn’t really publicised, yet within a few hours of retweets over 2 800 people globally had amassed to watch the livestream and contribute via Twitter – including Anonymous and Wikileaks. “Wikileaks is watching,” said Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum “They just retweeted this.” Revolution was in the air with #pdfleaks gathering pace until the spam bots moved in and we moved to #newstructures. Shifting channels is no big deal in cyberspace.
Mark Pesce set the scene , a few soundbites to set the tone:
Arianna Huffington: It’s not the job of the media not to protect power from embarrassment.
Jeff Jarvis : We are moving from a world structured on power-to-power to world structured on peer-to-peer.
Jay Rosen: It took the 1st State-less organization in the world to show how State-ist our regular media is.
Jeff Jarvis: We need to move to default of transparency… government should be transparent by default and secretive by necessity.
Dave Winer: Net neutrality is over. When sites are shut down because they don’t like the content it is over.
Arianna Huffington: There is a difference between secrecy and #privacy, the govt is outright lying to us!
Dave Winer: We’re not safe when corporations have the ability to shut us down
“The privilege of secrecy is something we extend to our government. As a privilege.”
Andrew Keen: The world doesn’t work without trust and it doesn’t work without secrecy.
Dave Winer: We’re not safe when corporations have the ability to shut us down.
Audience member: We wouldn’t be here, if it weren’t for what Manning allegedly did…
Audience member: Can we open this discussion to include other parts of world instead of America-centric ..
Emily Bell: US press coverage for past 10 years – the controlling mind-set has been “national security.” Too close to establishment?
@DanielSchuman: Funny that there’s talk about creating structures to support WikiLeaks, which says that structures aren’t needed
Andrew Keen: In journalism – maybe the power lies with the leaker..
Andrew Keen: But who has the new power? I think google/facebook – those who hold the trump card
Andrew Keen: The spectacle of secrecy
Douglas Rushkoff: The net is a great illusion of democracy right now—but it’s an illusion… It is completely top-down and centralized.
Nobody knows where this is going to lead exactly – we are at the birth of something new – or there again may be it’s just a continuation of a theme which is not so new…. perhaps Gil Scott-Heron is still speaking to us nearly 40 years on??
