 |
| The WikiLeaks logo 'works as a sort of graphic manifesto', argues the author [AFP] |
Melbourne, Australia - There is something eerie
about the WikiLeaks logo (see above). It works as a sort of graphic
manifesto, an image of dense political content stating a notion of ample
consequences. A cosmic sandglass encloses a duplicated globe seen from
an angle that puts Iraqi territory at the centre.
Inside this device the upper and darker planet is exchanged, drip by
drip, for a new one. The power of the image lies in the sense of
inexorability it conveys, alluding to earthly absolutes like the flow of
time and the force of gravity: a bullish threat that grants the upper
world no room for hope. The logo narrates a gradual apocalypse, and by
articulating this process of transformation through the image of the
leak, WikiLeaks defines itself as the critical agent in the destruction
of the old and the becoming of the new world.
What has become manifest since late November 2010, with the release
of what is now known as "The US Embassy Cables", is that the narrative
implicit in the WikiLeaks logo, that of a world disjunct, describes a
greater struggle against the global power held diffusely by
transnational corporations and enforced by governments around the world.
This power is under attack by a relatively new actor that can be
called, for now, the autonomous network.
The conditions that allow the network to challenge the power of
governments and corporations can be traced to the origin of the Internet
and the Cold War zeitgeist that made the network we know possible. It
was only because Cold War strategists had to narrate to themselves the
unfolding of convoluted thermonuclear apocalypse scenarios, a dark art
that peaked with Herman Kahn's surreal book On Thermonuclear War, that a computer network with the characteristics of the internet was implemented.
"I
loved this concept of the purest things in the universe being unowned.
The early Internet was so accidental, it also was free and open in this
sense. "
- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak
|
The idea of imminent apocalypse was so extraordinary that it allowed
for the radical thinking that over a decade evolved into the TCP/IP
computer protocol suite, a resilient network protocol that makes the end
user of the network its primary agent. The design philosophy of the
internet protocols represents a clean break from the epistemes and
continuums that had historically informed the evolution of Western
power, as traced by Foucault and Deleuze from sovereign societies to
disciplinary societies to societies of control.
Steve Wozniak has written,
"I was also taught that space, and the moon, were free and open. Nobody
owned them. No country owned them. I loved this concept of the purest
things in the universe being unowned. The early internet was so
accidental, it also was free and open in this sense".
To produce a commons is indeed an accident for Empire.
Dismissed as a never-meant-for-the-masses autonomous zone, by and for
the military and academia, it was allowed to evolve out of control. But
this accident that happened because of daydreaming an extreme future
never stopped happening.
It evolved.
At some point it gained an accessible graphic interface, and spilled
all over the globe. By then it was too late to disarm what is now the
increasingly contentious coexistence of two worlds, as the WikiLeaks
logo registers. One world is a pre-apocalyptic capitalistic society of
individualism, profit and control; the other a post-apocalyptic
community of self-regulating collaborative survivors. The conflict
arises from an essential paradox: Because the web exists, both worlds
need it in order to prevail over the other.
The "cyber war" announced so spectacularly (in the Debordian sense)
in the days following WikiLeaks' US Embassy Cables release is not really
about the DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service), "denial of service"
attacks that barely obstructed access to the MasterCard website for a
few hours. If anything, the ephemerality of the disturbance leaves the
sensation that Anonymous, the group that launched it, is far from being a
structural threat. What journalists around the world have failed to
narrate is the tale of a network that increasingly challenges, bypasses
and outcompetes the global corporate-government complex. This
is a struggle about the obsolescence of the very idea of the
nation-state, and an almost unanimous coalition of governments, led by
the US, fighting furiously to regain control by exerting legal,
financial, symbolic and, perhaps most concerning, technical violence on
their adversary.
Rogue episteme
Approaching the history of the internet through the Cold War
zeitgeist helps us see a sort of Schumpeterian quality in the network.
It is essentially a destructive entity that, like the Terminator, comes
from the future (the imagined end of civilisation) and is set loose in
an arcane environment (the present) that fights back. Perhaps the fact
that Anonymous defines itself using a tone and vocabulary that closely
resemble the description of the Terminator in James Cameron's 1983 film
is not a coincidence but a sign of the epistemic brotherhood of two
post-apocalyptic entities.
The Terminator:
Listen. Understand. That
Terminator is out there. It can't be reasoned with, it can't be
bargained with… it doesn't feel pity of remorse or fear… and it
absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead. (James Cameron,
director, The Terminator)
Anonymous:
Your feelings mean nothing to
us. … We have no culture, we have no laws, written or otherwise. … We do
not sleep, we do not eat and we do not feel remorse. We will tear you
apart from outside and in, we have all the time in the world. (extract
from entry on Anonymous in the Encyclopedia Dramatica)
Network-native structures and their resulting communities are fuelled
by hybrid motivations often alien to the material struggles seen by
Marxism to lie behind the motion of history. In his book Hacking Capitalism, Johan
Söderberg proposes the notion of "play struggle" as opposed to "class
struggle" as the force that drives hackers as well as diverse realms of
the network society.
Similar to labour in that it is a
productive engagement with the world, play differs in that it is freely
chosen and marked by a high degree of self-determination among the
players. At its heart, the politics of play struggle consist in the distance it places between doing and the wage relation. Play is a showcase of how labour self-organises its constituent power outside the confines of market exchanges.
Söderberg proposes that play is labour within an exchange system
external to the autocratic determinations of materialism. With the
notion of "play struggle", we can understand Anonymous and its instant
response in the wake of the WikiLeaks attack.
Anonymous emerged spontaneously from 4Chan.org, which has a curious
set of features: (a) anonymity, (b) "lack of memory" (as opposed to
"cloud computing", no record is kept in its servers but rather in the
collective memory sedimented in the minds and hard drives of its users),
(c) emphasis on visual conversation (through the intervention of
images), and (d) a non-censorship policy that is only afraid of the
police (as opposed to the market). Therefore, Play: These
characteristics are all instrumental to placing in 4Chan an
insurmountable distance "between doing and the wage relation".
Its unique policy, its origin, ownership and ethos, and its substantial
and highly engaged playful community make 4Chan the internet's most
prolific semiotic laboratory.
It is telling that the software used to perform the denial of service
attacks on MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon is a relatively simple
programme called LOIC, for Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a fictional weapon in
the Command & Conquer series of video games. Play
drives Anonymous. It is the glue that ultimately holds it together, and
the threat of state/corporate control triggers its reaction. Serious
play is at the core of the rogue episteme. When play follows only its
own logic it necessarily escapes commodification.
To play seriously is often counterplay, to
set the system itself as the locus of play (even 4Chan has been a
victim, because it is funny, of its own DDoS attacks). Instead of
commodification by the mainstream, it is 4Chan that exploits the
mainstream deconstructing its text, inverting and problematising its
original intentions in a way that exceeds fan culture. 4Chan.org is a
primary node in the fundamental clash of the centre and the indigestible
fringe of contemporary digital culture.
For an average individual, visiting 4Chan, and particularly its main
forum called simply '/b/', can be either repulsive or disappointing. Its
content is distasteful to sensibilities constructed by the twentieth
century's mammoths of consumption-driven mass media, and their resulting
version of reality. Its autonomous project requires a stage of
disorientation because its method is continuously to produce and evolve a
language of its own. After all, how can autonomy be claimed while using
the language of the oppressors? How can a new epistemological commons
come to be if not by the crafting of an alternative language? Perhaps
4Chan is not exactly what Sean Cubitt had in mind when interrogating
digital aesthetics, but it is certainly a model that seems to hold its
ground against the "insidious blandness" of the corporate site:
Digital aesthetics needs both to
come up with something far more interesting than corporate sites, and
to act critically to point up their insidious blandness and global
ambitions. Subversion of the dominant is inadequate. In its place, it is
essential to imagine a work without coherence, without completion and
without autonomy. Such a work, however, must also be able to take on the
scale of the cyborg culture, a scale beyond the individual, and outside
the realm of the hyper-individuated subject. By the same token,
aesthetics must move beyond the organic unity of the art object and
embrace the social process of making.
Anonymous and 4Chan currently play a strategic and necessary role in
the struggle: the construction of an alternative episteme based on the
commons of play rather than on consumption and commodities. Yet their
political impact, in the case of the WikiLeaks embargo, was blown out of
proportion. Mainstream journalism focused on the ultimately symbolic
skirmishes starred by Anonymous, hyping the spectacular narrative of a
cyberwar fought by an otherised and widely misunderstood cultural
movement that cannot be called "hacktivist". As Richard Stallman has explained, a DDoS attack is not really hacking, but the digital version of mass protest.
If code is law, then protocol is the constitution.
|
Coup de net
"There is no remote corner of the internet not dependent on protocols." The point Laura DeNardis wants to get across in her book Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance
is that network protocols are a matter of huge political value, value
that only grows as the net spreads. Lessig inaugurated this line of
thinking when he famously stated "code is law".
But protocol runs deeper than software: If code is law, then protocol
is the constitution. This is why, as long as attention is diverted
towards the spectacular (like tactical and superficial DDoS attacks),
governments can start the demolition of the protocols that grant the
possibility of autonomy to the network. In reaction to the release of
the US Embassy Cables, the UN called for the creation of a group that
would end the current multi-stakeholder nature of the Internet
Governance Forum (IGF) to give the last word on internet control to the
governments of the world. The almost illegible resolution calls for the
UN:
"to convene open and inclusive
consultations involving all Member States and all other stakeholders
with a view to assisting the process towards enhanced cooperation in order to enable Governments on an equal footing to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet but not of the day-to-day technical and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues."
I have emphasised the fragments where the meaning hides: to "enable Governments to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of international public policy issues pertaining to the internet"
is of course a nice way to talk about enabling the surveillance,
censorship and control that the current protocols still make porous. The
closing "concession" gives away the true intentions, "but not of the day-to-day technical and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues" means that once control is reinstated, people shall go on thinking they are free.
After Hillary Clinton stated that the leaks are "an attack on the
international community", the move to gain control of the IGF is
unsurprising. It fits the conflict outlined by the WikiLeaks logo. Even
if the motion is defeated, which is currently possible, a card has been
shown. More moves of this nature, on all possible fronts, will follow
until the coup de net is complete. The IGF episode matches Douglas Rushkoff's analysis of the ongoing "net neutrality" debate:
"The moment the 'net neutrality'
debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. … [the
internet] will never truly level the playing fields of commerce,
politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of
happening, the internet will be adjusted to prevent it."
Protocols are the defining battlefield in the struggle between
governments and corporations and the autonomous network. The UN’s
attempt to take over the IGF is a true act of cyber war with the
strategic warfare plan of hacking the internet to finally eradicate its
aspirations for autonomy.
In an ambivalent world that is simultaneously exploring new
territories of freedom and being subjected to heightened measures of
control, the gradual reclamation of the commons is the crucial
operation. The internet fosters processes of decommodification that
effectively challenge capitalism. Rather than being the result of a
violent class struggle, the end of capitalist hegemony might be the
result of a slow internet-enabled process of migration, a dripping (to
abuse once more the WikiLeaks logo) towards societies that organise
around commons.
What is interesting is that WikiLeaks, after all, is still up and
running. Someone still hosts it (poetically, a hosting company located
in a Cold War-era anti-nuclear bunker), and their fund-raising channels
have diversify to bypass the embargo (with partial success). WikiLeaks
is an example of how a rogue can still thrive against the will of
Empire, supported by an emerging ecology of more autonomous actors.
MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon don't need to be shut, just bypassed or
outcompeted. As the autonomous ecology matures, it allows for more
complexity. This is where the war stands to be won: in the building of
autonomous structures of all sorts (structures that bypass and
outcompete existing ones) on top of other new structures until the
entire old world is unnecessary.
Nicolás Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne and a member of the P2P Foundation. His recent work can be found here.
Follow him on Twitter: @nicolasmendo
A version of this article was previously published in the Journal of Radical Philosophy.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. |
![[Valid Atom 1.0]](valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
BBC MUNDO RADIO
1
Investigação da Polícia Federal afirma que a família do senador e
ex-presidente Fernando Collor (PTB-AL) pagou em 1998 pelo dossiê Cayman,
conjunto de papéis forjados para implicar tucanos com supostas
movimentações financeiras no exterior.
