Wikileaks and the Decentralization of Culture

Wikileaks is the closest thing to a paradigm shift that I have ever seen. And really, it's ultimately a story about the promise of the internet.

One can see the internet as a bit of a Frankenstein's monster. Surely, the internet is used most often to serve corporate interests. Facebook doesn't want you to "like" everything because it wants you to express yourself in new and exciting ways. The entirety of Facebook is market research. Data mining so that tabs can be kept on our consumer desires. (Or really to make sure that our consumer desires are being manufactured properly and tweaked accordingly, depending on how you look at it.) Of course, there are also games and the virus that is advertising. But for all the insidious distractions of the internet, we still have knowledge at our fingertips, the ability to communicate and disseminate information like never before, and now the ability to reclaim culture.

Culture has become a centralized tool of control. A feedback loop of a narrative perpetuated by centralized corporate media and based on our lowest common desires and fears. And this is exactly what Wikileaks is threatening. And over the past few weeks, the internet has looked like a whole new world in which we suddenly exist.

Every time you watch the news, doesn't matter who delivers it, Olberman or O'Reiley, you are being told a story. That story is rarely, if ever, representative of your immediate local reality. And never will it contain all the subtlety and nuance of your immediate local reality. So the metaphor is of someone looking at clouds in order to get an idea of how to traverse the terrain beneath his feet. ("Truth knocks on the door and you say: 'Go away I'm looking for the truth.' So it goes away" - Prisig.) That immediate local reality has been suffering because of our lack of attention. Like some garden that is left to be scorched in the sun, our immediate local reality has been neglected for the divisive fear-mongering centralized media. Centralization is the great plague of this whole country really: centralized food sources, centralized currency, federal laws. (Makes me wonder if it's all some strange trauma of the Copernican Revolution that we are still grappling with.)

Wikileaks certainly does not offer the subtlety and nuance of your immediate and local reality. But it does usurp the "official story" of the way things are.

Particularly my hope is that the tired and really deadly story of Republican morality vs Democrat morality will end here and now. First off, both institutions (like all American institutions) are morally bankrupt. Second, all politics revolve around corporate interest. End of story. Nothing else matters. The media seems almost particularly designed to smokescreen this fact these days. We are all angry and with good reason, but we are not each others' enemy. We need to refocus our passion from silly hot-button issues toward the widening social class gap and the fact that real reform has been stiffed by corporate interest.

When Mastercard and Visa cut off Wikileaks as a customer, they became a court of law and convicted the site of illegal practices which law enforcement itself has yet to do which is why they have to hold Assange on condomless sex charges. So in retaliation, Wikileaks releases today the deal the American government made in Russia on behalf of MasterCard and Visa: exactly what I was hoping for: the exposure of the real enemy: who's in whose pockets

This is the promise of the internet. We regain control of our culture. The genie is out of the bottle. The data dumps of Wikileaks are raw and unpasteurized: the strange digital residue of reality, but they render the corporate narrative impotent. Aside from direct holes punched in illusions, the volume of the leaks alone makes the sound bites of corporate media seem obsolete and inadequate. Suddenly, it's not just our entertainment that has become decentralized, our very notions of reality are up for grabs.

And this past week has become even more interesting: Hackers took down the bank that froze Assange's account and just today they froze Mastercard's website; Hundreds of mirror sites are hosted all over the internet, including one hosted by long time pirate faction Razor 1911, and there are reports of the discordians-at-heart of 4chan joining the fight as well.

The internet is a new frontier. Douglas Rushkoff has described the evolution of this top-down model of knowledge dissemination. Using the Jews escape from ancient Egypt as an example, he points out that until the Jews developed their own alphabet in the desert and wrote their own law, the literate ruling class created reality. The Old Testament is a story that mirrors extacly our struggle to break free and reclaim our culture. And by reclaim it I mean create it ourselves and not consume it from faceless sources. Unfortunately, we have always been one step behind in this process. They gave us reading, but we couldn't write. They gave us writing but we couldn't program. Now we can. Now it seems like the internet is the desert, a vast wilderness with no law except what we write for ourselves. Now the playing field is leveled and no bullets or bombs or blood are necessary.

The revolution will not be televised. But it just might be computerized.