On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 10:05 AM,
<SkeptInq@aol.com> wrote:
Hi Barrett,
The column is in editorial now and I imagine we'll post by
tomorrow.
I liked the column and I have read about your exchange with
Morozov. But I can't help thinking that the column is a bit far afield
from our usual fare for
csicop.org.
Barry Karr
Skepticism
in the face of evidence is no virtue
In
the space of its short life, this column has emphasized the dynamics of
the information age as of extraordinary and poorly-understood relevance to
skepticism as both a system of thought and a movement within society.
Ongoing events require that this now be explained in a bit more
detail.Since
2005, I have been involved in various extents and capacities with the
Anonymous movement. For the last year, I’ve been in communication with
several of its most active participants, including one who had been outed
by the Church of Scientology after helping to launch Operation Chanology,
a global campaign intended to remove that organization’s grip on lives and
government agencies alike. And for the last month, beginning with the
movement’s assistance programs to Tunisias, Algerians, and Egyptians who
seek to win their freedom, I’ve become more actively involved in tactics,
messaging, and now legal defense for some of my fellow Anons who have been
raided by the FBI and other agencies, which in turn have been
investigating a campaign involving DDoS attacks against financial
companies that had given in to government pressure to deny their customers
the ability to donate to Wikileaks. All of this is now in the public
record, and I confirm it here as a prelude to the subject of this column
and in the interest of full disclosure.We
are coming to the close of a two-decade debate over whether or not the
explosion of communicational possibilities brought to us via the
information age are sufficient to allow a subject population and its
supporters to overthrow a government and perhaps establish a freer one. In
light of the demonstrably key role that the internet played in Tunisia and
Egypt thus far and in a certain small sub-Saharan country soon enough,
that debate should be coming to an end. Nonetheless, it will go on
forever, because certain people are impossible to defeat via argument
alone because they are invincible, at least in a rhetorical and
professional sense.A
few months back I
argued
that Foreign Policy editor Eugene Morozov was not qualified to assess the
above dispute, being incompetent on the subject and having at any rate
committed himself to a certain position which was silly even before recent
events rendered it sillier still. “Tweets don’t overthrow governments;
people do,” Morozov proclaimed then, thereby dispensing with those who
have presumably gone around claiming that Twitter will gain sentience and
begin liberating populations into a Greater Social Networking
Co-Prosperity Sphere. Out of fairness to Morozov, I’ll note that he does
make somewhat more cogent arguments; out of fairness to everyone else,
I’ll note that his arguments tend to be of the following caliber: “Neither
the Iranian nor the Burmese regime has crumbled under the pressure of
pixelated photos of human rights abuses circulated on social networking
sites.” Thus it is that the infancy of the information age has not yet
brought down two of the world’s most repressive regimes.As
I noted then: Not
only has Twitter failed to take down either of the two regimes Morozov
lists, but one of those regimes has attempted to use the service for its
own ends. "Indeed, the Iranian authorities have been as eager to take
advantage of the Internet as their green-clad opponents. After last year's
protests in Tehran, Iranian authorities launched a website that publishes
photos from the protests, urging the public to identify the unruly
protestors by name." We are not told how effective this turned out to be
or why this necessarily cancels out the effectiveness of Twitter in
organizing the protests to begin with or how the fact that dictators use
websites shows that they are not being undermined by the use of Twitter.
The fellow's talent is being wasted in socio-political commentary when he
could be writing mystery novels.Today,
I have a better and slightly less catty answer to Morozov regarding the
question of whether or not the internet is a greater boon to dictators or
populations. Rather, I have a question, for him and for everyone else who
has spent the last few years building their careers on this incompetent
brand of pseudo-skepticism: If dictators are so fond of the internet, why
did Mubarak turn the damn thing off?Former
“President” Ben-Ali of Tunisia did not turn off the internet, of course,
when Tunisian activists began coordinating with Anonymous and other
parties in taking down the government’s websites and in some cases
replacing them with messages of support to the Tunisian people, thereby
proving that their government was not so powerful as it seemed; when
Anonymous-affiliated journalists began bringing attention to the nascent
protests in an effort to alert those around the world who themselves were
in a position to help Tunisia succeed; when guides were written by experts
and distributed by Tunisians and other North Africans to the many among
them who had no knowledge of street confrontation but who now know as much
as any black bloc anarchist; or when the great and still-growing network
of Tunisians, Anonymous, and other parties began building dark nets and
other solutions to the problem of government censorship and infiltration.
Ben-Ali should have done so, but he didn’t, and even if he had, many of
the same techniques used to reconnect Egyptians during the shutdown would
have been employed in Tunisia with similar results. Tunisia, incidentally,
is not finished with its ongoing troubles, but nor is this coalition
finished with its ongoing work, which will at any rate be ignored by those
whose professional interests coincide with those who would prefer that we
spend less time thinking up new ways by which to aid subject populations
and more time reading about how such a thing is impossible despite the
evidence before our very eyes.Contrary
to all the evidence, there are two general views on this matter: that
perpetuated by Morovoz and others like him who believe that such things as
Wikileaks, Twitter, Anonymous, and Facebook are not quite as relevant as
many would believe, and that perpetuated by those of us who have used
those very same dynamics to prove that they are already more relevant than
even the most enthusiastic of us were
predicting not long ago,
when we thought in terms of years rather than the mere months it has taken
to proceed to the current situation. Everyone among the thousands of North
Africans and others who poured into our IRC channels would seem to agree
with the latter view, having consequently watched and participated in
those things which are necessary to making any informed decision on the
matter. When you have seen a teenage Tunisian girl translating into French
and Arabic the guides that were minutes before compiled by activists
living five different countries and then passing them on to her family and
friends and then asking what else she can do to help free her country -
and receiving a dozen answers, all of them good - it is difficult to
take seriously the output of those whose first instinct at such a moment
is to downplay it in accordance with the opinions they already held to
begin with.This
dynamic will continue and will have in fact already expanded by the time
this is read, this being an age in which events overtake the quickest of
mediums (and the slowest of dictators). Already
a number of this column’s readers have worked to promote such a dynamic,
and we hope that more will join us at this crucial time. Many operations
are run out of irc.anonsops.ru
in #OpTunisia and #OpEgypt; other efforts are hatched at irc.freenode.net
#projectpm. I may be reached at barriticus@gmail.com
or, for secure communications by those facing surveillance, transistor@hushmail.com. Join us for proof that in such
a time as this, one can act against tyranny in the time it takes to
complain about it.(For
Freemary, who earned her name)
--
Regards,
Barrett
Brown
512-560-2302