1) Tank Hat

2) Emotional Recorder

Both of these are early steps towards things that are absolutely inevitable… I think what links them is that they’re movements towards remote exoskeletons. Like Sleep Dealer… or (taking it further) that one where Bruce Willis is all shiney… Surrogates. A brain in a jar controlling a landscape littered with toys.

The inevitability is enhanced (and made evident) by the fact that both of these are DIY projects – based on the new availability of EEG headsets, and whatever it is that has gone into that tank to get it to go – wifi (or whatever), sensors, motors etc etc. We’re not waiting for corporations to make these things for us – we want them so bad we’re making them ourselves.

I tell yer – there’s a relationship-made-in-heaven between hackers everywhere and the Chinese Shanzai geniuses. There’s a very distinct possibility of getting things to market before Western corporations have cottoned on – because the innovation doesn’t happen in corporations, it happens at the edges… the market-research isn’t done by corporations, it’s done by the blogosphere, and the Chinese can turn out copies of things at prices that are a tiny fraction of what are possible in the west. (eg: the other day my dad bought a fibre-optic lamp… it had 4 colours that you could switch between, and had it’s own rotating colour-change program. Retailing for $2(NZ). How the fuck do you make that for $2?)

Mind you – how the does the west make enough money to buy anything, if everything can be done cheaper elsewhere?

And the answer to that one I think… comes down to a serious re-think about what we actually need money for. Because we do need it – but… for all sorts of things now, we don’t… and maybe (just maybe) the primacy that we’ve given to fiat-currency, is a mistake. Maybe the whole model is a mistake. Maybe the way we’re managing scarce-resources is wrong. Well, it’s definitely wrong isn’t it? Half of us are fucking dying. That can’t be right.

There’s an interesting concept here – Basic Life Package (blip). If we can make multi-colour fibre-optic lamps for $2, we should be able to make BLiPs (covering the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs)

at a price that doesn’t… well, kill us.

–

By the way, the reason the old order is being kicked on its side, is that people are fulfilling the higher levels of that pyramid by creating things themselves. There’s a lot of fuss about people distributing other people’s stuff for free… but actually people will more than happily create for free as well… only it’s not really “for free”… it’s just free of money. They’re paid in benefits described in the top 2 levels of that pyramid.

Calling it an “attention” economy, is kindof missing what it’s about – the “attention economy” is an attempt to turn “abundance economy” stuff into fiat currency… into an economy controlled by scarcity. It doesn’t really work – although I think the illusion of it working is what’s funding a lot of progress at the moment. But I think it’s a bubble. I think advertising is a bubble.

Only BP has used dispersants so the damage doesn’t “look” as bad, so now all the oil is… everywhere, instead of just on the surface… but still… nice try. Maybe they could be used to clear up the gazillion tons of plastic crap that’s now floating in the North Pacific. You could connect them up with the plastic-recycling things

which takes plastic and turns it into reprap food. That’s the idea anyway. I have a sneaking suspish that the solution to this one isn’t to eat it up, but to enzymatically break it down, using genetically engineered enzymes that go on to devour the entire planet.

Nice idea though. They could take all that dead plastic and turn it into millions of fucking nick-nacks or whatever. Little plastic ducks.

I’m not sure if they’ve actually built the thing yet, but they’ve got a grant to develop it etc. I expect at some point they’ll do a TED talk, get a standing ovation, then we’ll never see them ever again. That’s what usually happens.

Quite interesting those EEG hats though. If I was a whole lot richer I’d get one and use it to control an army of insects.

Anyway, that’s enough cynicism for the moment.

I have a feeling this eeg stuff could be the blind-side technology that totally changes the shape of… things. If it ever becomes good enough. To start with it will probably be used for completely useless things like controlling your phone, or closing the curtains… so you’ll be constantly having broken-down curtains that are always running out of batteries etc… but the possibility of being able to shrink interfaces to sub-finger level could be a little too tempting to pass over.

The reason voice->text never caught on is that you can’t talk and think at the same time. If you’re typing you can kindof think ahead… you just leave your fingers to get on with it. Whether you can think and think at the same time remains to be seen – but if I were you, I’d leave well alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Go back to using a biro. A Quill and Ink. At least they don’t BSD on you.

Don’t know what this guy is doing

Looks like The Big Lebowski dance… although at one point he does apologize for being a fat guy with a bad hair cut that makes me feel so sorry for him that I just want to lie down and go to sleep for 1000 years. It’s ok dude. It’s ok.

I like this guy – if everyone in the whole world was like this, we wouldn’t get more done necessarily, but we’d probably fuck things up less.

I think it’s 9: 2 phones, 3 laptops, one aux, DSLR, point-and-click, cheapy-tiny.

I’m thinking about buying one of those sanyo underwater ones, and another EOS 550. I’m making a film about someone making a film. That means you need more than one camera. Simple maths. Simple maths.

–

So the war of eyes continues apace. The Love Police guys actually did get arrested (twice) in Canada during the Renta-Police-State that was the G20

The spirit of the age – police telling you that they’re allowed to film things, and you’re not.

So what does the Universal Panopticon need next.

Um…. 360 degree lenses that publish straight to the web?

Cool. Reminds me of The Eye of HAL – though appropriately enough it’s a beautiful blue. And has skiers in it. You can sort out the image in software and make it horizontal.

The quality is a bit el-cheapo because it’s a little hand-held thing… which Sony have called a “Bloggie”…

… which is not what I would have called it. I would have called it a “frabble” or a “strogshite” or a “grimplet” something like that… because every single word has been baggsed by people wanting to make new products… so we’re forced to stagger about the place making ridiculous noises like psychedelic cavemen. I was looking for wireframing apps earlier… “Gliffy”, “Omnigraffle”, “Cacoo”, “Lumzy”. I shit you not. Forget about peak-oil, we’ve hit peak-syllable-combinations. Everyone’s talking shit.

Still – 360 degree lenses… a way to go perhaps. There are various offerings from Olympus etc, and I think I was going on about a home-made variant earlier. Or maybe not. Whatever… maybe these are stuck permanently in novelty land… although, although… the clueless gadget-bot-bloggers do claim that the lens can be used in reverse – and can project onto all the walls and ceiling of a room at once… which would be cool because you could make movie tents – and sit right inside whatever scene you were supposedly looking at… like a womb with violence projected onto the walls.

That’s the world we’re making for ourselves.

Publishing straight to the web… eye-fi cards. and Qik. Easy.

This is how camera lenses are made btw.

–

Still, never mind about that – the evil empire needs to have a go as well… article here about a town in Mexico that has set up eye-scanners everywhere – that can retinal scan one person a second without them having to slow down or even know about it.

I don’t get these people – how could you invent something like that and not imagine in your wildest dreams that it wouldn’t be used for something evil? What’s the matter with these fucking people. The guard-economy is a disease.

But never mind about that either

Some mental art… that reminds me a bit of universal panoptica

from Justine Khamara who is from Australia, and who’s name sounds a bit like Camera, so that’s brought us full circle then.

As you were.

Which is cool, only Adafruit linked to it and generated so much traffic that it’s brought the site down.

Anyway – this dude I think : Kristoffer Myskja

I was expecting there to be some sort of explosion at the end, but there’s no explosion.

and then

and

Only I won’t

Jeremy Taylor The Terrible works in this great big record shop in Cuba St, Wgtn. I’d lost touch with him for years, then wandered into this shop… and the top 100 albums were lined up in order, in a great big display around the walls… and I could tell by the order that I’d found him again. Went over to the counter and said “I don’t suppose Jeremy works here does he?”

I don’t want Jeremy’s shop to go out of business. I want there to be a Jeremy’s shop in every town. A Jeremy in every town. I’m not sure how his business is affected by the fact that people (who presumably have finite disposable income (which has been stagnant since the 80s)) are now spending:

- more on their monthly phone bill than they ever did on records or
- more on computer games than they ever did on records or
- more of big-ticket live gigs than they ever did on records or
- more on ISP connections than they ever did on records

or that people are now using shared files to find out about new music, rather than radio. But… but…

Half the people I know are musicians, or work in the music biz in some capacity. If I was going to go nuclear on the music industry, there would come a time when I would find myself downloading and burning one of Sprouts‘ records… and I couldn’t do it. It would feel like I was being cruel to a small furry animal. And Sprouts is just one. I couldn’t even do it to people I don’t know. I could never mass-pirate a Grant Lee Buffalo record. A dEUS record. I’ll evangelise (which means sharing) but I won’t… (how you say?) “hurt sales”.

Someone is going to put the entire history of recorded music onto a single disc, but it ain’t going to be me.

However.

The entertainment/copyright industries are visiting their own version of a nuclear option onto the Internet in the shape of 3rd-party liability… the current incarnation of which is the entirely repugnant, and secretly-negotiated-trade agreement ACTA. It obliges ISPs to spy on you. Next time you send an email, next time you visit a porn site, next time you do a search for some embarrassing ailment, next time you do a search for something that is quite innocent, but the combination of words is a bit weird….

… the entertainment industry has created a situation where you’re going to be spied on. All the time. By law. Everything you do must be monitored.

In addition to this, there’s the incredibly chilling/stagnating effect – the fact (for example) that you can’t make a movie without ‘errors and omissions insurance‘ – which similar to a lot of other regulation, pretends to be about “protections” but has the side effect that only big corporations can afford to innovate in the open market. IP law needs to be reformed… taken down a peg or 12, and IP lawyers need to be put in the stocks and pelted with shit-filled crisp-packets.

The Internet is more important than the entertainment industry – I mean fuck, the telephone system is more important than the entertainment industry… and the Internet is that multiplied by about 12 entirely new dimensions. The Internet is definitely more important.

The entertainment industry does not have a god-given right not to have to adapt.

So.

A nuke option is required… or more accurately, a response to the entertainment industry’s attack on us is required… or more accurately, we need to get rid of any corporation that is big enough to change government policy to the detriment of the society that hosts it. We need to get rid of the copyright cartels.

I think it needs to be a supply-side change. I think we need to render the copyright-cartels irrelevant not for the consumers, but for the producers. For the musicians, writers, film-makers – and I don’t think many of them will be too sorry about this, because “The Industry” with very few exceptions was always a bunch of total cunts to start with. Andy Ross is an example of someone who isn’t – if the music biz was entirely populated by people like Andy, the entire terrain would be different I think. I can think of a handful of others… they do exist, but right now the majors are a machine owned by financiers, and mega-corporations who fund all sorts of dubious shit.

Look it up sometime. The last time I looked, the same people who put out Jimi Hendrix’s records were also building a massively polluting and outdated incinerator in East Sussex UK. Vivendi are attempting to do to water, what the 20th century did to oil. These people are greedy rapacious scum.

And they’re attempting to force top-down control of the internet.

So. Supply-side change. What do we do?

Damned if I know. Set up systems where people can be paid directly by their fans rather than going through a risk-aggregater (who no longer risks)(and who pays them back a pittance, after they’ve recouped) That would do it.

The way through it is to cut out the supply-side middlemen.

But I still haven’t figured it out. The other day Adam was going on about this: http://stillcorners.bandcamp.com/

Great song. For sale for 1 quid.

Sorry, that’s pathetic. That’s sad on so many levels – not least of which, it’s a pathetically low amount – nominal… pitched at such because it’s what the market will stand… only the market isn’t bothering with it. It’s so low that all it represents is the symbolic reluctance to get out a credit-card. The Reflexive-Stinge-Hump.

Do people pay that? I guess they might.

I’m feeling kindof torn on this one though. The last (and possibly only) digital track that I bought was this

And that was AFTER I’d pulled an MP3 from youtube (yea, you can do that).

It didn’t feel good doing it – paying for an MP3 I mean. There is something clangingly wrong about that deal. I like Trixie Whitley so much that I’d donate money to the cause… I’d pay money (proper money… you know, like $100) in advance for her next record – if she kickstartered it or something… but paying for an MP3 is like paying for an echo. It’s already out there… and I don’t want to ‘tip’ her a single quid. That’s taking the piss.

Maybe I’m hung up on cult of artifact… because I would pay for… a pebble off her local beach or something. Something of symbolic exchange – though if she sold a million records, she’d run out of beach… and it’s kindof ridiculous making someone go down the beach and post pebbles about the place anyway… but you get the idea. That scary Amanda Palmer

seems to do a roaring trade in indirect sales of stuff as well. Trent Reznor does as well I think. Monetising fame (that to a degree was paid for by their record companies before they split). Maybe that’s the way through – monetising fame. Not exactly meritocratic I know… but then it is more or less exactly what we have today anyway… only the terrain has shifted so what was once the product is now the advertising. And it’s really fucking good advertising, but you can’t really expect people to buy advertising. They want artifacts damnit. Like the ones Jeremy sells.

This has turned into a massive ramble… sorry.

Something else though… when I was a kid I was addicted to space-invaders. I must have spent thousands… 20c a go… would spend about $1 a time. I loved it. Every once in a while though I’d come across a broken machine that you could play for free… and it wasn’t 1/2 as enjoyable. I’d actually spend less time playing machines where nothing was at stake. I’ve noticed a similar thing with movies. If I’ve made some investment, I enjoy them a whole lot more. The value that I give to something is an inner-thing… and it gives back.

There must be a way through this… and I’m about to cast myself head-long into it because this year I’m shooting a movie based entirely on these principles.

So anyway… to boil it down to one memorable phrase: “I think we can destroy the legacy entertainment industry, by supporting artists directly”

Or… “The nuclear option is to water the grass-roots”

edit:
Unless of course they break the internet, in which case all bets are off.

The daughter of one of my sister’s friends has gotten into some strife over dying her hair.

This same story is being played out over and over again, all over the world. Someone oversteps their authority – it gets online, and the world bites back.

But never mind about that.

Carve this in stone somewhere.

It’s a fundamental principle – and by extension, any institution that needs to lie to (or censor) the people it governs, radically undermines its own moral authority… to the extent that it is no longer morally sustainable.

Period. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

So. The context.

There are these videos about the Protestant Revolution – which is still going on. The Printing Press was invented and “Power” (largely theocratic) lost its monopoly over the transmission of information and…

… what?

Moralities that are fundamental to human nature were suddenly allowed to come into play. We saw the end of slavery, the rise of science, the gradual banishment of superstition, the rise of liberal democracies, the suffragettes… on and on and on… the ripples keep spreading. The protestant revolution has never stopped.

We still live in a world with slavery, sexism, superstition, tyranny, fuckwittery of every hue – but these are on a back foot, scorned and often criminalised. Civilised countries, and people simply won’t countenance them. Not if they know about them. Not if they have access to the unspun truth.

–

Jonathan Haidt (off the back of a ton of research) identified three conservative morals

- obedience to authority (right or wrong)
- loyalty to the group (right or wrong)
- notions of purity – often (toxically) concerned with sex and race

These are adaptations for group/tribe survival in a hostile environment where tribes are at war. Primitive shit. This would explain why so much conservative spin is based around war-metaphors. Why conservatives are so keen to paint the world as being a dangerous place – when really, it’s not a hell of a lot more dangerous than it ever was. According to Steven Pinker, a hell of a lot less dangerous in fact.

But conservative morals are not adaptations at an individual level, and outside the arena of tribe-vs-tribe fighting, they’re profoundly maladaptive for societies as well. The ancient Romans (when they still had a republic) used to appoint dictators during times of war. When the war had passed, the dictator would resign and democracy would resume. Conservative morality has “obedience to authority” as a central tenet… and when people become frightened, they become more conservative – the conservative fear-reflex. “Amber Alert” mean anything to you?. The Never-Ending War? The Never-Ending War-Metaphors?

Fortunately, the happier people are, the less conservative they tend to be (ever met a happy homophobe?). The basic human drives that surfaced as a result of the enlightenment… which came out of the radical freeing of information-control – rise directly from human nature. From simple human happiness: Basic ideas of fairness. Equality. Inclusiveness. Questioning of authority. Truth.

And the thing that drove the enlightenment – the freeing of the memosphere… is happening again, only on a massively… dimensionally greater scale than the last time round.

–

So back to the rebellious beauty princess. Back to her “coach”. What happened to her? The internet happened to her. Just as the internet happened to Constable Bubbles, or the US military (again and again and again).

The internet (a radically sped-up-memosphere) (4/5s of who’s participants are happy), is profoundly hostile to authoritarianism. Witness the “spokesperson” attempting to justify the authoritarianism of the coach… and to my mind (but not my Mum’s) failing badly. The internet splits events from context. It may be permissible (or not) in a coach/student environment, but you don’t get to tell teenagers that “they won’t go far” in a context-free environment, particularly not to photogenic, and (in a wonky teenage sort of way) articulate ones – who are at least the teensiest bit media (and web) savvy. Never mind the incongruity of entering into a beauty contest, then rebelling against someone telling her how to look… the web splits events from context. We’re not just all writers now, we’re editors as well.

So: The central conflict of our age is network vs hierarchy, and the central demand that network makes of hierarchy, is “justify yourself”.

And authority don’t like it.

But we don’t care.

–

All authority is inherently illegitimate. That’s why interactions between the police and the public should be videoed for public scrutiny… rather than the public being CCTVed and not the police. I’m sorry, that’s the price you pay for authority. That’s transparency.

But authority don’t like it…. that’s why the police (in the UK especially) have taken it upon themselves to extend anti-terror-powers… by making up a law that photographing in public places is illegal without permission – even though they themselves CCTV every square fucking inch with impunity. The police have made up their own law… because their assumption of authority can (and is) now subject to public scrutiny – now that every single one of us carries a video camera at all times, and we can all publish, straight to the web, straight from the camera.

Sorry, our energy will simply prevail. We ARE the wave… for better or worse… but I think for better.

I’m hitting something of a psychic impasse here – not sure if it’s down to being interested in making movies now – so spending time on that… or trying to do 7 freelance jobs at the same time… or… dunno. I’ve been doing this here blog for about 2 years (I think) now – started off making a couple of posts a day. Am now lucky if I make one a week.

The blog I was writing before this – I suddenly just went “Fait Accomplit” and stopped doing it.

Another thing is that I wrote my own RSS client which basically aggregates all of my feeds into a thing that looks like Opera’s rendition of RSS… but it pulls in videos and images as well… basically presents a (beautiful) magazine of stuff that I’m interested in. It sits on my local machine… I’m the only one that sees it. But… having done that, re-blogging stuff now seems a bit echo-machiney. Unless I’m adding or interpreting, I don’t really feel like there’s a lot of point – my initial breathless excitement having waned a little.

I think I’d like to see some big movements – or focus on tectonics, rather than the flotsam and jetsam that rides on the top. I’m also a little tired of “Inspirational Speaking” being the new rock and roll. I think someone (not me) should go through all the TED videos and compare the Standing-Ovation-Quotient with the And-Then-Fuck-All-Happened Quotient. Because I’m getting a fairly strong sense that there are a lot of standing ovations – for what should be world-changing shit… and nothing’s happening. I’m sick of this whole aspirational self-help-book vibe. Someone on twitter a couple of days back said “Money is a random coincidental by-product of doing what you love“. Oh yeah. People love that stuff. Pity it’s bullshit.

Another thing is that I’m losing interest in the Nerdosphere. The Geekosphere. There aren’t any women in it. There are one or two, but… nowhere near enough. Most of my main drinking-buddies have been women. I don’t share this nerdoid-stepford-wife take on women that a lot of the geekosphere seems to have. I miss the perception and social-cunning.

Maybe I’m just burnt-out. It’s been on the cards for a while.

So… where to from here?

Dunno. Regroup.

I don’t know who this guy is, or what he’s doing, but he’s brilliant in every conceivable way.

You can read about him here and here.

Mind you, you’d need to have some pretty awesome skillz to not feel like a total twonklet wearing that eye-bluetooth thing… but if you’re anything like me, you feel like a total twonklet most of the time anyway, so what difference would it make? Maybe you ARE a twonklet? A Borg Twonklet. Maybe we all are. Already. Maybe we’ve already been assimilated.

It’s growing outwards in all directions. We’re evolving so fast we don’t know who we are any more, but… it all feels kindof normal – apart from this vague sense of encroaching disenfranchisement, combined with a sort of detached foreboding. Not so much “We are Borg” as “Everyone is Borg Except Me”.

Which would be just typical.

Is truth.

It’s been a bad year. It’s been an Empire Strikes Back year. Our futures are being negotiated away in secret – by the people we pay to represent our interests, but who actually just kowtow to the rich. Everywhere you look, the Internet is under attack – by private-tyrannies trying to oblige ISPs to spy on us… and our weak, pathetic, and fundamentally dishonest governments repeat the lies, going along with it.

All over the world… (having just nicked our money (our schools, our hospitals) and given it to gambling bankers, who’s activities have been in no way proscribed… (Obama just stood there, and lied to us)) we now seem to have a brace of governments who seem to see cracking down on the poor as a sign of strength.

Guantanamo is still going, the occupation of Iraq is still happening, the war on Afghanistan, or Pakistan or wherever it is, is still happening. The same austerity measures that were imposed by the IMF on South America in the 80s are now being imposed on the US, UK and elsewhere as though they’re some sort of moral imperative. Privatisation, and gutting of public-services. Rentacops stopping photography in the street. Police-statism-on-tap wherever the G20 goes. It’s been a bad year.

But.

Julian Assange turned up and dropped a white hot sublimating thunderbolt into all of this, and it has transformed. It is so simple. The Truth. It makes the activities of the prestidigitating corporate lawyers and militarists look like the cheap, juggling, side-show cheats that they are. Their reaction has been predictable and pathetic – lying, spinning… all cut to nothing with a few simple words.

It’s been a week or two… has the dust settled? I don’t think it’s even started to blow up to be honest – and this is just one bomb-shell in a series… a pattern of bombshells to come. We (the people, the internet) have a weapon at our disposal, and it is exposure. It’s truth – and it beats anything that the forces of old and evil can cobble together. There’s no point fighting, on our side or theirs. We have all the energy.

So anyway… thoughts (in no particular order) arising from the wikileaks thing.

1) On the state of “News”

There’s been a lot of wailing and soul-searching about the gutting of that cornerstone of democracy – The 4th Estate. “The Internet is destroying it” etc, “they’re stealing our work and giving it away for free”. Actually news-reporting was being gutted by capitalism long before the internet turned up – by the slashing of budgets, and the methodical dumbing-down of content etc etc.

Wikileaks has shown what journalism should be like. You (“news”) people should be looking at yourself in the mirror in shame – absolutely pathetic. You have kowtowed to the corrupt, corporate interests, and helped create the world that makes Wikileaks necessary. You’re complicit in corruption and creeping corporatism, and although we still need a 4th Estate… your organisations do not deserve to exist.

So maybe this will be a sublimating force here as well – an example and articulation of what news should be like… which provides not so much an example for the supply-side but the demand side.

2) The Military

The response was the same as any big institution that has been found to be less than adequate. Denial, then anger, then spin… followed by internal head-chopping in which the lowest-ranked person that they can get away with punishing is held accountable.

So… they started out by saying “this is low-grade intelligence, everybody already knew this, IT’S IRRESPONSIBLE AND COULD COST LIVES” all in the same breath. Today the Secretary of Defence opined “They could have blood on their hands” (a statement faithfully parroted as fact in headlines all over the world)… to which Julian replied “Secretary Gates speaks about hypothetical blood, but the grounds of Iraq and Afghanistan are covered with real blood.”

You don’t get it do you military people? You’re so wrapped up in this game that you’re playing that you can’t see that… You Don’t Have Any Moral Authority.

If you were protecting your country from an existential threat, then maybe… but you’re not. Your sole purpose is to maintain your budget – which you’re doing by perpetuating a war-game that has gone on for longer than World War 2 – with a budget that is 50% of your country’s tax revenues – and bigger than the rest of the world combined, against scattered tribesmen with beards and home-made weapons. And you’re still losing.

What is the fucking point of you?

Don’t come bleating to us about blood – you’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people in other countries, for nothing, and in all likelihood, hundreds of thousands more back home by thieving money away from social infrastructure, and from the people generally. You represent a net loss. A waste. Nothing you say matters.

3) So it turns out that Pakistan is playing both sides.

So um… if (as the military says) we’re not told anything we didn’t already know… um… why didn’t you know this? Or did you? WTF?

4) Drones – are they a bit shite then? That’s not what I’d heard. That’s not what you’ve been telling us.

“Indeed, the secret memos reveal that the much-vaunted drones do not work as well as is often claimed. Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has described drones as “extraordinarily effective.” And CIA director Leon Panetta has even said that drones are the most important means in the war against al-Qaida.”

“But the superweapons are also prone to problems. The US Department of Defense accident reports show that system failures, computer glitches and human errors are common occurrences during drone missions.” – from De Spiegel

Which is predictable enough I suppose – I mean how often do computers crash? But the point is – we are denied the dignity of being able to make up our own minds – because we’re lied to every centimetre of the way.

5) opinion-free reporting

It’s just raw data. Look it up yourself. The freedom of that is… rejuvenating. Enlightening.

Lights-on; Rats-out.

So when the Australian War-Lobby group ADA says “What Wikileaks and its apologists ignore is the clear legal and moral differences between the actions of rule-of-law democracies applying international humanitarian law in UN-endorsed warfighting (however imperfectly at times), and the deliberate rejection of such law by the Taliban and its Islamist allies“,

which is verbally-diuretic way of saying “we good; them bad”, we can quite legitimately respond “No, cunt. It’s pure data. We can make up our own minds, based on facts who is good or bad… now that we actually have some facts. Now that you fucking weaklings can’t hide them from us any more”.

We can get away from such counter-productive mindsets as “we good; them bad” and actually, for once, ask and answer the questions “is this working?”.

Because for once, we have a factual, public record – we aren’t forced to rely on the words of politicians, spin doctors and piss-wit little liars such as yourselves.

Again – you don’t deserve to exist. You should have no place in any democratic process.

6) on decentralisation

While all this was breaking, various people from Boing Boing or Wired or whatever were opining that Wikileaks needs to be invisible… that this material should just “appear”.

I disagree entirely – they’re misunderestimating the power of narrative, and narrative needs people. As Julian says, “bravery is contagious” – and it is. He has also protected himself (and his organisation) on a number of different levels by making himself famous. If nobody knew who he was, it would mean nothing if he were to just disappear.

If Martin Luther had nailed his thesis to the cathedral door and then snuck away in the dead of night, it would have meant nothing.

Sorry – we need people.

Revolutions happen when groundswells of popular feeling break surface around a single event – or person, and out of that a narrative arises. Revolutions are always catalysed – so while decentralised information infrastructure may be important for resilience – it is incredibly important that there be clear, recognisable faces. This is how we work.

7) what’s it all for?

What (as Julian has said) Wikileaks is for making sure that facts form the historical record.

It’s that simple.

If you’re opposed to this, then you don’t have any moral legitimacy, and your institution should be dismantled.

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So that’s my thought for the day.