Saturday 18 December 2010

A Letter to the Guardian...

I encourage you to copy and paste this letter and send it to reader@guardian.co.uk so that they can be encouraged to remember they are allowed to use google.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I was just wondering when you were planning to retract the false story regarding the supposed banning of 'Sicko', Michael Moore's documentary?

As he says in this article, http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/viva-wikileaks, a simple google search would have enabled your journalists to see that it was in fact shown in theatres throughout the country and was even broadcast in prime time on national television!

This laziness in reporting, despite much talk of the hard slog contextualising and checking the cables, has led you to miss the real story; that despite histories lessons, the U.S government is still deluding itself regarding Cuba and making the same mistakes as decades ago.  Namely, that embassy staff are making up news to pass on up the chain of command where upon it can get seized upon in a fit of positive bias.  This in turn fuels the kind of groupthink that enabled the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the first place.

So... presumably this correction will be appearing soon then?  I also presume that a lesson will have been learned and that future leaks will have at least a bit of fact-checking?  I'm a huge fan of wikileaks let it be said, but those claiming that these cables aren't Truth do have a point.  They are instead the inner workings of wholly nationalistic machinations and as such can also be bewilderingly wrong (whether purposefully or not). 

Yours,

Wednesday 1 December 2010

A sociocultural evolution view of Wikileaks..

Democratically elected governments are meant to be for the people, by the people.  This has never really been the case, but the argument against mob rule and it's relative advantages over other forms of government have led to it being the acceptable, prosperous and relatively peaceful system that it is.

The only reason we as citizens could accept this was because communication structures in the world led to a national concern only, stretching to a European/U.S. concern at the most. We were prosperous and peaceful because capitalism was able to outsource exploitation away from it's major markets and onto the environment and workers of undeveloped and voiceless people of the world that were hidden from us in our nationalist bubbles of bordered language.

Recent technological advances in transport and communication have popped this bubble. Sociocultural evolution teaches us that a form of memetic Hamiltons Rule operates as an evolutionary function of maintaining tribal/group loyalty. These two facts combine to create a global movement whereby people are now able to communicate and come to know people the world over and regard humanity as a whole, entirely worthy in recieving concern and respect.

The democratic system as it is however is, rightly from the age in which it was derived, stuck at the nationalistic level demanded by the enlightenment concept of the social contract. Since that time, memetic Hamiltons rule has ensured that, since money is the main factor in determining progress, private companies have been co-opted by governments and vice-versa the world over, both through lobbying and individuals swapping public and private high-level jobs. This is apparent even in the shared language of corporatese.

This puts them in direct opposition to the new generation who do not share such nationalist/corporate limtiations of identity and who instead recognise and empathise with those exploitated masses which were necessary for the system to progress peacefully in the West.  These cables represent the internal machinations of that corporate/government class, exposing it's inner-workings and crucially showing the vast gulf in moral criteria between what is good for state/business, and what is good for humanity as a whole.  Both sides feel they are doing a moral thing... it's simply that those who are for wikileaks are using a much vaster criteria in coming to those moral conclusions (i.e. seeing humanity as equals).  This for me makes Wikileaks the good guys and the true heirs to progress.

Releasing this material contributes to undoing this veil behind which the state operates. The internet is going to lead to this kind of thing as a matter of course. It is inevitable. That those in power rail against such leaks is also sadly inevitable since it threatens their position of power and represents a view of the world that they do not understand from their caged meme-pool of self-satisfying positive feedback and group-think.

We have come to a point where 'mob rule' is coming to be understood as crowd-sourcing, it's connotations going from contemptable to highly efficient. The new generation, a globally-minded generation, see those in power for what they are, a relic of an age that is no longer with us and whose time was, in reality, suited for a pre-global communication age. This kind of cognitive dissonance (the cables) is desperately needed because of the homogenisation of discourse, the corporate takeover of mass media, things utterly antithetical to sociocultural evolution. 

When we see humanity as a whole, one has to see the 'democratic' system a immoral and detestable. From the destruction of environments to the brutal pursuit of fenced-off profiteering, humanity is suffering at the hands of the few on a scale never seen before. To say that 'we have it good' is not enough in a world of global communication. That isn't how the Hamilton Law works.

Seen from this persepctive, not releasing it is a far greater crime than releasing it.

Sidenote:

These cables were accesible to nearly 3 million people accross dozens of U.S. agencies.  Unless espionage simply aint what it used to be, that would seem a walk in the park for at the least Russia, China and the UK to get a hold of it.  So why the anger?  Why the outrage?

If they knew America knew, yet did not raise a whimper until it got out into the wider public, what does that say about th relationship between these various states governments?  It says that so long as everyone keeps schtum, nobody cares what each other knows.  Russia knows America's corrupt, America knows Russia's corrupt... everyone knows everyone is corrupt.  Like Democrats and Republicans keeping quiet about stuff they both do, it has become an unwritten rule to simply keep mouths shut.

How did it get to this?  Well, there is one area that is powerful and multinational... corporations.  Take bribary.  U.S corporations have to bribe (see Haliburton in Nigeria) along with everyone else.  Big multinationals have to stoop to the lowest common denominator when business is global.  If that means competing with Russians, then that's what tehy'll do... safe in the knowledge that they certainly aren't going to complain about it if they too do it.  Corporate aims and ideology have seeped into that of the state, perverting it from principles of serving the public interest into a multi-state conspiracy (forget the kooky connotations, this aint truther territory) creating a secret environment amenable to profiteering at the expense of the public interest.