Re: <nettime> Wikiwars: exposing astroturf and rogue editors on WKP

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>]

There is an underlying issue here which is often glossed over:
differentiating between cheap labor and disenfranchised people is next to
impossible.

In short, one can affect public opinion either by money or by numbers. Once
numbers become a purchasable commodity, it's only money that counts.

The holy grail is finding some ingredient of actual "public" that
outsourced grass roots cannot replicate, and then filter based on it. As no
one today has a clue what such ingredient might be, it's obvious that
"public" does not exist on the "Internet" today. There is no imaginable
"mass movement on the Internet" that cannot be outperformed by combination
of money and cheap labor.

The only thing I see that can change this in the (not so near) future is
total abandoning of all centralised server-based computing and complete
physical and control ownership of own "digital presence".

Anyone mentioning "cloud", "service", "site" is the enemy. Never forget
that.

Until then,


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