Re: <nettime> [Fwd: [Goanet-News] Offtopic: Wikileaks and India]

["J.A. Terranson" <measl@mfn.org>]

On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, yonatan reinberg wrote:

<snip>
> But but but... the world loves hero-worshiping. There was more outrage
> about Time Magazine's pick of the year than there were about the
> cables themselves.

<snip> 
> Hate him or love him, he has been able to act as a "stop", to quote
> Marilyn Strathern, in an incredibly dense network of technology,
> politics, and so forth. And whether you hate *it* or love it, the
> vast majority of the world loves to focus on people rather than the
> vagaries of protocol... And we think internet peeps are different?
> Take a minute on Reddit these days and see how much he appeals to the
> technolibertarian crowd just as much as as he is hated - and focused
> upon - by the joe lieberman crowd. Assange is the newest killer app,
> and yeah, killer apps suck cause they're limited, closed-source and
> shiny, but... look how many complaints there were about the iPad, and
> yet it's outselling everything else by the (millions?) thousands.

Exactly my point: *Julian* shouldn't be the item being offered, the leak 
should be. As for the methods, Julian isn't much of anything but a talking 
head at this point, no different than any other [Cable]TeeVee anchor: He's 
got stage presence and people love to talk about *HIM*.  Julian plays his 
role with an expert PR hand, using WL to further his personal agendas, at 
the cost of the agendas of WL itself.  Worse, Julian used all of the WL 
contributors who believed in the process as stated - an anonymized drop 
box system (shaky as it is), offering plausible deniability (assuming the 
dropper doesn't then strut around in front of lamo wannabe hackers) and 
assured global audiences. The audiences are now looking to the messenger 
to see if he can continue his Survivor game without being voted off the 
planet by contestant Gitmo.


//Alif

-- 
"Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public
plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to
the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always
be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by
predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech


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