2010 on the internet: the empire strikes back
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Last year at this time I wrote that 2009 was the year the internet moved to the centre stage of politics. In hindsight, that was merely the start of Act One. 2010 has been the continuation. The now-familiar struggles for power and control — both of a society and economy being transformed by the internet, and of the internet itself — have continued to play out. Often with the same actors. Often also with different plot twists. Facebook continued to be the social networking tool of choice, despite a mid-year backlash against its shoddy privacy practices and tabloid fearmongering about “Facebook murders”. TIME chose well in naming founder Mark Zuckerberg as person of the year. The transformation to people’s social lives is undeniably vast — as is the trove of personal data Facebook has compiled. Our world will never be the same again. Those in the business of controlling the distribution of information continued to fight against upstarts and threats to their business models. My esteemed colleague Bernard Keane has already covered those issues nicely in his essays on Monday and Tuesday. I won’t belabour the point, but merely note two examples. The precedent-setting and powerfully symbolic federal court case by the movie industry against internet service provider iiNet continued, moving from the initial trial that began in 2009 — which they resoundingly lost — into an appeal in 2010. We’ll hear the result of that some time around February 2011. But don’t expect it to end there. As another symbol, consider The Australian’s bizarre war against bloggers, Twitter users and, essentially, anyone who doesn’t agree with their self-appointed status as the Purveyors of Truth. It’s clearly the lashing-out of a dinosaur against an uncertain future they don’t understand. The Murdoch empire’s faith in Apple’s iPad as their digital salvation — and yes, 2010 was the Year of the iPad, but by Christ aren’t we all sick of hearing about that? — is another symptom. The iPad may be digital, but it’s still about Apple’s gatekeeper role in deciding what you may and may not read. But none of that is really a surprise. For me the big surprise was the National Broadband Network becoming the defining issue of the federal election. Sure, it’s tens of billions of dollars. But so were the tax cuts, the so-called “War on Terror”, and the economic stimulus that got Australia through the GFC. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. As columnist Paul Wallbank told me on the wrap-up Patch Monday podcast, in an age of me-too politics the NBN was the only big policy difference between the two major parties. That, and the fact that opinion on the NBN polarised along not just ideological lines about public versus private sector spending, but also about belief in a glorious digital future. And then there was WikiLeaks … To the eleventy megabazillion words already written about WikiLeaks I have little to add today. Instead I’ll point to Bruce Sterling’s fine new essay The Blast Shack, where he points out that Julian Assange is a genuine cypherpunk and WikiLeaks an embodiment of the BlackNet idea imagined by Timothy C May, author in 1992 of The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. Sterling has already highlighted the money quote: “The state will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded.” Indeed. Add the word “p-edophile” and you’ve got the standard induce-the-fear strategy for demanding more control over these evil internets. Whether Senator Conroy knows it or not, that’s precisely the underlying power-play pushing for his internet “filter”. That’s why there was such an outcry, at least on Twitter, that TIME had gotten it wrong. Assange was the true person of the year, not Zuckerberg. Assange is the true rebel hero, fighting the corrupt establishment — you can already buy the Assange-as-Guevara T-shirt. Zuckerberg is just some prick who’s made billions by selling your personal life. Something very strange and wonderful is happening, I concluded last year. Same this year, but with one addition. Those who represent the ways of the past, those who see themselves as losing out in this Brave New World, have been fighting back. They’ll continue to do so in 2011. Ever harder. |
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13 Comments
“Assange was the true person of the year, not Zuckerberg. Assange is the true rebel hero, fighting the corrupt establishment — you can already buy the Assange-as-Guevara T-shirt. Zuckerberg is just some prick who’s made billions by selling your personal life.”
I agree wholeheartedly. And I’ll never understand why people willingly part with such personal, often intimate, information without pausing to contemplate the ramifications. Or is it all about immediate gratification these days and our ability to think long term has diminished.
This kind of revolution is a good evolution….
“Reality is death and blood not a Che Geuvera t-shirt” GBH ‘The Invisible Gun’
My mother worries about privacy still. Myself I know that I am being filmed and recorded constantly by Government and the police and God knows who else. Everyone want a piece of me and wants to know where I live, my phone number etc. I am obliged to give this information to a variety of people. I blame the anti terror laws myself not facebook.
so I may as well let my friends know via facebook that I got bombed on the weekend?
I am afraid Zut alors that privacy is an outdated concept of concern to the over seventies
“TIME chose well in naming founder Mark Zuckerberg as person of the year. “
“Zuckerberg is just some prick who’s made billions by selling your personal life.”
Er? see? now I don’t believe a word you say.
I had hope for a wee whiley. I read the blurb on the homepage about returning to the old ways (or at least that’s how I readed it!). I rushed here! I thought-ye gads!
We’re going back to folks answering phones instead of robots who tell us they value our call-every 30 seconds while we wait…and wait…an…
We’ll get service…at service stations.
We’ll find a member of staff in a megastore.
We’ll get a bill that we can actually decipher.
Companies will actually care about us rather than just telling us that they do.
We’ll get politicians who give a damn about anything other than themselves.
We’ll……..
Alas! IPAD/Tweet/Facebook is the focus.
You do realise now why dinosaurs are extinct don’t you? They got so bloody confused.
I’ll never forgive them; they left me behind.
There seems to be some confusion. I wrote carelessly.
The paragraph including the words “Assange was the true person of the year” and ending “Zuckerberg is just some prick who’s made billions by selling your personal life” is describing the thoughts of those who were part of the “outcry” that TIME had got it wrong in naming their Person of the Year. They’re not my thoughts.
My thoughts are in a previous paragraph. “TIME chose well in naming founder Mark Zuckerberg as person of the year. The transformation to people’s social lives is undeniably vast…”
@ Stilgherrian
Thanks for the clarification but I read it as you intended - and I still agree with the ‘Time’ objectors.
The general focus on the Assange & Zuckerberg is interesting - quite different from the focus on founders of Google, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo!, etc. More like Bill Gates & Steve Jobs? Something to do with the outsider … Not unlike the focus on some traditional media proprietors!
Gotyer! Silly fluffy headed little me…
ZUTS, you forgot the apple.
Zuckerberg is not the prick though. The real pricks are those who embrace the mindless crap of spreading themselves wide and willing on the www for all to see every nuance of their likes dislikes, and that God awful wart on the inside of their wazoo.
The real prick is/are those who fail to see that the Emperor is stark bollock naked-and reward the jackhole for such. TIME should award themselves Prick of the Year for being so prickdictable.
But Zuks? he’s a billionaire. He’s a ‘person of the year’ billionaire, because of the pricks.
….and I’ve said this elsewhere: the Wikileaks team need to be acknowledged for what they do-not just Assange. They took care of business while he was banged up. He got the high profile representation he deserved, but they get little or no acknowledgement. They need him; but he needs them. Hydra’s can be easily slain with just the one head..
And if Bradley Manning IS the source…he needs acknowledgement. And help.
I see the year as a triumph of quantity over quality. Twitter, a word once associated with feather-brained bottle blondes making meaningless noises just to fill the silence, became the mode de rigueur for modern communication. Having a short attention span is now something to boast about.
And the world has found its answer to the newspaper malaise: steal thousands upon thousands of confidential government data and dump it online, so that journalists can pick it over for good old fashioned muckraking. A worthy payoff for the inevitable construction of government communication that will follow.
As Jean-François Julliard, Secretary-General of Reporters Without Borders, wrote to Julian Assange in August:
The triumph of quantity over quality — hallelujah. Is that a sort of analogy for democracy?
Correction: for “construction” please read “constriction”.
There is more to the internet than bloody twitter and facebook.
Personally I would love the internet to go back to pre-web days. Usenet, IRC, email was all you really needed.
If digital history has taught us anything it’s that for every system designed to control digital information there are 10,000 teenagers creatively circumventing it.
Control of information is paramount to any governments manipulation of the people. 2011 will be the war on terrorbytes.
Digital history has also taught us that nothing is secure nor authentic under a pure digital regime.
Data can be altered without leaving an audit trail. Data can be falsified. The digital age distributes false data as quickly as valid data.
We are migrating from the situation in which we could only speculate on “what is really happening” to a situation in which we don’t know which datums are “facts” and which are constructions created to deceive.
Sort of one step to the left and a little jump to the right.