Wikileaks has opened Pandora’s box, not just state secrets and now also bank secrets, but has opened the door to enthusiastically proclaiming the beginning of a new era of promises of transparency and new citizen powers. Undoubtedly, it is true that it has shown the weaknesses of the system and, above all, the potential it may have towards new paths of freedom on the network train. But, is it a big deal? For some, it is still a model that, deep down, continues to fall into recentralization of power and does not bring us closer to be more free In a similar critical vein,Evgeny Morozov has just published a book that tries to set foot on the ground about the perhaps overly optimistic expectations that have been placed on wikileaks as a reflection of an era but, in general, on utopian cyber-optimism. A P2P Foundation post includes excerpts from three book reviews “The Net Delusion” (The Net Delusion. The dark side of internet freedom) which, in the absence of the book, are well worth to understand some of the author’s arguments.
In these times we seek in distant revolutions the passion that is lacking for non-revolutions here, and today we embrace Tunisia, yesterday Iran and tomorrow who knows what unknown country, but only because they seem to walk on the back of 140-character messages. That debate of “the revolution will be tweeted” and “the revolution will not be tweeted” is the least of it, except to entertain yourself in sterile debates so typical of cyclothymia 2.0. What if, in fact, after all, it was authoritarian regimes that were the What greater benefit were they getting from the web?
Techno-optimism creates monsters but, like good children of hypermodernity, they only last for a few fleeting moments. Read The culture-world is what it has, that with each page I turn I am closer to thinking that we live trapped in banality while the important things, the conflicts of a lifetime, are the same but no longer we recognize them. Politicians, the Praetorian Guards of the big parties, have engulfed the promises of politics 2.0, enormous entertainment for Western society in the absence of revolutions here. The thought becomes simple, that it fits in a tweet or facilitates an impulsive, empty, decontextualized and contradictory like/dislike like/dislike I don’t like it. Join, join in, put your clicks at the service of a passing idea, put your hashtags on the progress timeline. Entertained you are with the power that your ipad gives you, that, meanwhile, things happen. Wikileaks is the fiction that we have power in our hands, the illusion of sedition against the established order.
I’ll pass Well, better not.
Image taken from RD.2011 under CC BY license -NC 2.0
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