It’s a tale told in tweets, a very Twenty-First Century tale, for lo, it is all about recycling, Wikileaks, Russia, Orwellian paranoia, US online surveillance, and the Mainstream Media vs the New Media (remember the New Media? This is it. Are we vindicated or embarrassed?).
In other words, this is what my editors over at the DailyDot.com did NOT decide to run with my latest Wikileaks story, so I’m using it here, so there.
They took out all my wacky Cold War jokes, too, damnation! What’s an article about Russia and the US without a few tasteless Cold War jokes thrown in? Whodathunk a few references here or there to Google’s info-capitalist hegemony would get people in Silicon Valley so touchy?
Our story begins:
АФП выдало заметку о том, что Ассанж выходит у нас. Намешали туда, что я ходила на встречу с ВВ, и про альфа-самца, и про ДА:) #чистыйтрэш
which comes from the head of RT, the network which has just picked up Julian Assange‘s new talk show. I repeat: JULIAN ASSANGE’S NEW TALK SHOW.
and translates thusly:
The AFP has issued a note that Assange goes with us. Are mixed there, I went to a meeting withthe explosive, and about the alpha male, and about YES:) #chistyytresh
to which we can only reply:
This might actually convince me to get cable. I’ll just let Twitter tell the rest of the story.
We’re big fans of manifestii around these parts, and we’re big enemies of internet censorship, so when we saw this Anti-SOPA Manifesto by Alex Lindsay on G+, we knew we had to pass it on.
The Manifesto…
We’ve tried to ignore the problem… I tried to ignore the problem. I wanted to ignore the politics of the internet and, in many ways, politics itself. From a netizen point of view, Democracy often seems inefficient and ineffectual. But just because WE want to ignore it, doesn’t mean politics wants to ignore us.
There are many groups who would subjugate us if they could. They would force us to pay every time we heard a song on the car radio, they would make sure we can’t speak freely about their brand or their brand of government, they would exert complete control over our online existence.
As Netizens, we naively think that calmer heads will prevail and this has often been the case… but laws like SOPA and PIPA, which could potentially make the Patriot Act look tame if used to their fullest extent… continue to be paid for by big industry and pushed through congress. These acts are not just bad, they are unAmerican and more akin to something we would see in China or Iran… not here.
How does this happen? It’s simple enough, Congressmen are paid to make laws that would oppress us. In the emerging world, this would be called “Corruption”… here it’s called “Contribution”. It’s easy. These laws are complicated and their most of their constituents don’t even know that their congressmen are involved or how these laws would affect them. The industries behind these laws are wealthy and spend lavishly on representatives willing to support them. Most importantly… there is little to no political pain for these representatives. They fill their campaign coffers with cash… if the bill fails, they keep the cash and it’s quickly forgotten. If the bill passes, they’ll get more money next year.
This needs to stop.
We can no longer expect our representatives, many of whom couldn’t write an email on their own, to represent us without firm action. We can no longer depend on OUR means of discussion – Facebook, Twitter, and Email -l to express ourselves.
We need to fight these laws, and the lawmakers that would pass them, in their back yard. We need to earn their respect, and fear if necessary. We need them to know that supporting these bills has a political cost.
We need a sort of “Internet Protection Fund”, a PAC, that is designed for a single purpose – To use every legal means to attack those who would attack us. To bring the fight to to their doorstep, their airwaves, and their TVs. We need to organize and focus the resistance.
Step 1 – Stop the SOPA and PIPA before they are passed through targeted boycotts, information campaigns, and letter writing campaigns.
Step 2 – Target those in Congress who support these bills and attempt to unseat them in the fall with internet, grassroots, TV and Radio campaigns. Congress needs to know that supporting these bills is no longer a blank check…it’s no longer safe.
Step 3 – We need to build our organization BETWEEN elections, build its resources, and build its capacity to defend our rights… aggressively. This fight is about to intensify as the information age matures. We need to begin to take an active role in shaping our online future.
This is not a replacement for organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation… without whom we will be already be in virtual chains. This is the sharp end of the stick that comes when they are not able to negotiate our freedom. These are the troops that back up the political discussions with real, tangible, action.
This is not a replacement for Anonymous. They play harder than we will. We will keep our fight within the confines of the current laws. We will use every means within those laws to express the will of those we represent but we will stay well within the confines of the current rules.
We will play by the political rules that our opponents play by… not the ones we wish they would play. We will use our skills, connections and ability to organize online but we will bring this fight to their field and beat them there.
So now what do we do?
Step one: +1 this post and pass it on. If there is enough interest, the next steps will be somewhat obvious (begin the organization structure). Comment and let me know what you think and what you would do next. If there is enough interest… more posts will follow.
For some reason Flickr has made my pictures from yesterday visible only behind a sign-in. Terrific. Will upload all of the images directly to WordPress from now on.
Anonymous vs the Police which is not exactly a new thing
Dear Nonymite: you do realize you’re flipping off the photographer, not the cops, right? Jesus, EVERYONE hates the paparazzi!
Compare and contrast to our earlier Nony in London:
Work it, V!
This is a democracy! VOTE, DAMMIT!!!
Whichever you prefer, the mere existence of Anonymous reminds us that the present moment, yes, this exact moment, is one that has never come before, and will never exist again. It won’t be long until existing power structures have either shattered into a new, digital Brownian Motion model of solipsistic yet collaborative civilization OR the fascists have infiltrated and wiped out the free thinkers, resulting in something akin to the Orwellian KleptoReich that Putin’s got going in Russia.
And that, my friends, reminds me of this, from the great prophet Hunter S. Thompson. Think carefully about these words, because for just this particular second of time, they apply again.
“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end… but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that…
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Where will you be when it does?
UPDATED: a couple of hours after I posted this, I found the following video, which claims to lay out the one-year plan of Anonymous. Presenting The Plan:
“While the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.”
I have a copy of the Manual of Afghani Jihad (the CIA translation) and selections from the Japanese Kamikaze documents, and said back then that if we in the West had any documents as spiritually compelling as those, we would have no alienated teens, no existential crises. It’s literally unthinkable to most people in the affluent nations that their individual lives could actually have meaning; why is this so, when their nations wield the greatest financial and political power on the planet? When they enjoy personal freedoms undreamed-of in most of civilization and throughout history? Why is this, when destitute citizens of the poorest states on Earth change history every day as if it’s their birthright?
And it is.
Could this video and plan from Anonymous actually be That Call, the call to the hearts of the people of the West, for which we have been waiting?
Hillary Clinton cannot be captured in photographs!
Oh, the lamestream media has gotten their greedy, cover-uppy little claws on this shocking photoevidence and their appallingly tepid attempts to spin are fully steaming ahead. According to the Daily What (part of the shady icanhascheezburger network, and are we really sure Rupert Murdoch doesn’t have his fingers in that pie? Hmmmmm?) this series of pictures shows that cultist Israelites made Hillary Clinton vanish from a photo she was in.
Au contraire, mister cheezburger, au contraire.
What it actually proves is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (aka Hillary Rodham, aka Hillary Rodham Clinton) cannot, outside of the carefully controlled environs of the White House PR Department, be photographed. Obviously, the top photo is the original which was mistakenly sent out on the wires, and the below, now-iconic image, is the official White House version, sent out only after artful photoshopping to make the S of S visible on film, which she normally is not.
As for conclusions, there can be only one, and it can come as no surprise to anyone who’s followed this woman’s career over the past two decades.
They took images of Ye Xiangting with other people. They were stunned when the other people showed up in the computer images, but not Ye. Ye Xiangting seemed to have “disappeared” from the photos. In the end, the staff had to give up.
raincoaster 