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This author, who is a social entrepreneur and who seems to have some links
to the risk capitalists, does in my opinion quite successfully present the
WikiLeaks as an important and positive phenomenon in the development of
the internet. As the title says, Sifry sees the Net as a movement towards
“transparency”, which, of course, he links to global (although mostly only
American) democratization and democracy. “Transparency may be the best
medicine for a healthy democracy”, he writes, “but the problem with the
WikiLeaks revelations from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, plus the State
Department Cables, may well be that they expose too much”. One of Sifry’s
peers, Clay Shirky, has compared WikiLeaks to the secret pact, known as
“UKUSA”, which the USA, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand formed after
World War II:

“Since each country’s intelligence service was forbidden by local law to
spy on its own citizens, but nothing prevented each service from spying on
other countries, the five members of what is known as UKUSA agreed to
share information on each other’s citizens, essentially going around their
own local laws.”

Wikileaks, too, has found a way to route around the laws of the singular
states. Commenting more specifically on the role of Assange, Sifry arrives
at the following conclusion:

“If anything, Assange’s greatest contribution to global enlightenment is
that the idea of a viable “stateless news organisation”, to use Jay
Rosen’s phrase, beholden to no country’s laws and dedicated to bringing
government information into public view, has been set loose in the world”.

The way of WikiLeaks leads to what one might call the dilemma of the
ethical pirate, and which actually concerns not only news organisations.
Big corporations like Google Inc., for instance, also must consider this
problem. And so must certain institutions, e.g. the institution of the
library. I have a dream about the librarians of the world acting like
ethical pirates.

Sifry does perhaps not have so much to say about how we shall continue on
the road of WikiLeaks, but he surely points in the right direction when he
says that

“What’s needed is a much more robust discussion of how the internet might
become a genuinely free public arena, a global town square where anyone
can speak. Or, to be more precise, an Internet whose underlying
architecture is really free of governmental or corporate control, as
decentralized and uncontrollable as life itself.”

We should probably ask whether that “global town square” really differs
from the “world social forum”. Will the the WSF and the internet be
genuinely connected to each other by 2013? And which is the missing link
between them? You may have guessed my answer: the library. But then, how
can the library be “as decentralized and uncontrollable as life itself”?

Instead of contemplating eternally whether there can be such things as
black swans, or ethical pirates, let’s do something together. Heikki
Patomäki and others, including myself, are going to set up a Citizens’
Committee to support WikiLeaks and the the principle of public access to
official records*. Today at 18 pm, at the Old Cable Factory in Helsinki,
we shall discuus this at the AGM of the cooperative “Katto-Meny”, which,
incidentally, is also the internet service provider of NIGD. *About “the
principle of public access to official records”, read more at
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2039996,00.html#ixzz1GAyB5avG

This leads to the question of whether there could be a “new” hegemonic politics which the WSF activists should be actively struggling for. And, perhaps, to asking whether a politics that would not be hegemonic, or would not strive to become hegemonic, would be worth fighting for at all?

My own belief is what I believe was already the conviction of Ambrogio Lorenzetti when he depicted the effects of good and bad government on the walls of the town hall of Siena. Yes, we must fight for good government,and such a government also has to be hegemonic. If not, it would not be a
government. However, since the time of Lorenzetti much water has passed under the bridges of the Arno (in Florence, I mean). So the question now is, for instance, whether an “ethical pirate” would be possible, as I tried to formulate it in my notes on Google and the library last summer (see http://www.libr.org/isc — in the most recent issue, the editorial). It is a bit like H.G.Wells’ “open conspiracy” — and thus what they used to call a contradictio in adiecto. Well, surely no hegemony can be perfect, however universal or universalist it would be in its aspirations.

Regards,
– Mikael