Are you certain they are on the level? The information they put forth is actually not all that damaging. The question I have seen raised, is whether Wikileaks is actually an Intel Operation designed to manipulate and control information without compromising whichever government is behind them.

I've seen those speculations, and it's too early to rule them out. And I do accept quite a lot of "conspiracy theories" -- just about every popular one that doesn't involve outer space. But I don't follow the conspiracist view of history, in which anything that happens must have been planned that way by evil elites. I think history is like a wild horse that some people can briefly sit on but nobody really rides, and even the most powerful people in the world are not planning, just improvising with a lot of money. So, to accept that any particular event has been secretly planned, I need to see evidence, not just a good story. And I haven't seen any evidence yet on WikiLeaks.

...we perceive the web to be a public space, a place where you should be able to go and set up your soapbox and say whatever you want to say to the world. The truth is, the web is almost entirely privately held... basically, you're holding a political rally in a shopping mall.

So, given this situation, what is our best move? Maybe the best long-term move is to build an internet that is completely independent of corporations and nation-states, including decentralized DNS (whatever that is), microprocessors made in garages, city-wide wireless networks, and long-distance data transfer by short wave radio or carrier pigeon.

In the short term, we need to stop thinking like Sir Lancelot on a high horse, and start thinking like escaped rats in a death machine. We will prevail through cleverness, adaptability, and patience... and it might even be fun.

It seems to me that at the end of this chain is BitTorrent. That when WikiLeaks wants to publish the next archive, they can get their best practice from eztv.it, and have 20 people scattered around the globe at the ends of various big pipes ready to seed it. Once the distribution is underway the only way to shut it down will be to shut down the Internet itself. Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.

That must be what they're discussing behind the scenes in government. And don't miss that this is equally threatening to media. They won't be able to engage in spin rooms and situation rooms, appearances and perception. When we can see the real communiques, that kind of mush won't do.

Oh really? While we're at it, let's set up congress so we see exactly how everyone voted, and also see where their donations came from. Surely that will dissolve the power of big money lobbyists in the golden light of human awareness. Let's make an "information superhighway" where text and pictures and sound can move around the world in seconds. Surely that will bring universal understanding and world peace. Let's invent a magical device that can capture moving pictures and sound in a format that can be spread electronically. Then when just one person sneaks in and films an industrial pig farm, within days everyone in the world will see the video and change their buying habits. Let's put all the great works of literature and millions of scientific articles at our fingertips, and we'll all become scholars and geniuses...

You see what I'm getting at. The information optimists are forgetting the last and most powerful censor: the mind of the information consumer. It is human nature (so far) to believe whatever makes us feel good, and then go looking for the evidence to support it. So the more information we have access to, and the more free we are to browse it, the stupider we get! The spin rooms will be stronger than ever, because with all that data, we will want someone to sort it out for us.

Imagine a world of 100% transparency. There is a camera everywhere, all the time. You can watch Sarah Palin taking a dump or (God forbid) Joe Lieberman having sex. And if Vladimir Putin wants an opponent murdered, what will he do? He'll get right on the phone and order the hit, because he understands that nobody can do anything about it, just as we can't do anything now about all the undisputed facts that Noam Chomsky writes about. At the fringes of the internet a few losers will point fingers, while the great mass of losers point fingers at some guy in Ohio who tortured a cat, some powerless wrongdoer who can be run through the gears of human sacrifice.

So, getting back to tactics, total transparency is the wrong move. If everything is in the open, then nothing is in the open. The correct move is to make it so the functionaries of the targeted system never know when the eyes of the world will be focused on them -- a reverse panopticon! This is roughly what WikiLeaks is already doing, although they have room to do it better.

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.

Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

And from a few days later:

If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.

(Here's a permalink for today's post, including a rewrite of the last post.)

Often these time wasters you refer to really do put me in a better mood. And my REAL unhappiness is that my reflective self is unhappy that I spent my time having "fun" instead of curing cancer. So I wonder, perhaps we would be happier if we weren't future oriented at all.

Believe me, if there were no depressive backlash, I would be playing Gemcraft every day. I'm a future-oriented hedonist: my goal is to maximize good feeling and minimize bad feeling, over the entire span of my life. And it's damn hard to find something that makes me feel good without making me feel bad later. Instead, more and more I find myself doing difficult stuff that makes me feel good later, like meditating or building the hut.

I'm going to plunge into metaphysics and say that net good feeling is maximized by following the invisible flow of the infinite universe, the Tao. And there's no easy way to do this. Our instincts, our emotions, our intellect can all lead us astray.

Worst of all is our culture, which gives us only two bad choices. One is "fun", or short-sighted hedonism, making us feel good now and worse later. The other is "work", which is considered valuable to the extent that it increases the gross domestic product, or replaces what we have found with what we have made. Basically our culture equates "useful" with domination. Even curing cancer is a form of domination, destroying the alien invader, when maybe we should be listening to it.