Rethinking Electronic Civil Disobidience
In
a book published some 30 odd years ago titled ‘How Democracies Perish' the French political philosopher Jean-François Revel wrote:
“Democracy tends
to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing
what is necessary to counter them… What we end up with in what is
conventionally called Western society is a topsy-turvy situation in
which those seeking to destroy democracy appear to be fighting for
legitimate aims, while its defenders are pictured as repressive
reactionaries.”
It is this author’s contention
that the recent attempts at hacktivism by the now famous WikiLeaks
website and the controversy surrounding its owner Julian Assange is
precisely such an attack on democracy as Revel predicted. What is even
more surprising is the painful accuracy with which these attacks have
been misunderstood to be acts of revolution against oppressive regimes.
This is especially true in
relatively young and artificially-liberalized democracies such as India where Journalism - partly in order to save its face from the recent
embarrassments and partly to divert the common man’s attention from its
inherent moral corruption - has canonized Assange and his establishment
and portrayed him to be the champion of a new technological media
renaissance. But even in older democracies such as Britain, too much has
been published in support of the WikiLeaks adventure while its criticism has been relegated to the back seat.
The irrationality and immaturity
of the bias in favor of this newfangled mode of activism is revealed
when one considers the message being sent by the whole WikiLeaks issue
(and its media-hyped celebration) to, for example, organizations with a
Jihadi persuasion. It is funny to see, that the liberal tradition in
countries which are paranoid about their safety to the extent that they
manually frisk high ranking diplomats of major allies are exalting the
reformer-cum-revolutionary status of a person they know next to nothing
about.
What is also not discussed
enough in the news surrounding the whole affair is what the true import
of the leaked cables is. Anyone basically acquainted with the geopolitics of the countries indicted or mentioned in the leaked cables
would tell you that what is revealed in those cables is what is being
talked about in diplomatic circles much more openly albeit in a more
formal tone. It hardly takes a genius to figure out for example, that
India is indeed a self-appointed candidate for the UNSC seat (and there
is nothing wrong with that either) or that NATO countries are planning
to protect Poland (that’s is precisely what NATO was created to do).
If then, the argument WikiLeaks
is supporting is that Diplomats should always talk in formal,
subjectively-desensitized and politically-correct, official language
then it is basically tantamount to taking away the free speech of the
diplomatic community - which already suffers from the official
impediments of an over-neutralized language.
But most importantly of all, it
is the response to the WikiLeaks by governments worldwide that has
catapulted what should’ve been an easily overlooked nuisance into the
ranks of major historical blunders like the Watergate scandal. Instead
of having a calm and reasoned debate with members of the civil society
and media, the Governments (especially the American govt.) launched
themselves into attack mode against Assange and the entire order of
underground Hacktivists. The redundancy of the leaks was, it seems,
overshadowed by fears of what they might contain as opposed to what they
did contain. It should be noted that there is a lot more messier
information lying in the secret records of most major powers today and
the inability of the Americans to decipher as to exactly what and how
much of what was leaked was truly damaging to their repute led to their
taking the overtly defensive stance.
But the American attack on
Assange and the sudden rehashing of old court case against him in Sweden
is as unjustified as the DDoS attacks on major financial websites by
the so called “friends of WikiLeaks”. The term “Cyber-Anarchism” may
sound like aural manna to the ears of some yet-to-be-disillusioned
seeker of an anarchic utopia but for adults who understand the fragility
of the cyber-ecosystem, the threat is more real than ever before. This
eye-for-an-eye mentality of both parties involved will simply erode the
protective fringes of the online-freedom that netizens around the world
have carefully preserved for a decade or so.
By no means is this author
denouncing activism (cyber or otherwise), he is merely stating that
alternative versions of electronic civil disobedience exist which don’t
threaten the politico-administrative foundations on which societies are
built. Versions which demand accountability without resorting to any
kind of anarchism and which actually seek accountability for acts of
omission and commission. Turning the internet into a shoe-pelting party
for the mildly dissatisfied will simply result in the slow and painful
death of free-speech on internet. It is human nature to be fascinated
with secrets but just because something is secret doesn’t necessarily
mean it is important.
L’affaire Assange frequently
reminds me of the day when my 4th standard classmate who had just
discovered how babies came into this world used his mediocre language
skills to spread this newfound and forbidden piece of information.
Expectedly, the news started a mutiny of students against their parents.
“How could they do something this dirty?” was one question that seemed
to sum up the sentiment in the air that day. This analogy tells us, in a
predictable way that the internet has reached an adolescent stage where
it is particularly prone to bad influences. Any reasonable individual
knows that geopolitics, international-strategy and foreign policy isn’t
all unicorns and magic storks and any insistence on washing dirty
laundry in open would ultimately stink up the institution of democracy.
This is not to say, however that
any pragmatic notion of liberalism must come with an in-built system
for repressing bad politico-strategic memories nor does it imply that
the necessary evils of governing nation-states in a predominantly
capitalist world should be ignored. All that is required at this stage
is firstly, to infuse the idea of relevance and values within the
networked ratio of consciousness of online populations of the world to
the consciousness of bureaucracies which sustain them. Secondly, we
need to educate people to use the powers of the internet wisely and
instead of using it for nitpicking and hair-splitting critiques of
governments for the sake of revolution “here and now” they must be
taught to use the internet as a moderator of any relevance-to-values
imbalance which might creep on our way to truly emancipatory
technological solutions.
Lastly, In a world clearly
divided between those who think Julian Assange is a villain from a bond
movie and those who like to think of him as the “digital Gandhi” it is
wise to point out that he is neither. He is perhaps little more than a
younger version of himself hacking his way into the pages of human
history. Governments around the world must wisen up to his accidental
but insightful revelations into society, culture and the evolutionary
stage of the internet, he should also be put on an international
governmental payroll for investigating further into the nature and modes
of cyber-activism and should be a member of every committee
investigating ways to prevent and defend societies against
cyber-terrorism. Needless to say he should neither be turned into a hero
nor a villain and the ridiculous charges against him must be dropped.