The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.[i]The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson TurnerAs Evgeny Morozov wrote in the Financial Times earlier this week, Assange’s movement could become ‘either a new Red Brigades, or a new Transparency International. … But handled correctly, the state that will benefit most from a nerdy network of 21st-century Che Guevara’s, is America itself’. At the very least, we have an immediate branding glitch: Hillary Clinton was making speeches about the power of free information to create healthy societies only a few months ago, but is now squeezing the fiber-optics of the internet like the most enthusiastic Chinese firewall manager. As Morozov says, better to harness the power of these hackers ‘as useful allies of the West as it seeks to husband democracy and support human rights’ – that is, make them a complement of Western soft power or public diplomacy[ii] – than to martyr their main representative and thus radicalize his followers.
Once a blizzard of diplomatic cables started pouring through the gates of WikiLeaks, my initial reaction was – ‘that’s it, this will obliterate the basic premise for public diplomacy’. However, on second thoughts, there is a plenty of food for thought that begs to differ from the cacophony of unleashed critical voices that perceive the role of and conceive the effect of WikiLeaks only as far as being a banner-bearer of alternative political intelligence; a watchdog and a whistle-blowing platform of the Fourth Estate bent on curbing a monopoly of mainstream mass media; and a counterculture driven to a degree by anti-establishment zeal and impelled to wage asymmetric info war against a state’s secrecy and its communication lifeline – diplomacy.
Until now we have witnessed an unremitting harangue pro- and anti-Assange and WikiLeaks, starting with attempts to financially choke it down, to legally muscle it. Classification is stemming from Wikileaks being a huge psy-op. Assange is being portrayed as a poster boy for cointelpro or a terrorist or a spy; a trailblazing champion of alternative media aka the ‘the Ned Kelly of the Cyber Age’; ‘a libertine 007 by those who note his fondness for martinis;[iii]; a mobilizer of civic disobedience; a runner-up to TIME’s person of the year 2010; the 2009 winner of Amnesty International Media Award;[iv] and the list goes on.
Like the use of anabolic steroids in sports that defeats the purpose of a sportsmanlike effort, so has WikiLeaks’ trailblazing of a world without dead angles, and a world without shadows been perceived as unacceptable to a diplomatic discourse imbued by secrecy until now. According to Julian Assange’s vision, the end purpose of Wikileaks is to ‘carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity’, which consequently will make WikiLeaks stride and strife unnecessary.[v] Again, the question that arises is whether diplomacy can be devoid of secrecy and whether secrecy is sacrosanct to its effectiveness?
At first it appeared paradoxical to me that WikiLeaks could prefigure a progressive rather than regressive future of how the Internet and diplomacy are perceived and utilised. Nevertheless, after a month of ongoing dumping of diplomatic cables, in all reality and on the surface of international relations we have not witnessed significant political realignments. Sure, there were some calculated jabs thrown at the USA, like for instance the Kremlin’s suggestion to nominate Julian Assange for the Noble Peace Prize, but it did not go much further than a verbal picking on. Why is it so?
In my opinion, what become apparent are the three distinct adjustments to post-WikiLeaks impact. First, most governments throughout the world, both democratic and authoritarian, explicitly or implicitly sided with the USA and did not attempt to further agonise or capitalise on the temporary paralysis within the US State Department. Leaked cables not only exposed American secrets, they also touched upon a multitude of regional and global covert arrangements and sentiments, which have awakened a shared sense of urgency and feeling of threat from further info-leaking across a spectrum of different political arrangements. WikiLeaks reminded many of St Thomas More’s observation that ‘politics is a theatre often played out on a scaffold’.[vi]
In addition, the kind of investigative journalism that WikiLeaks propagated until now distinguished itself not so much by quality, but rather by the sheer quantity of information published, and the ideological agenda it sought to rectify. Major media houses that sided with WikiLeaks and helped uphold it by voicing content found within the cables, focused on capitalizing on what is current, and what generates coverage, readership, and publicity, rather than what is considered genuinely newsworthy. This conditioning of information at a selling point embodies the ethos of commodity fetishism Guy DeBorg described in his seminal work – The Society of the Spectacle.[vii] In addition, before the sheer amount of unmediated diplomatic communiqué that has been dispersed can be systematised and contextualised into a coherent narrative and its value be exactly discerned, will take time. It is exactly this limited number of eyeball-hours per day that allows the global auditorium to remain tuned into the story, and defies the mindless passivity of consumer culture delivered to it by mainstream media. As according to Jacques Ellul ‘excessive data do not enlighten the reader or listener; they drown him.’[viii]
Second, WikiLeaks has not only stirred up public opinion across the globe, it has also recognised to its advantage that ‘in moments when new technologies of storytelling develop, the competitive value of the medium can be more influential than the value of the message’.[ix] WikiLeaks has modelled itself as a sort of a universal remote control that sought to allow the global auditorium to channel-surf and deconstruct a carefully concocted content of mainstream media, escaping the grind of a consumer culture, while finally reframing reality around them.
A reaction to WikiLeaks publishing has accentuated public’s disbelief and a feeling of disconnection from certain policy choices that governments are making in its name. WikiLeaks has been hailed as ‘vox populi, vox Dei’ (i.e. ‘the voice of people is the voice of God’), calling on governments to remember to whom they are answerable, and to deliver substance rather than rhetoric and demagogy.
Public contra state fault lines were manifested or spilled over predominantly within the confines of cyberspace, where hacker communities attempted to have their ‘payback’ against antishock measures taken in opposition to WikiLeaks under direct or indirect auspices of various states. The public’s discontent will act as leverage that will make politicians wary of their future policy choices, and may also prompt alterations to some in order to rally national consensus, and live up to election promises. However, in my view, this demonstrates the extreme of the WikiLeaks phenomenon, and that is a danger inherent in a notion of omnipresent transparency, which brings me to my last point.
Third, we must not forget that the USA has been in a state of a permanent warfare since 9/11, 2001. In times of war there is a tendency for state broadcasting networks to converge and bandwagon to a point where the domestic audience is fed by highly sanitised views of the war, and one-sided patriotism meant to mobilise national consensus and reinforce a sense of national unity. However, this bandwagon effect of state media in times of national crisis can simultaneously lead to the subversion of political freedoms.
WikiLeaks as a stateless, Internet-based, non-profit medium has managed to scoop the mainstream media by untwisting its carefully concocted reality. It has pointed out to how far our own reality is spun, by allowing audiences to peak within a political matrix where real life, mainstream media life and cyber life are converging. WikiLeaks accomplished that by modelling itself as a platform from which it allowed audiences to observe desensitised scenes of brutality and the horrors of wars, and to read about covert diplomatic dialogues.[x]
What followed as a result of WikiLeaks heralding a notion of omnipresent transparency against power structures was a counter-notion of omnipresent surveillance perpetuated on behalf of the USA for the sake of its security. We witnessed an unremitting tirade against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange that skyrocketed in no time within America, and also across the globe.
What is symptomatic and paradoxical in this whole dynamic, however, is that the US went into a war against terrorism to fight for a more secure and freer world, and to preserve the same exact freedoms (i.e. freedom of speech and democracy), which in case of WikiLeaks America also sought to stamp out.
Emmanuel Levinas has warned that ultimately any war tends to ‘destroy the identity of the same’. In my opinion, the WikiLeaks notion of democracy, one it tries to achieve by waging info warfare, to a certain extent embodies a notion of ‘tyranny of transparency’, which out of its egalitarian ideals may be undermining the exact essence of democratic instances of a state that it wants to see accountable and respected. As winner of the Nobel prize for Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, pointed out, it is paradoxical that the states most affected by WikiLeaks are democratic ones due to their openness, while authoritarian regimes and dictatorships are spared due to their lack of openness.[xi]
However, to paraphrase the catchphrase of the Obama team in the run-up to the presidential election, this is a good crisis that should not be wasted, and which could still have a positive effect for America and its diplomacy.
The impact of WikiLeaks has pointed out a danger in American foreign policy and within the State Department as its wingman against succumbing to a dynamic observed among opponents in the Middle East, where opponents started resembling each other by utilizing the exact same tactics. In my view, it would be a mistake to use WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as a Trojan horse with which greater surveillance, censorship and circumspection of the Internet is introduced through a small back door. The geopolitical impact of WikiLeaks remains debatable and still rather speculative; using it as an excuse to side with authoritative regimes in order to devise a New Information Order in the name of defence against cyberterrorism or a similar formulation would be to preclude the potential of this ‘crisis’.
Maybe the greatest success WikiLeaks achieved is that it managed to establish itself as a sort of a media juggernaut, which has awakened psychological fear among governments that they will either have to learn how to ride it or will end up getting crushed by it. WikiLeaks has become a proxy of utility for public opinion, which some believe is or will be capable of exerting just enough domestic sentiment and pressure to keep government policy choices in check. Going against this hope for re-contextualisation of the way politics is conducted may be beneficial against the embarrassment the State Department underwent, but it would also imply re-militarisation of an already civilized network – the Internet, and satirisation of American democratic ideals rather than their advancement (i.e. the 2011 World Press Freedom Day will be organised in the USA, it will be an occasion where we will hear whether we have been ushered into an age of an open media dominated by free flow of information or if, rather, we are facing new barriers[xii]). Let’s not forget that in January 2010, US State Secretary Hillary Clinton proclaimed:
Information has never been so free. … Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.[xiii]
She had also recalled President Barack Obama’s remark during his visit in China in 2009, where he:
…defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.[xiv]
Public diplomacy operates best by precept and example. By allowing WikiLeaks to publish, the USA would redeem its democratic ideal, which in thea past month has been put to the test (i.e. public discourse was dominated by an lynch-mob atmosphere where proponents of government secrecy called for the incarceration and execution of Julian Assange even if this required creating a new law to realise it or modifying an old one – the 1917, Espionage Act). Democrat Representative John Conyers had pointed out a need:
…not be hasty, and let us not legislate in a climate of fear or prejudice …For, in such an atmosphere, it is our constitutional freedoms and our cherished civil rights that are the first to be sacrificed in the false service of our national security.[xv]
This is exactly why the USA should tread lightly in its deliberations on WikiLeaks. America has to remain loyal to its own fears of resisting consuming its own freedom. In this case, it means rather than concentrating on circumventing the Internet interactivity as a point of resistance to government secrecy, the USA could use WikiLeaks to launch a different kind of public diplomacy engagement with the world.
WikiLeaks re-contextualised the meaning of an open media environment and this may be a starting point for a dialogue between western and authoritarian regimes. As much as new Internet tools may create new challenges for governments, it may as well provide solutions to some of the world’s most vexing problems. The same can be applied to an increase in transparency. By allowing a more transparent diplomatic discourse to take place, there is also a hope that transparency will increase mutual trust, and lead to diplomatic relations less prone to feelings of anxiety and paranoia.
Transparency may also boost public diplomacy discourse, which allows greater flexibility than traditional diplomacy. The basic premise of effective public diplomacy is that those governments utilising it have a lot of mutually beneficial things to share with the world, and reasonably little to conceal. To couple the above with an open media space, it also implies that public diplomacy will have to be honest rather than just serve as a smoke screen behind which corrupt and authoritarian regimes may continue to strive. Operating in such an environment could potentially cajole more introverted governments to open up, and thus self-reinforce adherence to transparency and further accountability to their respective publics.
Finally, WikiLeaks may have pointed out missteps that have brought American public diplomacy into disrepute, but it has also offered a potential path to rehabilitate it by insisting on a more transparent engagement with the rest of the world based on a search for win-win outcomes to non-zero-sum games.
[i] Turner FJ (1964) The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. p. 4.
[ii] Kane P (2010) Wikileaks: an asset for the democracy abroad. Caledonian Mercury, 9 December 2010. Available at: http://patkane.caledonianmercury.com/2010/12/09/wikileaks-an-asset-for-the-democracy-brand/00146
[iii] McVeigh T, Townsend M (2010) Julian Assange furore deepens as new details emerge of sex crime allegations. The Guardian, 18 December 2010. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/18/julian-assange-allegations-wikileaks-cables
[iv] Julian Assange, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange
[v] Brady A (2010) Julian Assange and the computer conspiracy. OWNI.eu Digital Journalism, 26 December 2010. Available at: http://owni.eu/2010/12/08/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/, http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/12/16/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/
[vi] Virilio P (2005) The Information Bomb. UK: Radical Thinkers, Verso, UK. p. 73.
[vii] The Society of the Spectacle. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
[viii] Ellul J (1979) Propaganda: The formation of men’s attitudes. New York: Random House (Vintage Press).
[ix] Ruskkoff D (2003) Open source democracy – How online communication is changing offline politics. London: DEMOS, UK. p. 21.
[x] Fuchs C (2010) WikiLeaks – Alternative Internet medium and watchdog platform – and the critique of the power elite. Information-Society-Technology & Media, 4 December 2010. Available at: http://fuchs.uti.at/418/
[xi] Wikileaks ‘dangerous’ and ‘wonderful. Swedish Wire, 6 December 2010. Available at: http://swedishwire.com/politics/7518-wikileaks-transparency-dangerous-and-wonderful-said-vargas-llosa
[xii] World Press Freedom Day 2011 to focus on 21st century media. UNESCO, 16 December 2010. Available at: http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31106&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
[xiii] Naughton J (2010) Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It’s your choice. The Guardian, 6 December 2010. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Newman A (2010) Wikileaks leads to calls for new infringements on speech, press. The New American, 30 December 2010. Available at: http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/constitution/5700-wikileaks-leads-to-calls-for-new-infringements-on-speech-press
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