Why Assange & Zuckerberg Could Destroy Civilization

Orwell couldn't have predicted that we'd actually manage to spawn (with a lot of help from John de Mol) a generation of morons that would watch over Big Brother, rather than vice versa.

Er...I'm not clear what ATU's legal position would be if we posted the name of the UK Premiership footballer who has taken out superinjunctions preventing the details of his marital infidelity becoming known.. "in case he gets booed by fans".

The gentleman's name has already been widely publicised on Twitter, Facebook etc- not to mention under the parliamentary privilege bestowed by revealing all the grisly details on the floor of the House of Commons.

Nonetheless, I feel I should tread cautiously here, and merely replicate the image already published on the front page of Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper. That covers us legally, I believe.

Here we go, then:

^

Obviously, I have absolutely no idea who took out the legal superinjunction against publication of details of the gentleman's adultery, but if I were standing at a bus stop in Arbroath and I were a Manchester United supporter, it might possibly occur to me to remark to my friend Jimmy stood next to me in the queue that him in the picture looks a bit like Ryan Giggs.

I'd almost certainly be wrong, though.

There ain't no civilisation to fall, where these tabloid interweb tales venture, so no need to fret. These people are happy enough to take Hello's considerable coin, and invite them into their homes to paint an impossibly perfect- and gaudy- picture of their married, newly or otherwise, convivial bliss. No point in bleating, then, when the 'new media' flexes its muscles in the opposite direction, and the truth outs.

Bodministrator wrote:
3)through a massive data dump of private correspondence and day-to-day operational details, has revealed USA to be notably less cynical, and more well-intentioned than the radicals of the world suggest

To a certain extent, I agree with this. Resisting Isreal's calls to attack Iran was welcome news. Bugging UN officals - not so good... but no doubt many countries are doing that.

When I was a young man I was foolish enough to want to become rich and famous, and I thank whatever good fairy overlooked my nativity that neither of these horrors ever happened.

If I'd become rich at an early age, I would almost certainly be dead by now- my many youthful vices and indulgences would have finished me off long ago.

As for fame, it would be too easy to quote Bowie/Lennon, so here instead is part of the UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion's poem on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales:

Your life was not your
own to keep
or lose. Beside the river,
swerving under ground,
your future tracked you,
snapping at your heels;
Diana, breathless, hunted
by your own quick
hounds.


Yep- a deadly commodity, Fame.

Jaron uses his hands when expressing himself, more than almost anyone else I've ever seen. Only Hitler comes close. Jaron has lovely long dreadlocks. Jaron peers into the future, and says that in less than 10 years, unless kids can make their own Avatar in an afternoon, their dates will drop them.

What the heck, why not...?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfeaNKcffMk
Fame- David Bowie.

It done for John, of course.

Strawberry Jam wrote:

But I tend to think that what's going on with all those new-fangled virtual reality things is just the continuation of a development that's inherent in capitalism anyway - reduction of humans to commodities.

naturally my response is more emotional than learned......

but I don't think this vision that was born in the last few decades of automation, robots, cyborgs, androids and prosthetic brains etc - not to mention aliens, space travel, new worlds - is really capitalism taken to the extreme.....although humans have become commodities in lots of other ways unrelated to science-fiction's predictions and prescience......

I think it was an attempt (futile?) of grasping for a future utopia......even the sci-fi books that painted future dystopias were concerned with warning us about where things were heading

the Terminator - a glammed up film about machines gone mad

but we had Mad Max before that - the post-apocalyptic nightmare that we've all dreamt about since nuclear warfare became a viable threat to the world

The Matrix - plot derived from many influences - is actually an anarchist's take on our own current society....from my perspective......

this materialistic world where people willingly hand over everything to Big Brother in order to live a life of the least discomfort (whether it's real or not - and who knows, maybe it's not) - a bit like the Truman Show.......

I don't know about the singularity cult - perhaps I should have looked it up first......

but I really think the people who envisioned a virtual reality/internet reality future imagined it as a kind of utopia

where the machinery clicked along and humans were freed from the capitalist trap.......

but I haven't given it much thought like SJ......

so I will go and ponder........

OK, I have heard of the Singularity cult - as propounded by Ray Kurzweil

it was very popular on a geek forum my ex used to own and where I spent much of my time in the last 10 years - left about 3/4 years ago....

I suppose I am a member of that group of people that is looking forward to a future like that........

I am absolutely charmed by the different visions of the future I've glimpsed whilst reading sci-fi

androids, super-human people with augmented minds and bodies etc - I'm totally charmed by it.....

whether the reality will be quite the picnic I envision remains to be seen, but it probably won't be as exciting as it seemed to me a couple of years ago

Lord Peter Wimsey wrote:I will go and ponder........

Food for thought:


Damned to Fame- James Knowlson's biography of Samuel Beckett.

Strawberry Jam wrote:

Lord Peter Wimsey wrote:but I haven't given it much thought like SJ......

Well, neither have I so far. I really have to read up on that stuff. And Marxism is in no way anti-technological, of course. Marx had the hope that technological progress would help free us from having to work all the time and thus overcome alienation and enable us to do what makes us human. Perhaps some virtual reality utopias chime in there. But I really don't now enough.

yes, that's the utopian future that figures a lot in books by Iain Banks and others.......societies of leisurely scholarly people......

with the bangs and whistles of space travel - and alien races.....(not very realistic)

but the future was envisioned by these guys as having computers that evolved - artificial intelligence that evolved alongside and sometimes within human (bodies)

there are awful scenarios where the computers and machines (robots etc) become more advanced than their creators (kind of like Frankenstein monsters) and turn on them

the genre of science fiction is so vast - but my particular favourite (cyber-punk) was around before the internet became ubiquitous and I really think we are very close to the worlds within the pages of the books that fascinated me

anyway, in conclusion, I love that shit....heheheh

as for Assange - not driven by greed - not driven by fame - (he actively guards his privacy - I don't think his motivation was fame)

as for Assange - I admire him

I've heard he's a complete tosser - but being a tosser need not reflect on the ideas and actions that for a short while almost liberated our consciences.....and our consciousnesses

tell me the Arab spring wasn't influenced by Wikileaks - it surely must have been to some degree.......(Facebook and Twitter enables us all to be Paul Revere)

even if it wasn't, Wikileaks revelations have blown a gaping hole in the shield the rich have built around themselves......

a simple person was able to breach the defences of the pugnaciously secretive and piglike greed of the wealth-cocooned overlords.....

it's a true victory for the common man......

OK - I have no idea if that made any sense, but I think it made some kind of sense to me......

the establishment has tricky and sneaky ways of trying to tap into the zeitgeist......(whether past or present)

today I saw an abhorrent ad - POWER to the PEOPLE and their money - (some bank) - which taps into baby boomer fears.....with evil, twisted intent and malfeasance hijacking and subverting the genuine movement that made such a difference to the world (albeit short-lived)

I hope to see the end of capitalism forthwith......

why should we be molly-coddled like sheep to become the consumers that pad the pockets of the rich.....that pay for their extravagances and that are blindly herded up

it does my head in

why do we fall for this shit? again and again?

Never mind Avatar in an afternoon, suck on summa dis auld-time information super-highway magick, Mr. Dettol 'Speed of Light' Linoleum:

How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix

I SPRANG to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
‘Good speed!’ cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;
‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through;
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit.

’Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near
Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear;
At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see;
At Düffeld, ’twas morning as plain as could be;
And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half-chime,
So Joris broke silence with ‘Yet there is time!’

At Aerschot, up leaped of a sudden the sun,
And against him the cattle stood black every one,
To stare through the mist at us galloping past,
And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last,
With resolute shoulders, each butting away
The haze, as some bluff river headland its spray.

And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back
For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track;
And one eye’s black intelligence,—ever that glance
O’er its white edge at me, his own master, askance!
And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon
His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on.

By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris, ‘Stay spur!
Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault’s not in her,
We’ll remember at Aix’—for one heard the quick wheeze
Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees,
And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank,
As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank.

So we were left galloping, Joris and I,
Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky;
The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh,
’Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff;
Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white,
And ‘Gallop,’ gasped Joris, ‘for Aix is in sight!’

‘How they’ll greet us!’—and all in a moment his roan
Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone;
And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight
Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate,
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,
And with circles of red for his eye-sockets’ rim.

Then I cast loose my buffcoat, each holster let fall,
Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all,
Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear,
Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without peer;
Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or good,
Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood.

And all I remember is, friends flocking round
As I sat with his head ’twixt my knees on the ground;
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine,
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent)
Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent.

The Offensive Internet edited by Saul Levmore and Martha C Nussbaum – review

A timely study from the US looks at the questions arising from privacy and a lawless internet

Peter Preston The Observer, Sunday 29 May 2011


Newspaper headlines on 24 May naming the Premier League footballer at the heart of a debate about privacy laws. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

Once upon a more hopeful time, technology provided a suddenly empowering means of communication which united friends, families and communities of scholars across the world, blew away clouds of secrecy, toppled autocratic governments (and many other good things). The internet was free, and offered freedom itself; a wonderful tool. And then the law – or, more accurately, lawyers – began to try to catch up.


Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation by Saul Levmore, Martha C. Nussbaum

Enter a formidable core team of experts from the Chicago University law school, with guest players from Harvard, Columbia, Washington, Texas and Yale, all anxious to examine whether too much freedom damages psyches (as well as legal fee systems). It's a fascinating task. We know that spreading paedophilia on the net is like shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. Why shouldn't we be equally repulsed when false rumour spreads across Generation Google and blights an innocent life; when the "gender-objectification" of women (and their "huge fake titties") is dirty bathwater on the worldwide web; when misogyny and anonymity are the digital dishes of every day; when privacy itself lies in pawn to the click of a button?

Professor Brian Leiter (one voice from Chicago) wants the boundaries drawn much tighter. "Is there really an amazing diversity of valuable speech around (these) cyber-cesspools that we should give them safe harbours? We do not protect safe harbours in the traditional media for 'cesspool speech': why is cyberspace different?"

Thus you can feel legal mission creep operating, much as usual. Discover a new problem then discover a legal way of addressing it. Read Professor Nussbaum on the moment "autonomy violation" in women becomes "autonomy denial", which infantilises women and infects internet porn. But these are American professors and research fellows writing for an essentially American audience. That means their common obsession is the existence and meaning of the First Amendment, and whether it covers "low value news" as well as the good Watergate-style stuff, a spot of extramarital rough and tumble as well as the Pentagon Papers. If it does, then many of these zealous efforts to curb net opportunism will be doomed to eventual failure at some umpteenth court of appeal hearing – impossibility looming.

Professor Geoffrey R Stone, editor of the Supreme Court Review and one of the weightiest voices in this collection, adds now widely quoted pragmatism to such basic doubts. Of course there's a strong "strain of nasty" spreading across cyberspace. Of course you can draw modern parallels with Warren and Brandeis's famous, and eternally evoked, law review critique of 1890 newspapers ("The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and decency. Gossip… has become a trade"). But where, in a world of social networks and rampant tweets, can real lines be drawn?

His hugely influential conclusion deserves to be there at the top of the evidence bundle as our parliament's new Commons and Lords committee meets to find something sustainable in a world where even the prime minister thinks current privacy defences unsustainable. "Just as the law can no longer effectively deal with obscenity because of social and technological change, so too can it no longer deal with non-newsworthy invasions of privacy." The First Amendment plus technical change mean that, "for all practical purposes", the defences of privacy "have been gobbled up completely. To argue otherwise is simply to tilt at windmills".

We may seem a world away from mystery footballers, superinjunctions, Max Mosley and constant tweeting here: but, in fact, that isn't so. Geoffrey Stone sees the only way to protect privacy today can be at source – if individuals "who truly care about it… act carefully and with discretion". No romps with gabby Wbags, no drunken nights on the town, no starring roles in celebrity magazines. And here's where the circle of impossibility finally snaps shut.

The internet may be "offensive", and in some instances so repellent that international pressures can operate. But privacy, with its attendant injunctions, lacks any common definition that works in a global digital context, as this remarkably useful book – detailed, thoughtful debate at a level we haven't begun to approach yet in this country – irresistibly shows. Judge David Eady, sitting in his Strand courtroom, can't change the First Amendment. What he rules, as we now see, any twittering renegade in Baltimore or Boston can flout with impunity – and even the massed ranks of American academia can't change that. Privacy in one country has become as duff an international concept as libel rituals supervised in the same court by the same Judge Eady.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography - review

An unfinished draft of his life story does the WikiLeaks founder no favours

David Leigh
guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 September 2011 13.30 BST


'It vexes me when the world won't listen': Assange arrives at the High Court in July to appeal against his extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Marsupials are pouched animals, mostly from Australia, that give birth to their young in an unfinished state. What we have here is a weird marsupial hybrid. It's part Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and part Scottish novelist and ghostwriter Andrew O'Hagan. This mixed-up creature has given birth to an unfinished draft, dragged out of its pouch and published before its maturity under the wacky title The Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange hasn't really been well-served by his publisher's behaviour. It's the result of what seems to be a characteristic Assange imbroglio in which he will neither give back his £412,000 publisher's advance, nor deliver a finally approved manuscript. But the decision by Canongate's Jamie Byng to publish regardless, although understandable, has produced an unsatisfactory book.


Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography
by Julian Assange

The ghostwriter and his subject hadn't yet really gelled by the time of this draft. It's easy to see the fictionalising hand of O'Hagan in an early chapter about Assange's hippy boyhood in northern Queensland. It begins, soulfully: "For most people, childhood is a climate. In my case, it is perfectly hot and humid with nothing above us but blue sky …" But a later section on the Aussie hacker's souring partnership with the journalists who were to print his leaked US secrets is much more raw. The opening reads like Assange sounding off verbatim on a bad day, in a sentence full of bile and misogyny: "Vanity in a newspaper man is like perfume on a whore: they use it to fend off a dark whiff of themselves." For by the time we reach this second half of the book, O'Hagan's mediating intelligence seems to have retreated, and the digital recorder is doing much of the work. Perhaps the ghost got weary, locked up in a chilly East Anglian winter with his monologuing subject, who is currently confined there on bail, fighting extradition on Swedish sex allegations.

The lack of a final edit does other disservices to Assange's story. The narrative stops too abruptly, before publication in the Guardian and the New York Times of the third and most important set of leaks he had acquired (the state department cables), and the subsequent legal pursuit of Assange on the sex complaints. It's padded out instead with unnecessary chunks of the cables themselves, which can be read elsewhere. The unresolved criminal allegations, inevitably, make him censor a defensive account of sex with two Swedish fans. It's all very well calling a woman "neurotic", but did he deliberately tear a condom as she alleged?

Furthermore, a nervous Canongate libel lawyer, no longer able presumably to rely on Assange as a future witness, appears to have simply chopped out chunks of detail when Assange abuses those he doesn't like. This censorship muddies what could have been a lively, if defamatory, narrative, and pointlessly withholds many of the names. I myself, for example, who clashed with Assange during the Guardian saga, and co-authored a book he didn't care for, am anonymised throughout, transparently enough, as "the news reporter". Yet Bill Keller, then editor of the New York Times and considered presumably to be libel-proof under US free-speech laws, remains relentlessly vituperated against under his own name.

A final fact-check would have removed a crop of stupid errors. It must have been a transcription mistake that turned Heather Brooke into "the 'Independent' journalist" rather than the independent journalist she is. And Oscar Wilde with his rent-boys was not "sleeping with panthers", he was feasting with panthers.

For all its drawbacks, the memoir does add some good detail to the increasingly well-trodden field of Assange studies (it's the fifth book so far). The passage in which he meets his biological father, a bohemian Sydney actor, for the first time in his 20s, is genuinely poignant: "I found myself getting sort of angry … There on shelf after shelf were the exact same books as those I had bought and read myself … If I had only known him, I might just have picked his books down from the shelf … I was forced to make myself up as I went along."

And there's a telling section in which Assange, perhaps unwittingly, reveals why he seeks out unquestioning disciples, and quarrels with so many others: "Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them – first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out. It's a pattern that stretches in my life from toytown feds to hacks at the Guardian … Usually it ends with these people enumerating one's personal faults, a shocking, ungrateful, unmanly effort, to be filed under despicable in my book … I've been meeting [these people] all my life."

This seems to be a cry coming from a truly threatened personality, in fear of being overwhelmed and extinguished. People have criticised Assange for being preposterously grandiose and lashing out at imagined "enemies". Perhaps they should have been kinder, for there is clearly something else at work here.

It's a shame Assange couldn't get on with the Guardian. As he has the grace occasionally to recognise in this book, people there share some of his beliefs – free speech, investigative journalism, standing up to big corporations and murderous governments, the potentially liberating quality of the internet. And his idea for WikiLeaks provided an exhilarating addition to the world's journalistic possibilities. It was a neat tool – as an uncensorable global publisher of last resort, and as an electronic outlet for leaking the new kinds of huge database the computer age is bringing into existence. But unmediated leaking on a random basis, even of gigabits of purloined documents, cannot ever revolutionise all the world's power relationships. There Assange shows, regrettably, that he is living in a fantasy world.

Behind his high-sounding talk of quantum mechanics and global conspiracies, there lies a more familiar and heartfelt cry: "If only people knew what was really going on, they'd do something about it!" One sympathises. But these very memoirs demonstrate the opposite. Nothing much happened after Assange threw back the curtain to reveal his sensationally leaked Baghdad helicopter gunship video, with US pilots mowing down Reuters employees and young children in a burst of incompetent cannon-fire. As Assange (or O'Hagan) concedes: "It vexes me when the world won't listen."

That was what forced him to accept an offer from some of the world's major newspapers to make sense of the rest of his material, publish it under the authority of their own names and grant him a share of the credibility slowly built up over 190 years of reputable reporting. Thanks to that imaginative transaction, he rocketed briefly to worldwide fame. These marsupial memoirs of his seem unlikely to increase his prospects of becoming the messiah of the information age. Maybe, sadly, even the reverse.

David Leigh is the co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (Guardian Books).

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Assange, who addressed the anti-capitalism campers outside St Paul's cathedral (London) a few days ago, has had his appeal against extradition to Sweden on sexual offences charges turned down

WikiLeaks' Assange loses UK battle against extradition
By Robin Millard | AFP



WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday lost a bitter legal battle to block his extradition from Britain to Sweden to face questioning over allegations of rape and sexual assault.

Two judges at the High Court in London rejected arguments by the 40-year-old Australian, whose anti-secrecy website has enraged governments around the world, that his extradition would be unlawful.

"The court dismissed the appeal," said a summary of the judgement, before detailing the four counts on which Assange had appealed against a decision by a lower court in February that he should be sent to Sweden.

Assange said he would consult his lawyers about whether to make a further appeal to the Supreme Court, the highest legal authority in Britain.

He has 14 days to do so, but only if his lawyers can first convince judges that the case is of special public interest.

"We will be considering our next step in the days ahead," the former computer hacker told a scrum of reporters and cameramen gathered from around the world, in a brief statement from the court steps.

"I have not been charged with any crime in any country.

"Despite this, the European arrest warrant (EAW) is so restrictive that it prevents UK courts from considering the facts of a case, as judges have made clear here today."

Assange has strongly denied the allegations, claiming they are politically motivated and linked to the activities of WikiLeaks. He has been under virtual house arrest since he was first detained in December.

During an appeal hearing in July, Assange had argued that the warrant under which he was held last December was invalid because it was issued by a prosecutor and not a court.

However, the two judges presiding Wednesday said it had been subjected to proper judicial scrutiny in Sweden.

They also rejected his assertion that the claims made by two women of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and an accusation of rape would not be offences under English law.

One woman alleged that Assange had unprotected sex with her while she was asleep, and the judges rejected his lawyers' contention that consent to sex with a condom remained consent when a condom was not used.

Thirdly, the judges also rejected Assange's argument that he should not be extradited because he was only wanted for questioning and had not been charged, saying he was "plainly accused" of the crimes.

And they denied the arrest warrant was disproportionate, given that Assange offered to be questioned via videolink.

The WikiLeaks boss has been living under strict bail conditions -- including having to wear an electronic ankle tag and observe a strict curfew -- at the east England mansion of Vaughan Smith, a supporter and former army captain.

Smith told reporters outside court that Assange's morale was holding up.

"I find it amazing he's able to take the blows, and the blows have been considerable. He's been remarkably robust but then he's very committed and believes in what he's doing," he said.

Assange has previously expressed fears that his extradition to Sweden would lead to his transfer to the United States to face as yet unspecified charges of spying.

His mother Christine told the Australian Associated Press news agency Wednesday that her son was now "even closer to a US extradition or rendition".

"If (the Australian people) don't stand up for Julian, he will go to the US and he will be tortured," she said.

Scores of Assange's supporters outside the court building in London expressed outrage at the ruling.

"I have always had a lot of faith in the British and Swedish systems of justice but it just seems to me that there is something going on here which is murky," said Jason Gleeson, 35.

However, the lawyer for Assange's two female accusers welcomed the verdict.

"It has been very trying for them to live with this uncertainty, especially since they themselves have found themselves attacked," Claes Borgstroem told the TT news agency.

The poppy was a nice touch.

user wrote:

I think Twoody means that in the UK the wearing of a Remembrance Day poppy is a surefire symbol of respectability. Twoody takes a cynical attitude to this gesture on the part of Mr Assange.

^

Ribble ribble.

Me, cynical? Never.

I think our Julian started wearing the poppy even before November. Now that's respect.