Archive: Year: 2010

Next June 6-7, there's going to be only one place to be if you're interested in how technology is changing politics, governance and society--at the eighth annual Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City. We're pleased to announce that we'll be gathering at New York University this time, at the beautiful Skirball and Kimmel Centers. Our keynote speakers will include: Lucy Bernholz, Author of the Philanthropy 2173 blog; danah boyd, Social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet; Cory Doctorow, Science fiction author, activist, journalist and the co-editor of Boing Boing; Lisa Gansky, Entrepreneur and author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing; Ilyse Hogue; Director of political advocacy and...

In the digital age, should all information be free? Does good government require secrecy, or more openness? Can we trust private internet service providers to defend free speech? Is Wikileaks a terrorist organization, or the beginning of a new kind of transnational investigative journalism? This Saturday in New York City, we'll be discussing these urgent questions with a stellar group of thinkers and doers from the worlds of politics, journalism, diplomacy, activism and technology, including: Emily Bell, Director of Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School Esther Dyson, EDventure Charles Ferguson, Director, Inside Job and No End in Sight Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and editor-in-chief, The Huffington Post Jeff Jarvis, Professor, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Andrew Keen, Author of the forthcoming book, Digital Vertigo: An Anti-Social Manifesto Gideon Lichfield,...

The conflict between Wikileaks and the U.S. Government reminds me of something we've been experiencing for some years now in the private sector of corporate activity and social enterprises. Lots of hierarchical, top-down, closed fortress organizations have been discovering that they need to open up, accept that the internet is dispersing power to the edges and into the hands of free agents, a.k.a. the people who used to be their audience. Think of how internal bloggers like Robert Scoble helped open up and humanize Microsoft's evil empire, or how angry consumer virtual flash-mobs like the one that rallied around Jeff Jarvis's "Dell Sucks" blog post confronted and pried open Dell. Or how netroots bloggers made Howard Dean the chairman of...

Reflecting on Amazon's craven decision to pre-emptively cave in to pressure from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman and kick Wikileaks off its cloud servers, the thought occurs to me that it's time to update A.J. Liebling's old saying. Freedom of the press is not guaranteed to those who own one, but to those who own their own server. Amazon's stated reasons for dumping Wikileaks, without warning or chance of appeal, don't wash. In its blog post, Amazon says the group was in violation of its terms of service: ...

Last night, at a panel discussion at the Columbia Journalism School on media policy, Harvard University professor Yochai Benkler, made a series of critical points about the role of online media watchdogs. As his text, he took the current Wikileaks "Cablegate" disclosures and the recent episode of media misinformation around President Obama's alleged $200 million-a-day trip to India. First, he pointed out that traditional news media were hardly the best guarantors of independent journalism, noting that The New York Times editor Bill Keller has admitted, proudly, that everything his paper is publishing from Wikileaks is being vetted first by the government. "The next Daniel Ellsberg will not risk their career and liberty by going to the New York Times," Benkler...

Is this what a networked protest looks like? The police in London have taken to "kettling" student demonstrators in cul-de-sacs, where they simply hold them from moving in any direction without arresting anyone, and hope to grind them down by attrition. Read this description from Britain's Prospect Magazine of how things played out Tuesday. The distributed network is beating the centralized one; the starfish is beating the spider. But this time it would be different. Again 4,000 protestors marched down Whitehall. Again the police blocked their way. And then something different. The protestors turned. Like swallows catching the air current, in unison they wheeled. Four thousand people reversed back up to Trafalgar and then under Admiralty Arch and straight through St...

Here's a little more detail on how Amazon came to kick Wikileaks off its servers. Yesterday, members of the staff of the Senate Homeland Security committee, which is chaired by Joe Lieberman (D-CT) (I-CT) saw a news article that mentioned that Wikileaks was hosted on Amazon's servers. "We called Amazon and asked a number of questions, said committee communications director Leslie Phillips, including, 'Are you aware that Wikileaks is using your servers,' and 'do you have any plans to take it down'?" Today, she said, "Amazon called back and told us they'd taken Wikileaks down." I asked her if the committee staff had been contacting other major tech companies that provide services to Wikileaks, such as Twitter or Facebook. Phillips said no...

Looking at these videos of British students occupying their schools and universities brought back an old Emma Goldman line: "If I can't dance, then it's not my revolution." I can't decide if the James Brown or MC Hammer video wins the prize. What is it about protest movements that produces bursts of great video?...

Five quick comments about Wikileaks and Cablegate: 1. Let's posit that what Julian Assange is doing is "radical transparency," i.e. publishing everything he can get his hands on. He is, in fact, not doing that, though he is obviously publishing far more raw material than any prior journalistic effort. Given that the internet is a realm of abundance, not scarcity like the old ink-based and TV-time-based media, this is a feature, not a bug. Whether you like it or not, raw data dumps (in structured, searchable, mashable form) of previously private or secret information are now part of the media landscape. As Max Frankel of the New York Times just put it, "The threat of massive leaks will persist so long...

Students in the United Kingdom are on the march against deep cuts in higher education spending, and their protests are being organized and amplified by what, more and more, seems to be the standard social media tool-kit of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Google Maps (showing where marches are planned). Tomorrow they're holding the second in what appears to be a series of planned national walk-outs, and people are starting to call it a "Children's Crusade" for the large number of middle-school and high-school age students who are participating, along with their college peers. The forecast calls for snow, but it may also be a very big snowball fight, if all the plans circulating online come to fruition. Here's a bit...