Six anti-theses on WikiLeaks

[jose v]

Six anti-theses on WikiLeaks
The corporate abdication of non-discrimination requires scrutiny. Visa, Amazon, Mastercard, Tableau, PayPal, PostFinance, and EveryDNS, each severed their relationship with one or more aspects of the WikiLeaks organisation due to putative technicalities. None were served with legal documents requiring that they stop supporting élite-perceived illegal activity. Rather, they caved-in due to vague public and private requests by functionaries within US government offices. Yet, these businesses have no moral qualms providing similar services to the Ku Klux Klan, homophobic sites or just about anything else. As to their decisions to cut Wikileaks off, they justified their actions via the legalese of their Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policies.

The actions of the 4chan Anons using low orbit ion cannon software on the websites of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, PostFinance, and others are in a lineage with FloodNet strategies used by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. While many mainstream media sources see these as "attacks", others, such as The Guardian newspaper (London), realise them to be "non-violent action or civil disobedience". It is easy for the media and the twitchy end-time legal authorities to misconstrue these actions as illegal denial of service attacks, as a 16-year old Dutch teenager is finding out right now, or as the EDT and b.a.n.g. lab found out earlier in 2010. Nevertheless, we are seeing a maturation of this technique becoming acceptable to many outside the net.art community.

The deliberation process of the 4chan Anons ("Anonymous") prefigures future forms of activist collaboration online. Discussions happened across a diversity of networked media, both old and new (IRC, Twitter, Blogspot, PiratePad, etc.). Orderly discussion under the control of a leader was not the norm. Individuals simultaneously put forth their own suggestions to have them edited into or out of existence. The 4chan Anons appeared to the US net-illiterate politicians and corporations to be seasoned political activists, not simply script-kiddies. Perhaps there is something here which those of us interested in new forms of pan-global, non-political organisation can learn from these predominantly sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds. More here (11.12.10).