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d-miurge
Supreme tranceaddict
Registered: Jul 2004
Location: Unicornland
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For those who are on Twitter, search the hashtag #imwikileaks. It's really fascinating.
On a related note, Umberto Eco wrote a very interesting paper on a liberal magazine last week:
| quote: | | For the celebrated novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco, the Wikileaks affair or "Cablegate" not only shows up the hypocrisy that governs relations between states, citizens and the press, but also presages a return to more archaic forms of communication. |
His redefinition of a secret is very insightful:
| quote: | | A real secret is an empty secret Secondly, the very notion that any old hacker can delve into the most secret secrets of the most powerful country in the world has dealt a hefty blow to the State Department’s prestige. So the scandal actually hurts the “perpetrators” more than the “victims”. But let’s turn to the more profound significance of what has occurred. Formerly, back in the days of Orwell, every power could be conceived of as a Big Brother watching over its subjects’ every move. The Orwellian prophecy came completely true once the powers that be could monitor every phone call made by the citizen, every hotel he stayed in, every toll road he took and so on and so forth. The citizen became the total victim of the watchful eye of the state. But when it transpires, as it has now, that even the crypts of state secrets are not beyond the hacker’s grasp, the surveillance ceases to work only one-way and becomes circular. The state has its eye on every citizen, but every citizen, or at least every hacker – the citizens’ self-appointed avenger – can pry into the state’s every secret. How can a power hold up if it can’t even keep its own secrets anymore? It is true, as Georg Simmel once remarked, that a real secret is an empty secret (which can never be unearthed); it is also true that anything known about Berlusconi or Merkel’s character is essentially an empty secret, a secret without a secret, because it’s public domain. But to actually reveal, as WikiLeaks has done, that Hillary Clinton’s secrets were empty secrets amounts to taking away all her power. WikiLeaks didn’t do any harm to Sarkozy or Merkel, but did irreparable damage to Clinton and Obama. |
full article
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Dec-05-2010 13:15
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d-miurge
Supreme tranceaddict
Registered: Jul 2004
Location: Unicornland
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| quote: | Originally posted by Joss Weatherby
No. Quit viewing this in such black and white ways. There are some things that should be exposed, others left out. That is called being responsible and what wikileaks is doing is not responsible. |
Can you give us a single thing that must have not been leaked on the cablegate?
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Dec-06-2010 00:11
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d-miurge
Supreme tranceaddict
Registered: Jul 2004
Location: Unicornland
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| quote: | Originally posted by Meat187
I agree with this and find it rather disgusting that there seems to be almost no solidarity from the (German) media. It seems like they don't give a fuck, they are reporting the facts and news, but never make a statement. Now if a similar thing had happened in say China the media would have attacked the government for weeks. Looks like in the western world they measure the value of transparency and freedom of speech with a different scale. |
Even Der Spiegel?
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Dec-06-2010 11:41
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