Arun Kumar on Wed, 23 Sep 2015 13:19:59 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> "Speak Out with Snowden, Assange and Manning" |
there is a distinct difference between assange and the other whistleblowers, in that the others really are whistleblowers, whereas assange is an outsider. The eternal outsider if you will. to think about a whistleblower and their psyche, here is someone who obviously believed in a certain organization and its structure and goals and mission. but at some point either grew disillusioned by it or realized that the problem was systemic. these three aren't the first whistleblowers, there have been numerous others who've exposed corporate fraud and corruption before them. they are just the most high profile ones for obvious reasons. but this statue seems to encourage more people to step up and blow the whistle on corruption. it reminds me a bit of time magazine's person of the year for 2000 i think it was. where the person was You, an image of a mirror on the cover. but i guess when you are blowing the whistle on a system, what exactly do you decry? is it the specific excesses of power and authority and abuse of it, or do you decry or critique the very power itself and try and understand how these systems emerged and how perhaps we are all party to it, to whatever extent. places like this mailing list have been talking about the possibility of things like mass surveillance for a while now, yet i guess thanks to the leaks knowing about it has allowed a certain mass awareness of it to arise. rather than these academic discussions. i guess my own interest in this is more personal than academic. when you are in a position where you hear about things that you disagree with, disagree with strongly or vehemently even. you can keep speaking out against it, but what do you do when a certain dominant mode of thought arises and the threat of dissent becomes physical? do you continue to decry that fascism or do you begin to contemplate how your actions and perhaps lack of knowledge was systemic. and perhaps that is what has contributed to the rise of that fascism. or is fascism a concomitant product of conservative systems that seem to connect well with things like capitalism? to bring critical perspectives into what is happening currently perhaps requires understanding the history of that critique and what has been attempted before. i found poitras' documentary about snowden very interesting. especially the part about how well he understood media and how carefully planned his approach to the leaks was. co-ordinating the leak in such a way as to ensure that he was a few steps ahead of how he knew media would typically react to a story such as this. i wonder if there is another approach. i don't mean a socially naive approach, but perhaps remixing or playing with different cultural understandings of these things? On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 12:57 AM, John Young <jya@pipeline.com> wrote: > Yes, there is humor and inherent ridicule in the monumentalization > as with all monuments enlarging individuals into totems and taboos, > with giant constructions in capitals of corruption, governments and > NGOs yin and yang working the rock concert. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org