Re: <nettime> The Deleuzian Philosophy of Openleaks (podcast inside)

[Pit Schultz <pit.schultz@gmail.com>]

If Wikileaks is an event in the Badiou sense, then which kind of
subjects does it create? Which kind of truth does it reveal? Isn't it
exactly the mirror cabinet of mass media platonism which creates
phantoms and ontologic aporia?

the empiricism of the 2nd and 3rd row administrators, those who are in
power in the terms of a Max Weber and not Foucaulian order of things
leads to a specific ethics and sensitivity of chances and possible
decisions, of an incremental, critical practise of engineering. and
while wikileaks has become an appalling and hypocritical product of a
big media opera, something really useful might grow in its backyard.
so the stupid and ugly is often near to the smart and wonderful, you
can decide yourself which image you want to follow.

something useful might also grow out of the publish-all-data-aproach
which wolfram research is currently processing, why not data mining
all the cables too and let 100.000 openleaks editors digest the data.
some might be gold diggers ready to sell the news to old media. the
idea that an investigative truth will be revealed which marks one
point of relevance in the debate, lays out a simplicistic
understanding how history is working, and again is deriving from old
media experience. the way the truth is beeing told and becomes the
event has to to with the means in which the story is beeing told, and
who owns and controls these means. with the wikileaks debate old mass
media constructed a phantom of cyberpunk romanticism, comparable to
like second life, child porn hysteria, or the narrative of the digital
natives, it is a product of misunderstanding and system
differentiation, which pays many media artists, consultants and
IT-journalists indeed.

i have quickly scanned a number of wikileaks articles and 95% were as
irrelevant and redundant as most of newspaper articles in other cases,
or redundant media phenomena on twitter etc. a truth is beeing told by
repeating and modulating the same message again and again, then
calling it an "event". the most useful articles were probably the
compilations of Alexis Madrigal in atlantic monthly. what will mark
the wikleaks principle different is not the singular event it might
create, but a situation of communication which turns the table to big
companies and systems of collusion, between private equity funds and
backroom politics. the lackmus test of this principle will be when the
activities of gentlemen-gansters of the investment banks, and high
frequency trading software developers are becoming as transparent as
the average facebook user. todays political crimes probably do not
follow a 19th century national poltitics of a direct abuse of bodies
(and the deriving photos and videos) but rather gambling the stock
market. ( http://www.zerohedge.com/article/here%E2%80%99s-look-what-goldman-facebook-fund-will-look-it-ignores-sec-peddles-private-shares-publi
)

so history changes based on wikileaks data will be a choreographed
construction rather than the "one" relevant fact. just because the
multifactorial nature of collective processes, and the reductionism of
a pyramid attention scheme. the internet is not immune against mass
psychology.  the event media can construct can only lead to some kind
of "collective emotional rush", but has nothing to do with todays
information processing or experimental and incremental constructions
of interconnected truths, its the lemming effect of modernism.
wikileaks marks a point where the networked discourse was falling into
this logic. it has probably as much to do with mille plateauxs, as
evading camps in palestine based on a military strategy of "striated
spaces". the wikileaks moment becomes only productive if every user
fundamentally understands their own responsibility and possibility of
becoming a whistleblower themselve. it doesnt have to be "big
secrets", and there will be many usecases for "unwanted" information.

so the way a discourse is becoming stale it reveals that too many
people read the new york times, watch television and fall into old
media digestion patterns, while mailinglists become the unofficial
chatter room for printed articles online.

speaking about the power relations constituted in software some people
are perfectly aware of the imminent tasks:

Daniel Domscheit-Berg answers questions about Openleaks in the Q&A
sesssion. The talk will give an update on the status of the Icelandic
Modern Media Initiative refering to it as the Rubber Tires of the
"omnibus into the future Rop was proposing in his keynote. Details
about openleaks were discussed on day4 and a special workshop will
happen at the CCC camp this summer.

http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp3-audio-only/27c3-4206-en-immi_from_concept_to_reality.mp3


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