Adriana Lukas's Library tagged activism → View Popular, Search in Google

Jan

2012

CBC.ca | Ideas | The Vancouver Human Rights Lecture - Cute Cats and The Arab Spring

www.cbc.ca/...-cute-cats-and-the-arab-spring

- Preview

zuckerman internet freedom politics arab activism

Feb

2011

Gladwell Still Missing the Point About Social Media and Activism: Tech News and Analysis «

another old-world contrarian missing the point. well argued by Gigaom

gigaom.com/...bout-social-media-and-activism

- Preview

gladwell tippingpoint critique twitter politics activism socialnetworks

We need a serious critique of net activism | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Seems a fair critique of the man from what I have read by him. My conclusion is that Morozov is one of the 'professional contrarians' - coming to a noisy exposed area or topic, the only way to make yourself visible is to say the opposite of what everyone believes regardless of tubs, babies and bathwater... "Unfortunately, this message is buried amid a scattered, loosely argued series of attacks on a nebulous "cyber-utopian" movement, whose views are stated in the most general of terms, often in the form of quotes from CNN and other news agencies who are putatively summing up some notional cyber-utopian consensus. In his zeal to discredit this ideology (whatever it is), Morozov throws whatever he's got handy at anyone he can find who supports the idea of technology as a liberator, no matter how weak or silly his ammunition."

www.guardian.co.uk/...net-activism-delusion

- Preview

activism politics corydoctorow critique socialmedia twitter technology freedom utopia ideology opensource

Morozov is skeptical of technology's capacity to foment revolution and spread democracy. Free access to information isn't necessary or even important to toppling corrupt regimes, he says — this is a shibboleth of Reaganites and their sentimental view of Samizdat, Radio Free Europe and other cold war information efforts. The Soviet Union didn't fall because of political organising, brave dissidents, or photocopied zines – it fell because it was a badly run nightmare that lurched from crisis to crisis until it imploded.
He supports this caricature with a few of the dumbest quotes cherry-picked from the last two decades of "internet discourse," but neatly ignores all the serious work on the history of the net as distinct from other media – notably, he fails to mention or address the arguments raised in Timothy Wu's excellent The Master Switch that was published last year.
10 more annotation(s)...
- When Morozov talks about the security risks arising from dissidents' use of Facebook – which neatly packages up lists of dissidents to be targeted by oppressive nations' secret police – he does so without ever mentioning the protracted, dire warnings of exactly this problem that have come from the "cyber-utopian" vanguard as embodied by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, NetzPolitik, Knowledge Ecology International, Bits of Freedom, Public Knowledge, and dozens of other pressure groups, activist organisations and technical projects around the world.
  Indeed, there is hardly any mention at all of history's most prominent internet freedom fighters, such as the venerable cypherpunks movement, who have spent decades building, disseminating and promoting the use of cryptographic tools that are purpose-built to evade the kind of snooping and network analysis he (rightly) identifies as being implicit in the use of Facebook, Google and other centralised, private tools to organise political movements.
- Instead, Morozov focuses his criticism on the "release early, release often" approach to free and open source software, and mocks the aphorism "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," though if these had been applied to Haystack, it would have been revealed as a failure long before it got into the hands of Iranian activists. Here, Morozov is as wrong as he could possibly be: if you want to develop secure tools to allow dissidents to communicate beneath the noses of oppressive regimes, you must widely publish the workings of these tools and revise them frequently as your peers identify new vulnerabilities in them.
- But I think Morozov is hoping to address people outside of Whitehall, Brussels and the DC Beltway here – it seems to me that he's hoping the whole world will stop looking to technology as a force for liberation, and instead trust in – what?
  I'm not sure. It seems that Morozov wants to see the chaos of popular, grassroots movements replaced with a kind of orderly, top-down style of regimented activism led by intellectuals whose thoughts can't be pithily expressed in 140-character tweets. Whether or not Morozov sees himself as one of those intellectuals is never explicitly stated.
- Which is to say, intellectuals have been bemoaning the trivialising effect of mass media forever – I don't see an enormous gap between the church argument against Martin Luther – allowing the laity to read the Bible will trivialise theology – and Thoreau, Postman and Morozov arguing that the internet will make us stupid by exposing us to too many "LOLCats".
- But as Clay Shirky has pointed out, there is a crucial difference between hearing about Princess Adelaide's health by telegraph or watching the cast of Dallas act out their intrigues on TV and doing "LOLCats" on the net: namely, that anyone can make a "LOLCat" and disseminate it to the world. That is, the internet has the capacity to be participatory in a fashion that no other medium has ever approximated: anyone with a manifesto or exposé can make it widely available. It's true that in a world in which anyone can publish, it's harder to know what to pay attention to, but it's silly to argue that freedom would be better served if 90% of the world was forced to remain silent so that their intellectual betters would have a clear channel in which to educate the rest of us.
- It's true that the internet has put more trivia at our fingertips than ever before, but that's only because it has put more of everything at our fingertips. It has never been simpler to publish, read and participate in serious and weighty discourse than it is today.
- People who believe in free speech should not be distressed by the fact that others use the freedom of expression to express bad, wicked or stupid things; as the free expression mantra goes: "The answer to bad speech is more speech."
- the new thing is the replacement of unidirectional propaganda vehicles such as TV (whether broadcasting Eastern or Western messages) with a new medium that allows any message to be placed alongside any other through powerful concepts such as the hyperlink.
- As a lifelong political activist, I remember the thousands of person-hours we used to devote to putting up flyposters, stuffing envelopes, and running telephone trees simply to mobilise people for a protest, petition or public meeting (Morozov minimises the difficulty of this, asserting, for example, that Iranians would just find out, by word of mouth, about demonstrations, regardless of their tools – which leads me to suspect that he never tried to organise a demonstration in the pre-internet era). I'm sure that if we'd been able to get the word out to thousands of people with the click of a mouse, we wouldn't have hung up our placards and called it a day; that drudge work absorbed the lion's share of our time and our capacity to think up new and exciting ways to make change.
- The internet makes it possible for more people to speak and participate, which, inevitably, means that protest movements will have a more diffuse set of goals than was common in the era of top-down, authoritarian revolutions. But Morozov romanticises the consensus of revolutions gone by – whether it was 1776, 1914 or 1989, every successful revolution is a fragile coalition of conflicting interests and views, held together by the common desire to abolish the old system, even if there was no consensus on what to replace it with.

Dec

2010

Wikileaks: Anonymous stops dropping DDoS bombs, starts dropping science - Boing Boing

www.boingboing.net/...anonymous-stops-drop.html

- Preview

wikileaks disruption anonymous internet politics activism protest boingboing

What It's Like to Participate in Anonymous' Actions - Gabriella Coleman - Technology - The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com/...67860

- Preview

wikileaks disruption anonymous IRC internet politics activism protest

Nov

2010

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

www.zonebooks.org/...KRIK_ACC.html

- Preview

knowledge access IP intellectual property copyright activism

Anonymous DDoS Attacks Crash U.S. Copyright Office Website

www.readwriteweb.com/...ake_down_us_copyright_offi.php

- Preview

anonymous attacks ddos copyright activism p2p torrentfreak

Jun

2009

The Revolution Will NOT Be Twittered | techPresident

agreed. digerati sounds more like a bunch of narcissistic voyeurs rather than revolutionaries in any sense. social & political events more complex than lotsa noise. though noise certainly has an important role.

techpresident.com/...volution-will-not-be-twittered

- Preview

iran election politics online activism revolution