2017 Q1: What is the politics of the social media age?

Context: 2017 Questions.

Pretty much everything I've believed in and championed over the last 15 years in terms of blogging, social media, freedom for anyone to speak out without gatekeepers etc. has come true.
And the result is what we've seen in 2016 ... President Trump, Brexit, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff etc. All driven by massive disinformation campaigns across social media. We are in a "post-truth" society or as I actually predicted many years ago "the end of consensus". Conspiracy theories are the epistemic mode of netocracy.

So what now?

"What now", in the sense of how can we reinvent a politics which "works"? And "what now" as in what are the responsibilities and strategies for people like me who work in software and have championed the spread of technologies of open communication? What can and should we try to build next to "fix" the problems we've caused? Finally "what now" as in what actual policies can be advocated for netocracy where many traditional gatekeeping epistemic strategies are no longer available.

In one sense we are seeing a burst of authoritarianism which is covering the profound weakness of governments to control what's going on. Everyone in power wants to control borders to prevent the movement of people. When their real "problems" are flow of information and capital which remain harder to control than ever. Scapegoating the poor is the standard tactic of an elite in trouble, of course. I now think we're moving to "scapegoating bodies" for the frustrations and failures to constrain information (including finance which is now revealed as a subset of information).

Saddam's Chemical Weapons

Status Report:

Saddam's Chemical Weapons :  Existed, sold to him by the US / European companies, covered up by Pentagon at the cost of their own soldier's health due to potential embarrassment.

My cynicism : Undiminished.

Text of the moment : The Occult Technology of Power

Andrew Rawnsley :

This prime minister needs to take particular care in his relationships because the politics of "personal connection" have always been important to David Cameron, right from the beginning of his career. In his early 20s, he landed a job in the Conservative research department thanks in part to an intervention by a patron in the royal household. His inner circle is packed with people with whom he went to school or university or first met in his youth. Mutual histories and backgrounds are a much more important bonding agent at the Cameron court than ideology.

I'm not particularly persuaded by Jaron Lanier or this article.

Nevertheless, there is something interesting in the debate he raises here :

The strategy of Wikileaks, as explained in an essay by Julian Assange, is to make the world transparent, so that closed organizations are disabled, and open ones aren't hurt. But he's wrong. Actually, a free flow of digital information enables two diametrically opposed patterns: low-commitment anarchy on the one hand and absolute secrecy married to total ambition on the other.

While many individuals in Wikileaks would probably protest that they don't personally advocate radical ideas about transparency for everybody but hackers, architecture can force all our hands. This is exactly what happens in current online culture. Either everything is utterly out in the open, like a music file copied a thousand times or a light weight hagiography on Facebook, or it is perfectly protected, like the commercially valuable dossiers on each of us held by Facebook or the files saved for blackmail by Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks method punishes a nation -- or any human undertaking -- that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn't have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.

If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. Wikileaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.

Personally, I don't think he's backed up the assumption that wikileaks's avowed objectives are unachievable or that we'll end up with silos of locked-down private data. After all, until recently, much of the US government's data might have been imagined to be more secure than it turned out. It's not yet clear that the US is punished for transparency whereas China is rewarded for opacity. China is one leak away from being seen as equally vulnerable.

Will that leak never come because of their better security measures? Because of their unwillingness to share data internally? Because of their less individualistic culture?

Or is it simply that it hasn't happened yet?

Even if China buys secrecy at the cost of major internal compartmentalisation, this could still be victory for Wikileaks, as Assange will have imposed his "secrecy tax" on it. Of course, China may be able to afford that tax. I suspect that in even the medium term it can't.

But most of the conspiracies that wikileaks is trying to tax / disrupt are between independent agents (eg. two governments, government and corporation, between separate senior managers). The fear of leaks then, is a fear of betrayal by your partner. The Chinese government may have its own employees locked down in fear. But it can't get into a conspiracy with Ukraine or Microsoft if it can't be sure of Ukraine's citizens or Microsoft's employees.

I'm reading some absolutely fascinating articles about neo-folk, apoliteic music and attempts to build a fascist, green, anarchist synthesis.

Very confusing and scary. Like Michael Barkun's "improvisational millennialism" without the flying saucers (yet).

Fits right in to conspiracy theories and netocracy though, doesn't it?

Further thought. Is hauntology a kind of left-wing apoliteic music? With the myths of a cosy, Reithian, paternal modernism replacing the the folk-tradition celebrated by the rightists?

New Scientist on denialism.

Tim Berners-Lee worries about the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories on the web.