I was at a fascinating Citizen Media event hosted and organised by the University of Manchester recently.  Some initial thoughts I had immediately afterwards can be found here.

In that piece, I provisionally concluded that:

[...] universal education, a glory of latterday progressive societies and perhaps a key reason for the much wider deprofessionalisation of society all of us are manifestly witnessing (from the already-mentioned craft of journalism to teaching to legal practice to even – in Google’s wonderfully weird world of medical search – that doctoring whose bedside manner we thought we would never give up), is no guarantor that progressive behaviours or beliefs will spread.  In fact, universal education is only able to assure us that all parties on all sides of political conflict will become powerfully better at their own particular brands of prejudice.

It is our responsibility, therefore, on understanding that citizen media does not necessarily equal constructive democratisation, to ask ourselves one simple question: what sort of citizens – and therefore what sort of citizen mediators – do we want to become?

It was rather a depressing point of view to take from a series of erudite papers which provided much evidence to the contrary.  So today, I’d like to turn the question around and ask whether the construct of Citizen Media is leading us not to more brutality but, rather, to a more analytical and constructive society.

I won’t deal individually with each and every discourse made – this wouldn’t be fair to those involved for two reasons:

1. There’s no guarantee I would be able to fairly represent their arguments.
2. They’re not here to defend themselves from my inaccuracies.

What I will do is list some thoughts I wrote down whilst listening to what they had to say.  This second post, then, will deal with two papers I felt spoke to each other – even where from quite independent starting-points and narratives.

Let’s start with the subject of citizen-witnessing – in particular, with respect to its implications for traditional photo-journalism and the attack from which a wider professionalised mediation of reality is currently suffering.  These are some of the randomised ideas I had whilst witnessing Stuart Allan’s words – let me emphasise, they are not intended to represent his arguments in any way, reliable or otherwise, but instead provide evidence of the sparks they generated in my own thought processes:

• There are news-gathering processes of different sorts and different motivations: in it for the money; reckless and gratuitous; committed and engaged.
• A citizen can begin to occupy the space of a journalist but, similarly, a journalist can begin to occupy the space of a citizen.  (This leads us back to the issue of social responsibility, but in normal corporate structures this is essentially impossible – a problem of “political economy”.)
• Perhaps to achieve reliability in this different kind of witnessing, it might be necessary to disentangle “citizen” from “witnessing”.  Alternatively, the summation and output of citizen points-of-view through software and community can assign its own “objectivity” too.
• Crowdsourcing and intelligence-gathering raise issues of trust and authenticity.  It may be possible to relocate citizen journalists and witnesses as a kind of raw data which a new journalistic profession of post-generation analysis can serve to validate and, thus, engender trust.  In this way, we could combine amateurs and professionals in symbiosis; a different relationship which nevertheless would maintain the tenets of professional journalism somewhere down the line.
• The digital treatment of photos is like the verbal analysis of events: mediated in a similar way, no more nor less.  A frame placed at the time of capture is just as much an act of construction as a post-production airbrushing, as in exactly the same way a carefully chosen collection of words inevitably filters the direct experience of reality.
• Professional photo-journalism has been termed “the heartbeat of humanity”: in this way, mediation doesn’t necessarily mean negative confection or a lack of authenticity.  Like art, such artifice may get closer to that heartbeat than a nominally unconstructed and citizen-based observation.
• As professional photo-journalists lose their right to exercise their profession, “humanity is being robbed by people with money on their minds”.
• The “Google-isation” of society: many professions are now being taught not to know things but to know where to find them.
• We now live with crisis on a permanent basis – we have all become permanently prepared witnesses of violence.
• Universal education is paradoxically leading to the deconstruction of the professions; an intelligent and trained mediation seeing its virtues being undermined.

Contrast some of the above with other images which have been, in a complicated way for me at least, defined as the product of post-human impulses.  My incomplete appreciation of this terminology has led me, in part, to reject it: I see it as being defined in terms of technology versus humanness, and yet do not see technology as anything but a tool which has always extended humanness: the discovery of fire, for example, is a clear hyper-reality – just as arrowheads, cutting implements and shields similarly were.

Also: “The digital is just social by another name.” (Brandotti, 2011)

Here, then, we have some further thoughts which, in my disorganised manner, I am equally unable to properly disentangle from Bolette Blaagaard’s own challenging presentation:

• Objectivity is seen as a performance, which can be measured in terms of truth.
• The lack of professionalism leads to the perception that the image is taken (a stolen moment) rather than made (fabricated and therefore not as authentic).
• The photograph/image is defined socially: personal dream sequences are now publicly shared images, as the imagined “global consciousness” takes over.
• Images taken from drones see people as ants; history as that of the masses.  The language of drone imagery is paradoxically that of Marxism more than capitalism (impersonal imagery; zero interpretation; zero subjectivity).  As journalism it can allow access to areas where traditional witnessing with relevant permissions would not be allowed.  But can it ever shrug off its surveillance-state overtones and carryover?
• Perhaps drone imagery is not a “post-human” process at all (whatever that really may be) but – rather – a foregrounding of our analytical side over our emotional.  Perhaps the participation of computer software in both drones and crowdsourced intelligence-gathering is painfully – unexpectedly – moving us away from historically-felt emotions.  It is not a matter of losing touch with the essence of our humanity but, instead, of handing control over to a future logic and rationality – a logic and rationality which was always present but not always prioritised.  This, of course, for violent beings, is a curious process to undergo.  But not necessarily destructive.

I’ll be posting later tomorrow on another pair of trains of thought: a) on the subject of doing an encouraging “good” online; and b) on the subject of doing an unremitting “bad”.

In the meantime, I note that whilst capitalism is judged to be finally taking over from everything else history has offered, especially as it imposes its cruel processes of austerity in the times of crisis it is primarily responsible for, its characteristic sign of identity as a supposedly individualising and liberty-developing creature appears to be subsuming itself as it battles the contradictions of an Internet-mediated citizenship.

Thus it is that the very technology that an “individualistic” capitalism makes its money from is precisely the latterday tool which a “social” crowd is using to fight back.

A mighty contradiction, indeed.

Wouldn’t you say?

Few places I can reach on the web this evening tell me what Blair said in a Times interview on Saturday.  This curious outlet does, however (the bold is mine):

Former Labour leader Tony Blair has warned his successor Ed Miliband to avoid the “politics of anger” by pushing to hit the super-rich with greater taxes.

The former Prime Minister said that pursuing such a policy “won’t necessarily change the nature of your society”, going on to defend the rise of the wealthy as “the way the world goes”.

In the past we’ve been frequently told, unendingly told, that we deserve the politicians and business leaders we’ve got.  In particular, the politicians.  And especially because we vote for them.

Now Blair adds a second reason: we have the rich and powerful we have because that’s “the way the world goes”.

He has something else to say, though – something else also pretty sad:

“There are two types of politics today: the politics of the anger and the politics of the answer,’ he said in an interview with The Times on Saturday.

“I prefer the politics of the answer. [...]”

The answer being that which the powerful prefer to predigest and expel over the rest of us.

I don’t agree.

I don’t agree at all.

This is the reason why.

When the rich and powerful separate themselves so clearly from the rest of society (as Blair so obviously does), the rest of society can’t be a reflection of – or, indeed, related to – the rich and powerful.

We really don’t vote for them – particularly when they cleverly impose their will.  We really don’t owe them anything – especially when they ingeniously argue we must.

Nor can these individuals realistically represent our very obvious needs.

How on earth could they possibly when, at the same time, admitting their stratospheric differences?

From Blair’s own mouth, from Blair’s own words, he shows us he is no socialist.  No socialist would ever give in to a world as he describes it; no socialist would ever say there was nothing to be done.

Nothing to be done – except to refuse to get angry about a planet where the needy die needlessly every day; nothing to be done – except to trot out criminal platitudes about an economy where the wealth of the wealthy concentrates off the backs of the needless deaths of those needy.

Blair’s right, of course: this is “the way the world goes”.

And that’s why we are socialists, precisely so it doesn’t.

I’d like to change how we talk about these issues.  Let’s accept, for one minute, we need a surveillance state.  Let’s accept – to use Doctorow’s terminology – that high-ranking secretive officials of our democratic administrations should have the right to watch what we’re doing, even whilst we are doing something as private as going to the toilet.

On shifting the frame of the surveillance-state debate, my issue would no longer be with these matters as described above.  No longer would I worry about the rights and wrongs of invading our privacy; of needing to properly understand the difference between democratic privacy and criminal secrecy; of disentangling the process whereby this way of defending liberal democracy – and its corresponding business practice – undermines precisely that which we claim to defend.  No.  The matter would become quite different; my focus quite another.

If a surveillance state is an inevitability – neither because evil is threatening to overcome our civilisation nor because the gradualists have painted us into a corner from which there is no escape but, rather, simply because maybe we all have too many freedoms to know properly what to do with them – let’s, at least for the sake of argument, assume there is nothing we can now do to stop it.

The issue is no longer prevention.

It therefore becomes a different one of implementation.

Yes.  Admittedly, we are late to the game because the gradualists have done their job all too well.  But that doesn’t mean we are too late to the game, nor – indeed – that we can’t amend its rules in some constructive and democratically hopeful manner.

I suggest, therefore, as a starting-point of sorts that we might want to proceed in the following way.  As I tweeted this afternoon, the real serious problem of minimal democratic oversight on the kind of massive expenditure a surveillance state will always involve is the inevitable inefficiency, graft and downright corruption that comes out of any such cosy relationships framed thus.

This is why we need to shift the frame of the debate.  And this is how I suggest we should do it.

It’s time we introduced the ideas of data protection, total quality management, democratic oversight, and – above all – an intrinsic value for money, back into the debate around what our spies can and can’t do.  We need to get involved somehow in their processes and procedures: after all, to eliminate an evil terrorist we need surely to know how much it might cost in resource terms and whether this can be justified as a proper and correct return on our taxpayer contributions.  You want the right to get rid of people extra-judicially; to keep people in prison for years; to bring down or support dictatorships; to destroy dangerous democracies?  OK.  That’s fine.  But show me – year in, year out – you’re doing it in the most cost-effective way.  No blank cheques any more.  No unexamined processes and procedures.  Instead, a righteous – and rightful – process whereby democracy observes and guarantees its overall value for money.

That’s where I’d like to push the surveillance state now.  Proportionate; correctly administered; a technocratic revolution in everything spyworthy.  Let overarching objectives and targets become the bread and butter of its practice; let productivity spreadsheets and return-on-investment become public knowledge; let spies and spooks and practitioners of our societies’ underbellies be required to emerge blinking and emboldened into the cold light of a leaner way of seeing.  Ultimately, let the ways of thinking and doing the rest of us have long ago got used to be the guiding light of a new surveillance state.

You even want to watch me do my business in my figurative bathroom?  Then demonstrate, prove and evidence to what degree you really are defending my personal and public integrities.

In practice; in reality; in fact and in deed.

And only when I really know, not just believe or trust to be the case, that – in exchange for losing the freedom to shit in private – I will have gained the freedom to always walk the streets safely in public … well, only then will I begin a slow, possibly painful, process of being prepared to decently accept, democratically consolidate and transparently implement this implicit compact and settlement you lay out in front of us: a compact and settlement which, over the past two decades, the gradualists have been incorrectly imposing on us – without honestly or in good faith ever drawing our political attention adequately to.

You want to control a long-ago consumer-driven world?  Be prepared for such a world to verily demand its VfM!

I once had a next-door neighbour who was clever enough to know how, and stupid enough to go ahead.  This individual split the cable that came out of another neighbour’s Sky dish and hogged half of the service for free for probably a year.  They caught him in the end.

Nothing came of it though.

I’d like you to watch a podcast before we continue, which eventually – in its studied and careful way – takes us back to basic physics.  Remember what that beautiful object we called a prism actually did?  Split a pure white light into a rainbow of illuminating colours.  And that is just about what this video from last Wednesday invokes both figuratively and literally.  If you’ve not too much time on your hands, start from a little after twenty minutes in.  You might also want to read this EFF document (.pdf format) which describes a highly relevant legal deposition from way back in 2006.  It gets mentioned in the podcast; it’s a crucial part of the audit trail.

http://twit.tv/show/security-now/408

Worth every damn minute, right?  As I said, that next-door neighbour of mine.

So really, if they’re right in their analysis, what’s happening here is permanent wire-tapping, possibly legal (the Internet after all is a public space), on a hugely infrastructured scale.  Maybe a bit like (then again, who am I to say?) those episodes of CSI where they gain DNA by getting someone to drink a cup of coffee and then throw away the cup.

You discard something into that public domain and we’ll hoover it up by splitting the signal as close to its node as we can, without even telling the companies which harvest it in the first place what we’ve decided to do.

So where do people congregate?  What do people use?  The services of – and routers closest to – Google & Co’s massively centralising communication facilities.  All that careful language in their denials of any possible server back-doors, when the issue – semantically – wasn’t the servers.  Direct access to the data the servers contained, yes; but not direct access to the servers themselves.

So it is our society has trodden a long path from once being “economical with the truth” to saying “the least untruthful thing” a politicised figure could think of.

But I’d like to take the issue one step further.  What if Prism doesn’t only allow the light to be split off?  What if it also allows the data to be manipulated?

Last week, just a day before the podcast linked to above, the Greek broadcaster ERT – described to me by Greek citizens recently as the Greek equivalent of the British BBC – was suddenly taken off-air.  News, current affairs, history, culture – all gone at the drop of a hat.  The shock, if replicated here in Britain with our own organisation, would be powerful and lasting for sure.  Yet I argued, for only a moment it is true, that perhaps the Greek way was better: at least someone was taking ownership for obfuscation by clearly closing down its outlet.

The BBC, in the meantime, has been accused of multiple acts of perfidious journalism – an institutionally implemented censorship, in fact, of considerable consequences; a censorship never admitted nor answered by anyone in charge; a censorship, for the majority of its viewers, never even perceived.

Under such circumstances, wouldn’t a manifest – even where shockingly sudden – absence be a cleaner and more hygienic way forward than this grubby messing-about with the parameters of our perceptions and realities?

Except that, of course, for those who use it as a tool to transmit on-message content, keeping it all going is going to be far more productive and in keeping with their overarching objectives than any honest admitting of the truth.

The aforementioned opportunities for manipulation being far more useful than simple tracking and observance.

Don’t just be a spectator is what I’m suggesting here; far more proactively, actually become an actor.

This brings me back, then, to Prism.  If the NSA is accessing everyone’s data, and has allowed in some indirect way for our knowledge of this information to finally hit the public domain, it will surely – now – have the parallel capacity to intervene, interrupt, modify and falsify almost anything which flows around the Internet.

I’m not saying it would, mind you; just suggesting that it’s impossible that the facility wouldn’t have been included.

That is to say, it would include not only the ability to split out of the Internet a perfect copy of everything that hit Google & Co’s servers just before it actually did but also the ability to replace a digitally manipulated alternative of what was originally on the point of being there, just before it actually ended up being so.

There could be many desperate reasons why someone might wish to reserve the right to do this: not least, in times of awful war or some other ongoing conflict, the desire to short-cut legal niceties and thus allow the summary removal from circulation of people who otherwise might be far too clever by half.

And I’m not saying even in this case I’d agree with such a position; all I’m saying is that it wouldn’t surprise me if someone thought engineering such a feature into the infrastructure might be a natty thing to do.

Whatever the substantive reality of the situation, I’m pretty sure one of the drivers of all these repressive instincts is that maybe, just maybe, the Internet as constructed has, at least in the eyes of those who would continue governing, given us far too many freedoms: far too many freedoms for governments to treat their peoples with justice; far too many freedoms for the establishments across the world to feel safe; perhaps, I wonder, even far too many freedoms for even the most sensible and stable of the planet’s citizens to know how to choose consistently reasonable ways of using them.

I’m not saying they’re right; I’m just trying to understand their fears and behaviours – as well as their downright illegalities.

I’m trying to understand how rational human beings can justify using “the least untruthful” way of answering questions from political representatives speaking in permanently-recorded public forums.

*

Let’s finish on a pertinent piece of legalese.  Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says the following:

• No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Now that’s pretty sweeping – correspondence for example, at least these days, may cover everything from the more analogous emails to tweets and Facebook “likes”.

And remembering Doctorow’s intelligent separation of the words “privacy” and “secrecy” this morning, I do wonder if anyone who’s fighting the good fight still recalls why they went into the business in the first place.

Stop Watching Us?  Well, quite.  It’s an important thought.

Though when 60 percent of Americans say they just don’t care any more, perhaps the good fight has already been lost.

This needed to be said, and I’ve never seen it said better:

You should care about privacy because privacy isn’t secrecy. I know what you do in the toilet, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to close the door when you go in the stall.

Read the rest of this brilliantly pointed post.  It sets up the market-stall for those of us who find attacks on privacy disturbing and resistable – even as that government argument of “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear” both resonates weightily and sees rebuttal as a complex process.

Privacy is a human right.  The flipside of the coin of integrity.

We mustn’t allow government discourse to interfere with that right, nor dirty it with broad-brushed arguments which attempt to criminalise us or make of all our activities suspicious indicators they must feel obliged to track for ever and always.

In truth, whilst governments becomes evermore disagreeably secretive, they avoid all constructive debate on the matter by shifting the onus onto the voters and represented who must – often with a sense of overriding guilt these days – pledge themselves to fight for the few remaining freedoms out there.

Our desire to be private has been corrupted by their need to maintain their own secrecy.  And so they confuse and conflate their desire to hide stuff from democratic oversight by arguing our human requirements for privacy equal their hierarchical and corporatising thirst for permanent obfuscation.

But when we righteously, rightly, demand our privacy, we are not asking for secrecy.  And when they refuse to concede our privacy democratically, arguing that it is little more than the anteroom to criminal secrecy, they curiously, perhaps revealingly, do not choose to give up on their own secretive games.

We ask for little.  They reject this little.  And, what’s more, they assume oversight over so much more.

This, and so much more, is why we must separate the words “privacy” and “secrecy”.  The battleground is so much clearer for me today.  I hope it is also clearer for you.

I’ve just spent two wonderful days in the company of very clever people, at the welcoming hands of the University of Manchester.  Sometimes I felt – from my position as an interested observer and (just about) mere citizen witnessing the event – that some of the English needed translating for my cloth ears.  But even where I struggled to get a handle on some of those terms which escaped me, none of the presentations in question failed to engage in some constructive way.

These were high-powered concepts which matched the serious times we are living.

As you will see from the programme link above, a broad range of subjects was covered.  The deprofessionalisation of mainstream journalism – in particular photo-journalism – and its corresponding issues of ethics and professional integrity linked in quite clearly with the progress which volunteer translator communities had made in the radicalisation – even the overt politicisation – of their labour.  The “crisis readiness” we are all being educated into possessing, that instinct to being prepared to film or snap any and every notable event, in particular those events which occupy the tragic public sphere, neatly engaged with Russian experiences in what was termed “shovel” organisation: the small, localised and politically non-threatening community organisation that has recently begun to accompany not only natural disaster but also relatively impactful man-made and administrative incompetence.

From many of the papers presented, it was clear that those of who occupy spaces in the Western Anglo-Saxon world are barely – if at all – aware of the prejudices we hold: from the mass digitalisation of government documents in Russia to the humongous (and highly active) online participation of the Chinese to the curious state of second-generation immigrants in Italy, the planet as presented through the lenses of these thinkers is never as simple as it looks.

Democracies which treat their citizens like second-class objects of disparaging discourse; one-party states which allow considerable internal dialogue; anarchist groups which organise in such a way as maintain their “brands” and their virtual presences; hierarchical structures which repeat but do not solidify; volunteers who are driven by imbalance to provide contrasting imbalance; worlds where a powerful couplet of bias and its corresponding transparency replaces that ever-so-durable veneer of traditionally institutional “objectivity”.

Frame being so important as it clearly is, we were presented with examples of highly contrasting journalistic practice.  These ranged from citizens in cases of extreme involvement to distancing drone footage attempting to shrug off its surveillance overtones; from overtly biased and authentically stolen moments to manufactured product, clearly pre-packaged and pre-digested primarily for the benefit of bottom lines; from devolving Silicon Valley web instincts to Hollywood-like impulses to teach podcast skills through star-riven trainers.

Essentially, that is, the push and pull between a civic contribution to a broader intelligence and that sliding scale of reward which greater “competence” often chooses to finally demand of the “consumers”.

Where we choose to volunteer, we start out on a journey of societal collaboration.  Where this reverts to being more a case of primarily learning a craft, that old old need to earn a living kicks in.  But in the grey area between one and the other, marvellous things can still be achieved by civic-minded witnesses of events that require mindful empathy.

I’ll be writing in more detail over the next couple of days on a number of the papers thus presented yesterday and today.  In the meantime, here’s a final thought to be going away with: universal education, a glory of latterday progressive societies and perhaps a key reason for the much wider deprofessionalisation of society all of us are manifestly witnessing (from the already-mentioned craft of journalism to teaching to legal practice to even – in Google’s wonderfully weird world of medical search – that doctoring whose bedside manner we thought we would never give up), is no guarantor that progressive behaviours or beliefs will spread.  In fact, universal education is only able to assure us that all parties on all sides of political conflict will become powerfully better at their own particular brands of prejudice.

It is our responsibility, therefore, on understanding that citizen media does not necessarily equal constructive democratisation, to ask ourselves one simple question: what sort of citizens – and therefore what sort of citizen mediators – do we want to become?

And only in defining this answer, and in fixing its location on the spectrum of behaviours the web currently displays, will we ever manage to rescue all the fascinating potential of citizen media from what might otherwise be interpreted (and ultimately seen) as the clutches of a universally educated cruelty.

____________________

Further reading: you might find the abstracts of the papers given of interest.  They certainly make interesting rereading for me, as I strive to sort my way through so many rich and splendid ideas.  A case of a citizen witnessing his own information overload perhaps?

:-)

Ever wondered why we call bankers “gnomes”?  The BBC has a lovely explanation from 2010 here:

Forget kitschy garden ornaments. These gnomes emerged from medieval fascination with the secrets of wealth, especially gold, buried underground and mined by mysterious beings. Goethe writes about them in his epic Faust – ambiguous characters creating wealth which others, depending on their morals, use for good or evil.

So as the secretive world of Swiss banking took shape, centred on Zurich, and based on underground vaults with anonymous numbered accounts in a fiercely independent, mountainous country, you can see why the idea of gnomes sprang to mind.

They even get Donald Rumsfeld in on the act with a reference to “so many ‘gnome unknowns’”, as bankers line up alongside the Illuminati and the Bilderberg types who “really run our world”.

But one of the saddest things about a modern hyper-communicated world is how silos of prejudice are more often than not perpetuated rather than broken down.  There’s evidence of this today in a few stories about Switzerland.  Firstly, how a Swiss referendum of ordinary people unexpectedly leads to caps on bankers’ bonuses:

Swiss voters have overwhelmingly backed proposals to impose some of the world’s strictest controls on executive pay, final referendum results show.

Nearly 68% of the voters supported plans to give shareholders a veto on compensation and ban big payouts for new and departing managers.

Secondly, how the Swiss parliament looks to pass a bill which aims to break up “cherished” Swiss banking secrecy laws once and for all:

A blow to banking secrecy: a Swiss government bill has just been put to parliament which would allow Swiss banks to hand over internal information to the US authorities – effectively sidestepping Switzerland’s own secrecy laws, but hopefully also placating Washington.

Thirdly, there are moves in this apparently ever-so-gnomic country to award all citizens a €2100 a month salary for life (the Spanish original here; robot English here):

Un chollo. Así se puede calificar, de primeras, la propuesta de un movimiento ciudadano suizo que pretende que todos tengan de por vida una renta de casi 2.100 euros al mes (2.500 francos suizos), trabajen o no trabajen; sean ricos o pobres.

A bargain.  At first sight, this is how we can define a proposal by a Swiss citizen movement which looks to give everyone a salary of almost €2100 a month (2500 Swiss francs), whether they work or not; whether they are rich or poor.

And of course I suppose you can happily contemplate such a move where a majority rejects in a similar kind of referendum the opportunity to increase its holiday entitlement by fifty percent:

Voters in Switzerland have rejected a proposal to give themselves more annual leave in a national referendum.

The plan would have given workers six weeks off a year, but business groups warned about the cost to the economy.

Who, after all, would really want – or, indeed, need – to increase their time off, if citizen wages as described above were to be implemented for all and sundry?

Prejudice is a bad thing, though.  Of that, I am clear.  As the BBC goes on to say in the last report linked to above:

Referendums are a key part of Switzerland’s direct democracy system.

The Swiss frequently have their say on changes to laws, budgets, or any issue that 100,000 citizens say they feel strongly about.

Meanwhile, the kind of things the Swiss democratically say yay or nay to can, quite obviously, vary immensely:

In other referendums, voters in Zurich agreed to the creation of “sex boxes” where prostitutes can work. In Geneva, residents voted to tighten restrictions on street protests.

Democracy is just that, isn’t it?  You have to run with the rough and the smooth.  What you can’t do is leave it all in the hands of the privileged corrupters of latterday politics, simply because you assume the voters will do worse.  As Kath Raymond Hilton points out in her coruscating piece:

Politicians are extraordinary people. There’s almost nothing they can’t do. They can break, with impunity, laws that govern the rest of us. They can take our money, commit fraud, tell lies, make libelous statements and break judicial injunctions, all without fear of prosecution. They can earn thousands of pounds on top of the salaries we pay them by telling businesses how to influence ministers and select committees. Or by helping them get new laws in place, or get around the old ones. That’s a bit like a serving police officer advising a burglar – for cash – of the best way to bypass window locks.

That’s exactly how it is.  That’s exactly how it’s ended up.  Out of a historical fear of the base instincts of uneducated and unmediated souls, the educated elites have been able to justify taking over our society and turning it into a tool for their final self-enrichment.

I’ve never been entirely in favour of referendums myself; maybe I’ve also feared the clear dangers of a dominating people-power.  Today, however, in the light of the Swiss examples I’ve described in this post, as well as the rank reality Hinton’s article lays out so plainly, I’m truly beginning to wonder if it isn’t time we needed to learn from the “noble gnomes of Zurich”.  As the BBC feature also suggested:

[...] “In the world it is not the image, but the substance behind the image which counts,” sniffed top banker Paul Rossy at the time.

We could do well to remember this idea.

Especially in a time where all – including our democracy – has become a quite unfulfilling, sales-driven hype.

I really don’t know the real motivation behind the leaking of the details of this Prism program which apparently allows real-time direct access to Google & Co’s servers by the American security services.  Google itself (presumably the rest of the jolly online cohort will be planning to do something similar) has just published this open letter to the US authorities.  It certainly makes interesting reading.  As the company says:

Google has worked tremendously hard over the past fifteen years to earn our users’ trust. For example, we offer encryption across our services; we have hired some of the best security engineers in the world; and we have consistently pushed back on overly broad government requests for our users’ data.

We have always made clear that we comply with valid legal requests. And last week, the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that service providers have received Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests.

Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue. However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.

Clearly they’re looking to knock the government for six, denying – as they might well do out of sheer corporate terror – that user content has been compromised.  It sounds very nice, of course – though stories from 2010 that indicated Google had been hacked by a foreign power without being aware of the activity (a recent update can be found here) does make it seem rather likely that its own government wouldn’t find it difficult to do the same without the corporation catching on.

But quite apart from Google’s own manifest inability to be absolutely sure it hasn’t been hacked, either by evil foreign bodies or by homegrown defenders of the faith, we have another matter which has just this minute occurred to me: in the midst of moments of grand fragility for our own Prime Minister Cameron (the affair in question being only the most salacious of his current woes) as well as potentially jittery events for President Obama in his inevitable whimper of a second term, alongside the periodic meet-up of that gloriously conspiratorial association which is Bilderberg (in a part of the country which, by the by, rings far more brightly of motorway service stations than grasping billionaires), dovetailing as it nicely does with those stratospheric reunions of the hardly great G8, we suddenly get a media-distracting and humongous statement of the bleeding obvious which is this really weird set of above-mentioned Prism revelations.

Really weird because, basically, they reveal nothing we didn’t assume all along.

Isn’t, then, all this shock just a little bit manufactured?  Won’t its icy horror simply get consumed by the trivia that’ll surely sandwich it?

And, most importantly, when setting off such a #liebomb as this (at least as per Google’s POV), who will we see ultimately walking away in the opposite direction with a complicit smile of the happiest sort on their chops?

If you think about it, telling us we’ve been stripped naked of all our previously cherished privacy really isn’t news at all.  We’ve been doing it ourselves voluntarily for years, via blogging, tweets and social networks various.  So there can only be two drivers for making a big hoo-ha of it now:

1. Mr Snowden is very naive and thought none of us suspected what he has discovered.
2. Mr Snowden is working for someone who, for some unfathomable reason, wants the information revealed in the noisiest possible way.

Unfathomable, do we say?  Maybe not.

We can guess.

These days, desensitisation is the simplest and most effective way to get people onside.  Don’t bother with the paraphernalia of logic or rational debate; instead, just throw a mix of data, shock and fabricated intellectual gore in amongst the celebrity gossip that pollutes our ethers.

And in the meantime, we move on to yet another unending conveyor-belt’s worth of scandals – soon to be mislaid and baldly forgotten.

This, from Daniel Ellsberg in the Guardian today, makes for interesting reading.  He’s clear Edward Snowden is a whistleblower – that is to say, someone who reveals wrongs which need righting.  Right now, I’d be inclined to agree.  Even though my own country doesn’t have to always be inextricably linked with the curious destiny of the US, a land of the admirably free where – nevertheless – violent people are free to be violent, I’m pretty clear there are enough politicians on both sides who would prefer that both countries remained inextricably linked.

And thus, I suppose, it will always be so.

Anyhow, I think I’ve said in my previous blog what I needed to say for now on the pros and cons of the NSA’s surveillance state itself, so I won’t pursue further any of the points already covered.

At least for now.

Instead, here are a couple of idle thoughts which I’ve had on the back of all this.  Three, in fact; and kind of tangential, too.

Firstly, imagine Snowden hadn’t voluntarily given up the information which was in his power to release.  Imagine, say, a truly unpleasant regime like Iran had captured him and proceeded to make propaganda hay out of his revelations.  How would we have then interpreted the situation?  How would we have reacted to the revelations?  Would we have rejected their possible veracity out of hand?  Would we have been able to deal with the challenge of accepting such propaganda might be true?  Would we have been able to square the tremendous circle of doubt and shame thus generated?  Would, in fact, he be a martyr to freedom for everyone rather than, as now would seem to be the case, a severely fallen angel of the world of secrets for at least some of us?

Secondly, Snowden has revealed to us something we surely all suspected for a long time – even, in the absence of any real certainty, resignedly decided to accept: that our communications were accessed, channelled and controlled by security organisations in real time, via freemium services and economics provided by the large American social-media and social-network corporations.  Now I’m sure that unelected representatives and individuals in disagreeably undemocratic foreign powers have known – for certain – for a long time what Snowden has recently decided to confirm to us ordinary voters.  What then, really, gives organisations like the NSA the right to hide from citizens of its own democracy truths which foreigners of other societies are perfectly cognisant of?  In the grand hierarchy of things, why should someone from the aforementioned Iran know more about the workings of those who would protect us from terrorist attack and conspiracy than we ourselves do?  What, in heaven’s name, is the reasoning behind hiding the truth about those organisations which are out there to keep us healthily democratic, when our undemocratic enemies already know far more about them than we ever can?

Thirdly, humans are, of course, the weak link in the whole security thang.  In the air, of late, drones have been the talk of the town.  Pilot-free aircraft with astonishing capacities now do stuff robotically in such a way that not only do we find human error is removed step-by-inevitable-step but also the terrible temptation to jump ship.  So let’s, for this final thought, take a huge leap into this future I now lay out in front of you.  Imagine, one day, the Snowdens of this world are no longer the unpredictably weak (or morally strong, depending on your point of view) flesh-and-blood creatures they currently demonstrate themselves to be.  No chance of emotions which might lead to whistleblowing-like revelations.  No chance that any abuse might filter its way out to those voters, citizens and families the abusers should be protecting.  Rather, an utterly closed system where behaviours were literally programmed to protect the hierarchies.  In such a closed container where outside inspection, democratic oversight and access became effectively impossible, surely it’s not beyond the realms of reasonable thought to assume the few human beings who would remain might not be able to resist being corrupted in some way or another.

As Ellsberg observes rather terrifyingly in his piece:

[...] given the extent of this invasion of people’s privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement – like the one we had against the war in Vietnam – or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous.

So although we are not yet a police state, although democracy still keeps the blood mostly off our streets, it would appear that some in the security services believe Edward Snowden’s biggest crime is confirming to his fellow citizens what is essentially an open secret elsewhere.  Elsewhere, and not necessarily a democratic elsewhere.

And if that’s a crime, I do wonder exactly where our Western justice systems – and wider civilisations – are headed.

The Guardian is live-blogging events I’ve already posted about twice on these pages.  As always in relation to matters of media abuse, the aforementioned newspaper does it thoroughly.  First, it headlines today’s revelations thus (the bold is mine):

NSA Prism program: more details revealed in new slide – live updates

Google and Facebook issue strong denials of participation

It then goes on to describe President Obama’s spinning of the matter in the following way (again, the bold is mine):

[...] The Guardian’s Paul Lewis and Dominic Rushe report:

However in comments that appeared more emollient than his remarks earlier in the day, when he criticised “leaks” and “hype” in the media, Obama tried to deflect criticism, saying internet privacy posed “broad implications for our society”. He said privacy concerns also related to private corporations, which he said collect more data than the federal government. [...]

This latter comment, unguardedly I guess, simply goes to underline why the Prism project might choose to plug directly into the servers of such companies as Google and Facebook, instead of building a separate infrastructure to efficiently intervene content as it flowed over the open Internet.  After all, if private industry has already achieved such goals, what really is the point of doing it all over again?

Not that this latter approach isn’t also being effected in some way, mind.  From the very same Guardian last year, we get this story:

America’s largest eavesdropping centre in Britain, Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, is being expanded in a multimillion-pound programme as it becomes increasingly vital to US intelligence and military operations, according to a study of the controversial base released on Thursday.

The article goes on to say:

The study describes the programme, called Project Phoenix, as “one of the largest and most sophisticated high technology programmes carried out anywhere in the UK over the last 10 years”. Work on it has been reserved for US-based arms corporations including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and their personnel with high-level security clearance, it notes.

In fact, what this all simply goes to show is that everyone – but everyone – is playing the same game.  Whether Google and Facebook knew about Prism or not, they’ve been doing precisely the same with their own users (you and me) as the American government and others round the world want to do with the citizens they supposedly serve (coincidentally, also you and me).  Both private and public sectors see their very similar constituencies – consumers on the one hand, voters and potential terrorists/paedophiles/agitators of the establishment galore on the other – as content generators to be mined aggressively for an allegedly greater good.  That Google and Facebook do it in order to fill the pockets of their shareholders is surely no less moral (to borrow Milton Friedman’s language) than the battle governments now appear to be waging against fearful threats to our democracy.

And I really wouldn’t mind any of this Prism bollocks – what will sooner or later serve to define Obama’s presidency and legacy for historical good or ill – if it honestly and sincerely helped to guarantee our democracy.

The problem is that the accumulation of all these very discrete acts of invasion – discrete and, to date, also fairly discreet – into our personal, political and psychological spaces can only lead me to want to suggest the following:

• look to guarantee our democracy through occasionally greying means by all means;
• fight to guarantee our safety and physical security with some uncertain steps of course;

but leave – please leave, please please leave – some of this democracy, which you clearly cherish, love and covet so very sincerely, intact for the rest of us to enjoy in the meantime.

That’s what’s really crushing my own belief in the future.  By allowing both public and private sectors to invade our privacies so violently, one in the interests of defending civilisation, the other in the interests of shareholder value, we are putting for the rest of us, the law-abiding us, the good us, this whole massive democratic construct on humongous hold.

For if this huge battle against terrorism/paedophilia/agitators galore goes on for much longer, one day – not so long in the future – there’ll be people who’ll have lived in democratic countries like ours who truly won’t ever have enjoyed the democratic experience we once so considerably took for granted.

OK.  So right now, they’re not slaughtering us in the streets.  Democracy, even the damaged one we’re living in, still achieves a lot of good.  But if we can build whole political belief systems on the importance of encouraging citizens to aspire to better economic activity, why can’t we do the same with our democratic integrity?

Why do we have to be so unaspirational when it comes to fundamental human rights?

*

Am I being too cynical here when I suggest that perhaps those in charge don’t care for anything but economics?  That liberal democracy has only been allowed to flourish whilst it served the needs of the moneymakers?  And when this is no longer the case, so it can be carelessly discarded.  Maybe this is cynicism speaking after all.  Maybe I’m just joining too many silly dots.  But as one final set of thoughts, just ponder this:

• we knew we had an economy where private industry aimed to track and know everything about us, from family photos to favourite porn to any and every personal like and dislike;
• we now realise we have a democracy where public servants aim to track and know everything about us, from political inclinations to social activity to how far we can be pushed before we fracture;

So what happens when in order to find out the latter, the number-crunchers understand all they really need is the former?  What happens when the data and the uses to which it can be put overlap?

Prism, that’s what.

The result of a socioeconomic framework where business and government fuse in one – and democracy becomes no more than the collateral damage of a much broader failure of democratic ambition.