so the transnational politico-financial oligarchy continues to ratchet up pressure on wikileaks, trying to "deal with" problems of incoherence and incompetence by shutting down the messenger who brings news of it
WikiLeaks: France adds to US pressure to ban website | Media | guardian.co.uk
earlier today, assange answered reader questions in quasi-realtime on the guardian's site. here's the playback:
Julian Assange answers your questions | World news | guardian.co.uk
there are a couple interesting statements, i think. the main one, which is not new, is:
Quote:
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The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.
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so speech is "free" in the states to the extent that it's politically irrelevant. this we know.
public speech is monopolized by corporate mediations, and so the space of public speech is mostly commodified. this we know. operations like wikileaks undermine that to some extent. and the push-back can be seen as an expression of financial concern more than anything else, concern over maintaining the monopolies of information distribution mediated by corporate interests over the "mainstream"....
public speech is managed. it is not free to the extent that access to the channels has a price. this is a model that is in some danger of falling apart in the print sector--in the one-dimensional infotainment streams that are television, things are pretty good for them. pretty pretty good. wikileaks makes television largely irrelevant. this is not a meme-show. it is at best the direct object in statements about something outside television. so it is a problem for television. no wonder fox et al have made assange into the bogeyman of the week.
corporate monopoly of information channels works symbiotically with state information controls. pigs in a blanket. the mainstream press is typically as critical of the state apparatus as the pastry is of the hot dog it's rolled around.
bad hot dog i am wrapped around. bad bad.
this symbiotic relation is significantly undermined by actions like wikileaks.
this threatens the established politics of information control, which is a matter of choking off access to channels.
the response---attempts to choke off access to channels.
of course, speech is free like a bat or badger so long as it's irrelevant.
without access to channels that distribute your speech, what you say is of no consequence at all.
no-one need take responsibility because it's all just about cash, man.
the absolute universalization of the commodity form. welcome to the world of neoliberal capitalism.
no-one has to take responsibility for anything.
and when something comes along that disrupts that illusion of universal market values and fake freedom that comes along with it, the oligarchy as one says:
off with his head!
and tells us we're better off sleeping. reality is scary. make it go away.
we're free like that. that's what the wikileaks theater shows us.