There has been a lot of positive response to the ten theses on Wikileaks that I wrote a couple of weeks ago together with Patrice Riemens. We were not so interested in an offer to rewrite it for a journal into “a substantially re-worked/developed piece.” The peer review lobby that rules these academic journals luckily do not have a monopoly position to define what is–and what is not–theory and critique. Having said that, there might be next versions and upgrades coming up of the Ten Theses.
Our piece is covered on the frontpage of the tactical media files archive.
There were two questions from the Spanish magazine Diagonal sent us. They will run a piece on Wikileaks shortly.
> – Do you think that Wikileaks is a step forward for the Free Web and for its diffusion?
GL: One step forward, two steps back? Let’s not forget that Wikileaks can always be blocked and censored. This already happens. In that sense there is not much left of a ‘free web’. We can put anything online but how long will it stay there and will anyone be able to read all these document, let alone make sense of it? We’re talking about evidence here, raw material, data bases, huge data sets that do not make sense for outsiders. We, the ordinary people, need contextualization, analysis, background stories, interviews with those involved, in order to make sense of a case. Freedom as such is meaningless unless it is ‘cultivated’. We need to give the world shape and direction. This has always been the case. Some would call that education or ‘Bildung’. That’s also the case in the networked age of digital media. Making data accessible alone won’t do the job.
> – Do you think that the “ordinary medias” can work in synergy with WL?
GL: If they invest in investigative journalism, for sure. But someone will need to do the job. The idea that there are ‘scandals’ out there, hidden somewhere on the Wikileaks servers, is a misleading image. Someone will have to put in the effort to spend hours, days, in some cases even months to go through thousands of documents, including having to read background literature in order to go through the material. Wikileaks is now expecting the ‘ordinary media’ to do this job. This are supposed to be keen to scoop and break news stories, but the reality is otherwise. Causing scandals costs money. News media are under pressure financially and have less and less budget. This development has been going on for years, if not decades. There is a real shift in news towards cheap, sensational and celebrity-driven news reporting that is quasi real-time and that looks spectacular. This non-news is often quickly copy-edited material from elsewhere. A solution for could be an independent fund for investigative journalism, for instance by taxing Google, or organized networks of dedicated experts, a sort of ‘wisdom of the crowds’ approach in which people devide their time and attention to sort though the material.