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This week has been strangely surreal. I was one of the first last Friday to write about PayPal's quiet little blog post announcing it was freezing WikiLeaks' account. Soon after, a link to the story was tweeted by none other than WikiLeaks itself, then linked to on the WikiLeaks website as the explanation of why you could no longer donate via PayPal. And so the week began, my email flooded with comments as both ReadWriteWeb and this blog were flooded with traffic. The writers at ReadWriteWeb have long covered WikiLeaks -- co-editor Marshall Kirkpatrick noted the blog covered the organization 2 years before the Economist did. But this week I think all the writers on staff filed at least one WikiLeaks-related story as DDoS attacks, Twitter trending-topic controversy, Facebook non-banning, Wikipedia deletions occurred. Suddenly as technology bloggers, we found ourselves at the heart of one of the most important stories of the year -- free speech versus espionage and the battle for the future of the open Internet.

But that's only partly what I mean when I say this week was surreal. It's not simply that I am a tech blogger, and these are crazy times on the Internet. It's that I am a tech blogger and these events -- both in terms of technology and politics -- now echo years of scholarship and activism.

Let's rewind 11 years...

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

On November 30, 1999, I joined tens of thousands of people on the streets of Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization's ministerial meeting. Hopefully you know the story: we shut it down.

While the officially sanctioned rally in opposition to the WTO was held blocks away from the meeting, groups of loosely-affiliated, but well-organized activists staged lockdowns at major intersections in downtown Seattle, effectively barricading the streets and access to the meeting. Separately, roving groups of the "Black Bloc" smashed windows of downtown shops, some say giving the police the justification they needed to turn their pepper-spray and tear-gas on those engaged in the non-violent civil disobedience.

I could go on. The WTO protests were a watershed moment for me (for a lot of reasons); much of my academic work thereafter dealt with issues of political theatre and street performance.

I think the WTO protests demonstrated two key things, things I've been thinking about all week regarding WikiLeaks:

1. The government -- centralized power -- does not understand decentralized opposition.
2. The mainstream media fails to be critical of the government, and people turn to the Internet.

As I heard the media's accounts of what happened that day in Seattle, I was horrified as the "violence on the streets" was often pegged as something that protesters, not police, were engaged in. I was compelled to tell a different story, and so I did the only thing I really knew how to at the time: I wrote an email about my experiences -- reporting what I saw -- and sent it to friends, family, and listservs. (The latter's obnoxious, I know.)

I shared it on Indymedia, an alternative online news organization that grew out of the WTO protests. Decentralized and autonomous Indymedia sites spread all over the world as part of the anti-globalization movement, and Indymedia became the place where activists and journalists could post photos, audio, video, and stories and provide what was often a counter-narrative to what mainstream media reported.

"Be the media."

The Revolution Will Be Distributed

WikiLeaks may be the first "stateless news organization" but its heritage, I think, lies somewhere alongside this decade-old alternative, oppositional media -- something, I'd like to point out, that has also resulted in Indymedia's having its servers seized and visitors' IP addresses subpoenaed. Sound familiar?

For its part, Indymedia often documented the crimes that occur in plain site -- local police brutality, for example. WikiLeaks, on the other hand, has exposed leaked documents from the U.S. government. So no doubt, that's why we're talking about WikiLeaks in ways we never quite paid attention to the stories that Indymedia shared.

But it's not simply a matter of politics; it's a matter of technology too. In the 11 years since Indymedia's first broadcast, reporting there from the streets of Seattle, it has become far easier to distribute information online. WikiLeaks benefits from more widespread Internet access, from tools like Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, as well as from Netizens who are willing and able to tweet, share, and mirror Wikileaks (not to mention push a button to participate in a DDoS attack).

Nevertheless, in the 11 years since the WTO protests, centralized power still fails to understand decentralized opposition, even more so when that political opposition is distributed technologically as well. Seizing the wikileaks.org domain, blocking access to certain websites, arresting Assange, demanding the return of the leaked documents -- these are tactics and demands that belong in a different world, a different time. They are actions that suggest that the government recognizes opposition as a centralized, hierarchical organization with a spokesperson/figurehead/leader rather than its being distributed globally across nodes and networks and bodies.

And the mainstream media? They're often still wrong about this story too. And perhaps now more than ever it's obvious how implicated the mainstream media have been in that very centralized power, how complacent they have been as watchdogs, and now, how undermined they are by the very distributed communication networks at the heart of this story.

Audrey Watters


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Audrey Watters

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