Wikisecrets
Just finished watching this piece on Bradley Manning and Wikileaks:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/
They draw many connections I wasn’t aware of, including the fact that Bradley was perhaps partly a misfit in the military because of being gay, and the possibility that the Arab Spring uprisings were in part enabled by the leak of the US diplomatic cables.
Ex-wikileaker Daniel Domscheit-Berg sums up the trend that protagonists in this story hope for:
“… it has set in motion a cultural change. In some way it has created this whole debate we are having today: What is secrecy? And is there a need for secrecy? And what is the need for breaking these secrets? …
The goal is not to get rid of all secrets in this world, the goal is to foster transparency, and that I think is a really important cause.”
In this week when S&P downgraded the US and the economy seems like it’s headed into the crapper, it’s nice to know that the larger arc of history is showing progress. In ten years perhaps we will look back and see that our society is more and more open than before. How interesting that the revolutionaries in this story, flawed and vulnerable as individuals, push both political and interpersonal boundaries.
Take the political arena first. Our governmental institutions today are still working on methods that rely on speech and writing laws on pieces of paper. How backward! The Jasmine revolutions show that the social tools we used to for governments for the last few centuries are about to be overrun by Twitter-like media.
- Why not use Google docs or open-source software to create laws so you can see who wrote what?
- Instead of having elections why not have people indicate who they support through twitter or facebook - when popular support shifts from the incumbent to a new candidate the government reorganizes.
- Why not make all battlefield footage public so people can see what war is really about?
All interesting ideas, but a true revolution in openness revolution can’t happen if closed societies (China comes to mind, though obviously the US has plenty of misdeeds to hide) can reap tactical or strategic competitive advantage over other nations by being secretive. I’m not sure that this is a slam dunk in favor of openness.
This organizational transformation also can’t happen from the top-down. Rather, smaller (initially very small) groups must adopt new methods of governance and decision making, and then overtake existing institutions because their newer methods make them more effective. That does mean that if openness is to work at the scale of nations, then it also has to work at the level of companies, teams and even families.
Which brings us back to the interpersonal. The revolution that is happening there is even bigger perhaps than the political revolution that could be coming. More on that later…