Shhh! It's a Secret.

Achieving information control is the fundamental first step of any authoritarian regime. In the absence of informed dissent, the taxpayer-funded noise machine lets leaders do what they want while most of us are so confused about the actual facts that we are incapable of articulating any policy demands at all.

As we become less capable of confronting the world in a coherent way, we are increasingly dependent on politicians to tell us what to think. Even though their "information" may conflict with realities that slap us in the face every day, the cognitive dissonance causes paralysis.

The fundamental crisis facing our government is that most of its actions are so highly classified even other officials can't and don't know what's going on. How can they plan complex operations? How can they coordinate policy? The Iraq debacle makes it obvious that they cannot.

If a government can't even trust its own employees, we must assume that it's up to some seriously twisted shit.

Forget about media bias for a moment and consider the impact of secrecy on our society. True information is the blood of democracy. We need the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God. Without it our political discourse is starved of air. We become captive to "experts," pundits and smooth talkers, insiders who can claim privileged access and special information. We are no longer participant citizens but subjects.

Insane Campaing Clips: Volume 3

And as it turns out . . .

. . . Al Gore agrees.


Page 3:

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.

The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, "even we here"—are collectively still the key to the survival of America's democracy.

Network Rule: The “Lesser of Two Evils” Fallacy

In this country, we often find ourselves presented with a short menu of distasteful political choices, but this situation need not persist. “Choose the lesser of two evils,” we are told, as if having an only mildly evil politician in office is some kind of comfort. Let me suggest that we may be approaching this problem all wrong.

At the risk of revealing too much about my views on “good and evil” (I might as well say “choice and no choice” or “freedom and coercion”) I should note that the political history of the world demonstrates an endless and cyclical opening and narrowing of real options, pendulum swings from tyranny to liberty.

I confess that I, like millenarian Christians and assorted other cultists, believe that we are approaching a sort of inflection point past which things are going to get much better or much worse for most of humanity, very quickly and dramatically. We may be on the verge of a political renaissance, and not just in this country but across the world . . . and by that I of course mean that things have gotten very bad, many people have started to notice, and we have the tools to fight.

I do not believe in necessary evils, only evils we have not yet reasoned a way around. When we appear constrained by bad political options, options we would not choose if we were truly free, we must put aside the questions of the moment to restructure the underlying institutions that constrain our choice.

The Westphalian state has decayed, too long a tool of personal enrichment, racial oppression, nationalist violence, and moral crusade. It is tainted by the blood of “criminals” without victims, stained by the acts of its torturers and mercenaries, a monster behind the shroud of triumphalist mythology.

Our leaders, children of the state that they are, cannot be expected to point out its flaws. Even those who struggle against the state, the Bin Ladens of the world are little more than power seekers, thugs who differ from politicians only in their location and willingness to engage directly in the killing of people who oppose them. Even when these types embrace the cause of reforming the state, their actions only expand its power and reach, never reduce it.

And yet I am hopeful, principally because we have the element of surprise. Our leaders have refused to see the writing on the wall, failed to carry the diffusion of information technology across the globe to its logical conclusion.

In a world where participation in the political process is practically cost free, where ideas can cross barriers of language and geography instantly, notions of representation and sovereignty may become anachronisms, literally obsolete.

The ethical and technical foundations of network-based government are being laid right now. The presumption of freedom, total transparency, decentralized participation, and natural rights guide this new movement, and promise to inject a good dose of reason as antidote to the demagoguery and hatred of the past. Network rule, this elusive webocracy is not something that can be completed during the next presidential term, or even the next generation. It will operate first in parallel with the current system and then come to supplant it as people discover that their shared problems are better and more cheaply addressed by a politics stripped of its mythology, its money whoring and its absurd violence.

In the domestic context, we may only have two evils to choose from now, but with a bit of luck the donkey and the elephant will be distant and amusing memories to our children.