Skip to main content

World Wide Mobbing

Everything is said about Wikileaks (and one face behind it).
We know now: they are the incarnation of Evil - or the saviour of free speech. No shades of gray.
The debate is pure hysteria - on both sides.
Imagine a second platform for whistleblowers popping up. That platform, let's call it TheNakedTruth (TNT), co-publishes wikileaks data. It gets tremendous media-attention as it then goes on to reveal a treasure trove of classified cables on international business-connections that some anonymous insider compiled - with rich personal detail on well-known business leaders, evidence for dark paths into government... and documents demonstrating the manipulation of the western free press by shadowy interest groups with ties to rogue states in the east.
Just imagine! Some would be shocked, others less surprised by the revelations.
But what a discovery! What a public service! A victory for free speach, a glimmer of hope for democracy! Let there be a thousand Wikileaks!
All becomes strange, however, as TNT publishes evidence that the Wikileaks informant was manipulated, that parts of the diplomatic cables were omitted, altered, others completely made up. So, TNT has an agenda, right? Either their information is wrong, or Wikileaks stuff is indeed invented.
But wait, invented compared to what? What did we check the Wikileaks' 'information' against? Not even Wikileaks claims to have corroborated their facts (how could they?). They did not check the validity of their sources. Julian Assange believes "As long as they [the documents] are bona fide it doesn't mater where they come from". Well.
The hysteric reaction of the political caste lends some credibility to the documents. But is this enough? Will it be enough if destructive pseudoinformation is launched in a similar way by interest groups of various kind? The doors are open for world-wide-mobbing.
The validity of 'data' can not be deduced from it's popularity or click-rate. A fundamental difference between factoids and facts lies in the corroboration of sources and information. There is nothing like that in Wikileaks to date. While there is reason to believe that the wikileaks-folks are the 'good guys' if information is not validated there remains ample space for bad-guys to use selective and tailored information for their goals.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Academics should be blogging? No.

"blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now" The London School of Economics and Political Science states in one of their, yes, Blogs . It is wrong. The arguments just seem so right: "faster communication of scientific results", "rapid interaction with colleagues" "responsibility to give back results to the public". All nice, all cuddly and warm, all good. But wrong. It might be true for scientoid babble. But this is not how science works.  Scientists usually follow scientific methods to obtain results. They devise, for example, experiments to measure a quantity while keeping the boundary-conditions in a defined range. They do discuss their aims, problems, techniques, preliminary results with colleagues - they talk about deviations and errors, successes and failures. But they don't do that wikipedia-style by asking anybody for an opinion . Scientific discussion needs a set
8 comments
Read more

Information obesity? Don't swallow it!

Great - now they call it 'information obesity'! If you can name it, you know it. My favourite source of intellectual shallowness, bighthink.com, again wraps a whiff of nothing into a lengthy video-message. As if seeing a person read a text that barely covers up it's own emptyness makes it more valuable. More expensive to produce, sure. But valuable? It is ok, that Clay Johnson does everything to sell his book. But (why) is it necessary to waste so many words, spoken or written, to debate a perceived information overflow? Is it fighting fire with fire? It is cute to pack the problem of distractions into the metaphore of 'obesity', 'diet' and so on. But the solution is the same. At the core of every diet you have 'burn more than you eat'. If you cross a street, you don't read every licence-plate, you don't talk to everybody you encounter, you don't count the number of windows of the houses across, you don't interpret the sounds an
3 comments
Read more

Driven by rotten Dinosaurs

My son is 15 years old. He asked me what a FAX-machine was. He get's the strange concept of CDs because there is a rack full with them next to the bookshelf, which contains tons of paper bound together in colorful bundles, called 'books'. He still accepts that some screens don't react to you punching your fingers on them. He repeatedly asks why my 'car' (he speaks the quotation marks) is powered by 'rotten dinosaurs'. At the same time he writes an email to Elon Musks Neuralink asking for an apprenticeship and sets up discord-servers for don't-ask-me-what. And slowly I am learning that it is a very good thing to be detached from historic technology, as you don't try to preserve an outdated concept while aiming to innovate. The optimized light-bulb would be an a wee bit more efficient, tiny light-bulb. But not a LED. An optimized FAX would probably handle paper differently - it would not be a file-transfer-system. Hyper-modern CDs might have tenf
Post a Comment
Read more