Stop Congratulating Yourselves, Digirati, and Get Back to Work

I agree with the many people who are claiming now that the wide circulation of damning digital images and documents from Iraq and elsewhere might begin to contribute -- now that people are finally talking about these things in sufficient numbers -- to a turning of the tide that will culminate in the toppling of the current inept and immoral U.S. Administration.

But the sudden avalanche of articles about how digital dissemination will always topple tyrants looks to me like just so much hype-edged hysteria. Militarism, social justice, and democracy are actually topics too important to be reduced to yet one more occasion for pampered North American early-adopting web-enthusiasts to indulge in another interminable and very-public self-congratulatory circle-jerk about their splendid toy-pile.

One wonders how this latest Net Bubble squares its heady joys with the reality that the same digital networks and cameras existed to document the largest anti-war protests in the history of the planet, protests in which informed and respected voices routinely claimed that there were no weapons of mass destruction to find in Iraq, that there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaida, that real democratic liberation is never imposed at gunpoint, that oil-money should not be valued more than human beings.

One would imagine that with so many millions of people on the side of truths so palpable (and now proved), the digital tools that existed then as now should have made a better showing at frustrating the drumbeat for these hideously pointless and destructive neocon war adventures.

But they didn't.

And that must also be part of a balanced accounting of the political impact of digital networks.

The same digital tools that can provide a check on tyrants can be deployed opportunistically by tyrants to secure the appearance of justification and consent for their crimes.

Digital media can generate wonderfully consolidating echo-chambers for spin, they can facilitate distraction from reasonable objections, they can be machineries for the swift character assassination of critics, they can whomp up environments of uncritical mania in which reasonable voices however loud and clear are as good as silent, they can bury truths in spam and scandal, they can exacerbate information asymmetries to harass the weak, and often enough they can veil the wrongdoing of the powerful for just long enough.

Sure, new tools change things. With luck and good will and hard work they change things for the better. But anybody who wants to tell you that new tools will change everything wants to sell you something. Sometimes they want to sell you something while they sell themselves the same thing, which is worse.

Here's your assignment, democratic digirati: Prove to me your triumphalist theses about the digital networked communication and information technologies are righteous by shining your digital spotlight on prison abuses in the United States right this minute, and on the problem of rape in the United States military right now. Let's see if the domestic analogues to the current scandals provoke comparable outrage and prompt comparable and needed demands for change.

Use your cool tools, my Netizen friends and comrades. I assure you the images, the texts, the exhibitions, the testimony, the broken promises and broken lives are all there. Show me how the new emergent democracy of many to many digitality can speak truth to power and make the world a better place.

It's not that I think you can't do it. It's that I think only you can do it. Your tools are waiting for you to make good use of them. They don't give a damn about the uses to which you or the tyrants you decry will put them. It's you who wants to be free. Information doesn't want anything.