June 4, 2013 at 5:53 P.M. My home Internet connection was blocked. I have rebooted my connection. The essay that appears below was posted from a NYPL, Morningside Heights, lap-top computer. I will continue to use multiple public and private computers.
The size of words in the text has been altered and I have no control of these and other defacements of the text which must come from New Jersey government officials and technology.
Gregory Currie, "Does Fiction Civilize Us?," The New York Times, June 2, 2013, p. 12. ("Sunday Review.")
Julian Assange, "The Banality of 'Don't Be Evil,'" The New York Times, June 2, 2013, at p. 4. ("Sunday Review.")
Charlie Savage, et als., "U.S. Confirms Gathering of Web Data Overseas: Officials Defend 2 Surveillance Programs," The New York Times, June 7, 2013, at p. A1. (U.S. acknowledges stealing information from the global net community as America calls on China to control cybercrimes.)
Noam Cohen & Leslie Kaufman, "Blogger, With Focus on Surveillance, Is at Center of a Debate," The New York Times, June 7, 2013, p. A18. (I will be writing more about this matter. America has called on China and Cuba to protect the rights of dissidents.)
"We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks," (Focus Films, 2013) Angelika Movie Theater, Houston Street, New York, N.Y. http://www.itunes.com/westealsecrets
"The White Geek's Burden."
Should the Internet create a world culture that mirrors American values as distinct from promoting quirky individualism for "little brown persons"? Is there a difference between American values and the much-vaunted independence of "other voices in other rooms" on-line?
Should global communications culture be designed to make the world safe for the Disney Corporation and the policies of the U.S. State Department? Are these different entities today -- massive corporations and the U.S. government -- generating different levels of respect? Or is the Internet primarily a tool of empowerment and connection among very different persons of unequal power and education expressing their opinions, ideas, values and feelings, freely, against the constraints and/or impositions of power?
Electronic communications and debates have become our "public square" in the "Age of I-Phones" and lap-top computers -- a public square to which all are invited at the risk of offending the C.I.A. and State Department as well as other powerful forces in the world concerned with "obedience to authority."
In terms of the values of this sometimes rowdy public "space" of encounter and ideological confrontation, there are two competing visions of what should motivate U.S. actions and expressions:
First, some contend that this electronic "Agora" is a setting only made possible by American technological imagination and scientific achievement which, therefore, should not only celebrate but also promote and defend national values -- especially democracy, freedom, equality as understood in American terms -- the very values, again, making the Internet possible.
Second, others contend that pluralism and individual creativity as well as intelligence, true democratic values, are not limited to any one country nor can "anything be defined in only one way" -- a way that happens to be convenient for a few powerful countries. American values are only one of many competing value systems on display in our electronic public square.
Are all values created equal so as to be worthy of identical attention and respect? ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Power expressed in attempts to control the Internet is the opposite of a democratic celebration of individualism and/or freedom. It may well be that the tensions we struggle against are in our value system, not merely a matter of the limitations of the net or ourselves. ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution" then "John Rawls and Justice.")
Advocates for the Americanization of the human species by way of the Internet include Eric Schmidt of Google and former advisor to Condoleeza Rice, Jared Cohen. The first of these gentlemen is a Democrat; the second is no doubt a Republican.
Together these men symbolize and embody the "marriage" of government power with Sillicon Valley wizardry that is so frightening to everyone in the world subject to the jurisdiction of "Apple Computers" and the Google "experience."
Against the union of these dark forces of technological power and the world's dominant military machine there are only a handful of independent and dispersed, philosophically- as well as scientifically-minded "Jedhi Knights" from many parts of the world with intelligence and learning as their only "light sabers." May the force be with you!
China has opted out of the Google Empire because, curiously, they do not want the U.S. government controlling Chinese Internet activity. The good folks in Beijing have figured out that Google (translated into Chinese) means "the National Security Agency" (NSA).
Before quoting Mr. Assange (who is basically correct in his observations) and without offering a personal assessment of his argument, I will provide a statement of the Google/Blogger position and State Department dogma, even as I expect to be denied access to the Internet shortly, as I endure a number of distractions aimed at preventing me from expressing my opinions, fearlessly, at a library computer. Perhaps this censorship is merely a coincidence. ("How censorship works in America" and "Censorship and Cybercrime" then "Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?")
Schmidt and Cohen "proselytize the role of technology in reshaping the world's people and nations into likenesses of the dominant Superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not."
Cuba says, "No, thank you!"
"The prose is terse, [in The New Digital Age,] the argument is confident, and the wisdom -- banal."
Essentially, the "boys" argue that progress and freedom means the spread of U.S. commercial technology and capitalism all over the world.
Disparities in wealth and resources, billions who are illiterate and have never seen a telephone, television, or computers versus an elite in First World societies sporting wearable computers and micro-thin media devices is fine. Whatever.
This indifference to grotesque injustice is to reinvent Orwell's nightmare in 1984 in order to allow Homer Simpson to become "Big Brother." Mr. Assange spells it out for us simple folks :
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google glasses strapped on to vacant human faces -- forever." ("Whatever" and "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
"I have sworn eternal vigilance against all forms of tyrany over the mind of man [and woman.]" -- Thomas Jefferson.
Julian Assange is among a handful of media experts and crusaders fighting to democratize information as a form of struggle against any government colonizing and/or controlling minds. Mr. Assange argues, persuasively:
"The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world towards authoritarianism. ... the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuse inevitable moving the 'good' societies closer to the 'bad' ones." (emphasis added!)
When it comes to silencing dissidents and behind-the-back destruction of lives sanctioned by government officials, secretly, the so-called "good" societies are already no different from the allegedly "bad" societies. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" then "What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
Aside from targeting Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, the fusion of Google with the National Security State has contributed to the destruction of many young lives, literally and figuratively, like the much-regretted destruction of Aaron Schwartz. ("Aaron Schwartz, Freedom, and American Law.")
This is to say nothing of any number of Internet revolutionaries also facing harassment and personal attacks. Perhaps this intolerance may explain new pressures on Assata Shakur, Noam Chomsky, the demonizing and torture of Mumia Abu-Jamal -- together with the daily cyberwar against persons, like me, struggling (however modestly) to speak truth to power. ("America's Holocaust" and "Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison" then "So Black and So Blue in Prison.")
In a nation where 800 persons per week, according to Ralph Nader, still die of curable diseases because they can not afford quality medical care, the Panglossian suggestion that we "live in the best of all possible worlds" or that philosophical issues should only be resolved in accordance with the wishes of powerful U.S. officials -- a claim usually followed by the contradictory assertion that "it is all relative!" -- makes no sense at all. ("Nihilism Against Memory" and "What is Enlightenment?" then "Derek Parfit's Ethics.")
My prescription for tolerance is as old as John Locke's "Letter On Toleration" and Spinoza's essay "On the Emendation of the Intellect" or John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" and Mr. Jefferson's allegedly "unpatriotic" Declaration of Independence: Let truth emerge in a FREE and EQUAL exchange in the marketplace of ideas, without manipulations, control, illicit attempts at domination, or further hypocrisy and mendacity from minor state officials. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
If we are genuinely "for" freedom of speech, then we must be prepared to accept that many persons will not agree with our views. It is never appropriate to silence dissidents. (See again: "Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" then "No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")
Understanding the point of view of others requires gifts of empathy and identification best cultivated through literature and the arts, which are currently endangered disciplines. To imagine or share in and/or assist in the plight of others (sometimes "others" who are very different from ourselves) philosophical lightning is the most powerful weapon of the powerless masses.
" ... individual human beings can break free of the structures into which they are born," writes Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University, "by reimagining the world, they can change it."
This is the genuine American idea that the NSA and State Department may fear for it is not easily limited to a safe "Google search" or trendy political slogan:
"The politics implicit in classic American writings are those of liberal democracy [or democratic socialism] -- a society of [EQUAL] individuals ... within a culture of mutual responsibility -- but free to pursue happiness by refusing the designated status of their parents, race, sex, or any other limiting accident of birth."
Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (New York: Noonday Press/ Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997), pp. ix-xi.
