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[la_vie_noire]

eccentricyoruba shared this wonderful article that talks about Wikileaks, Freedom of Speech, Nigeria and Shell.

Julian Assange in Nigeria.

[...]The theory goes something like this: freedom of speech no longer has political traction in the west, in contrast to other parts of the world. It doesn’t really matter what is said in America in the press or elsewhere; it has little consequence for a system that is buried from view, circulating via diplomatic cables and a (mostly) secure corporate communications infrastructure. In contrast, freedom of speech remains a matter of life and death for hundreds of millions of other people, where the communications infrastructure is less sophisticated and inconvenient truths are harder to hide.

The trick is to realise that the two versions of freedom of speech are intimately related: what cannot be said in one part of the world is often conditioned by the interests at work in another. [...]

But there is a crucial difference: the genie is out of the bottle. It no longer matters what happens to Assange. Westerners can no longer believe in the seductive entitlement of the First Amendment (now that we know how easily compromised it can be), at the very time when information has never been so disaggregated and available. The way the tension between the two (the limits of the freedom of speech vs the unlimited power of disaggregated information) plays out will have consequences for the global order we cannot yet anticipate. No matter what newly produced official secrets may stay secret from now on, the West’s handmaiden in corruption, the transnational corporation, will itself be under surveillance. Anonymous is here to stay.