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Interview: WikiLeaks, The Future Of Journalism, And 'The Internet As A New Government'

Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website

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August 11, 2010

Jeff Jarvis was the creator and founding editor of the pop-culture magazine "Entertainment Weekly" and is now a professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, where he directs its New Media program.

In an interview with RFE/RL's Christopher Schwartz, Jarvis talks about the controversy over WikiLeaks, a website that recently published a trove of some 90,000 sensitive U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan. U.S. officials and others were concerned that the leaks constitute a national security threat. Jarvis talks about WikiLeaks' significance for journalism and the future of the Internet.

RFE/RL: What does an entity like WikiLeaks ultimately mean for journalists?

Jeff Jarvis: The WikiLeaks story is interesting because we see big media not sure what to do with them. "The New York Times," "The Guardian," and "Der Spiegel" cooperated with WikiLeaks and became their distributor. On the other hand, WikiLeaks opened up more than the newspapers would have, and that's where the controversy comes from...

I think what we find here is that in the new age you don't need a journalist to get information. The Internet makes it possible to gather and share information at a zero marginal cost. We as journalists have to ask where we add value to that process...

In the case of the WIkiLeaks war logs story, the journalists did add value. They distributed the information, they brought it attention, they gave it perspective and context, and, at least in the publications [i.e., the newspapers], they edited out the things that they believed were dangerous.

Jeff Jarvis
RFE/RL: What does WikiLeaks mean for the future of government secrecy?

Jarvis: In WikiLeaks, what we really see is the move to more radical transparency. The only solution to leaks is transparency, and the problem with holding too much secret is that you not only become more vulnerable to leaks, but we don't trust you to decide what should be secret...

I'm all in favor for transparency in government. The problem becomes when we make everything on the record -- every e-mail, for example -- then we may be motivating government officials to not put things in writing in e-mail and instead pick up the phone, which so far is not recorded. And so I think we have to be somewhat careful about how we structure transparency in government so people can get their work done and aren't constantly feeling as if they're under the spotlight...

We also have to change our relationship to government. Now it's a lot about "gotcha" moments -- you know, "catch the bastards." Well, you know, there are bastards to catch, but I think we have to make our relationship of citizens to government more collaborative, more constructive. When that happens, there's more benefit in releasing information. Right now, the cat-and-mouse game is to get information released so we can prove a wrongdoing by government, and that only makes government more secretive.

RFE/RL: What alternative model would you propose to counter the current cat-and-mouse game?

Jarvis: I think what we have to head to is an ethic of publicness by default in government, and we're far, far from that now, and we see new things bubbling out there trying to create more transparency in government...We have to assume that the actions and information of government are owned by the people and should be public -- except in cases of [national] security and personally identifiable information...

Other than that, everything government does should be open, but we're not there. Government should be asking us for permission to keep something from us, not to force us to ask permission to get our own information from the government. I think what will happen...in the more public age we're living in, in the age where we reveal our lives on Facebook and all over, is that we're going to expect governments to be more open.

RFE/RL: How do we go about implementing such a change?

Jarvis: That's the tension. I think we're living in a more transparent age, but big old institutions are going to try to revert into their old ways. In business, I think new start-ups that operate very publicly will become very disruptive to big old closed centralized corporations. In government, it's a bit harder to disrupt them because you can't just start a new government here and there. But in a sense, the Internet is a new government.

RFE/RL: "The Internet is a new government" is a pretty bold statement. What do you mean?

Jarvis: We can now create societies across national boundaries, and in a sense, the rules, the laws of those societies are created by, as Lawrence Lessing from Harvard says, by their code, so that there's a society built around Facebook and I can create a group of people who have similar interests and needs from anywhere in the world and we can operate under our own new rules and structures. And that's possible in this digital world in a way that wasn't so possible before.

RFE/RL: Let's back up a moment. We were talking about government secrecy, but what about the secrecy of individual citizens or online groups or societies?

Jarvis: We have so much talk these days about privacy and the dangers and fears around privacy and technology -- and that's fine, we should be looking at what could happen -- but at the same time we need to balance that with the benefits of "publicness." There are benefits to us as individuals to be open; there are benefits to us in our groups and communities; there are benefits to having open and transparent businesses and government; and there are benefits to pooling our knowledge, the knowledge of the crowd, which can give us all great value.

So I think we have to balance all this talk of privacy and all this fear of technology with the connections that the Internet now enables...

There is a role for anonymity on the web. It's necessary for whistle-blowers and it's necessary for people to speak under repressive regimes...So, there'll be a place for anonymity online. But I think that when it comes to standing up for what you believe in, when it comes to organizing people together, identity makes a difference [because] it adds value.

And so I think we're going to find more and more an identity-based community on the web. Facebook is part of the proof of that. Facebook is built on real identity and real relationships, and that's part of the reason it has grown so explosively.

RFE/RL: Entities like WikiLeaks emerge from hacking subcultures. In their eyes, they are the future of the Internet and of society. What do you say to that?

Jarvis: I think we're just living a new world that's going more and more digital and more and more open. It's not as if that digital is owned by some cult; we're all digital.

This forum has been closed.

Comment Sorting

Comments

by: Catherine Fitzpatrick

August 12, 2010 18:33

The Internet is not a new form of government; this usage of the Internet is in fact a very old form of government called "totalitarianism". Basically, the premise of Jeff Jarvis here, as elsewhere in all his writings, is that a tiny cadre of the "workers' advance guard" -- coders and engineers and their "progressive" affiliates -- get to decide, based on their own cultural and political affinities, what is right for the rest of us, without our participation, and without the rule of law.No thanks. This needs as big a pushback as we can possibly muster.

The Pentagon Papers story involved professional journalists cultivating sources, getting documents that exposed the government's lies, lengthy discussions with lawyers and defense by a First Amendment lawyer, all with the goal of covering the news that's fit to print in the public interest. The Wikleaks represents none of those values whatsoever. A disgruntled and troubled young soldier who just wants to stick it to everybody due to various psychological problems dumps as much as he can possibly dump into the hands of a foreigner who is bent only on one thing -- undermining the United States, period. Very, very different dynamics. Sure, the First Amendment may protect both acts. That doesn't mean that the Wikileaks is some laudable and special new form of government. It's Bolshevism, in fact, to recklessly endanger troops and without a demonstrable public interest served -- giving the material to professional newspapers to work over is merely a thin patina of legitimacy.

No one elected or appointed or even clicked "like" on this project of the Wikitarians. Like other Wikitarianist enterprises, it involves the unaccountable and anonymous few arbitrarily deciding things for the many. The only reason the soldier's identity did become known is because one of the Wikitarians got a conscience and began to worry that in fact maybe the information would endanger lives.

You notice these Wikitarian exercises all work one way. They work to expose and discredit the U.S. or Israel. They never find leaks in the Taliban, or, say, the Russian or Sudanese governments. They benefit from open societies; they could care less about making their future possible by the rule of law.

The only solution to leaks is transparency? That sounds an awful lot like that *other* criminal notion of the Wikitarians, which is that because you *can* copy everything on the Internet -- songs, art work, photos, book texts -- that it's ok and shouldn't be characterized as theft or crime in any way. So rapidly this mindless cult goes from chronicling what's *possible* or what *happens* and then reifying it into saying "and therefore it's ok and *should* happen, and if it doesn't, we'll force it."

by: Catherine Fitzpatrick from: New York City

August 12, 2010 18:34

The entire Government 2.0 gambit is a masterful exercise in how to make it seem as if you are transparent, but cover up a lot of other basic things -- like the way that Silicon Valley and notably Google are essentially able to use these tools and these movements for "openness" to further their own commercial interests, again, at the expense of the public interest.

The first task with "transparency" is to ensure that it isn't a power move by the few without any civic controls by the many. Congress should review a lot more of these new Gov 2.0 gadgets than they do currently. Lessig's extreme notions of "code not law" run smack against the basic notion of the rule of law -- which is that it is law that has to be *above coders, too*.

The worst feature of all of this is that it is packaged with a "don't touch or you fear technology" ribbon so that if you criticize it, you are told that you "fear innovation". Baloney. The New Age totalitarians who want to force the phony "transparent" wiki way of life on the public without any accountability, and without people's genuine and pluralist participation have to be questioned as much as any band of hijackers intent on using force and violence to change society. Technological capacity isn’t an excuse.

by: Irina from: Former USSR

August 13, 2010 14:56

The WikiLeaks is just a front for Russian Secret service. And latest publication is an act of retaliation against the US after the Russian spy ring scandal. Then Russians were embarrassed, now the US. As simple as that. Worth to notice that WikiLeaks publications are accompanied with usual Soviet style anti-war and pro-peace propaganda, what only indicates that there is nothing new here except the use of new technology.
..." We can now create societies across national boundaries, and in a sense, the rules, the laws of those societies are created by, as Lawrence Lessing from Harvard says, by their code... "

by: Bill Webb from: Phoenix, AZ, U.S.A.

August 21, 2010 15:00

Like yelling Fire! in a crowded theater, a suicide bomber killing dozens in a crowded marketplace, WikiLeaks isn't something new, it's just a different way to go about it: people doing things to other people. Making military secrets public is going to harm a lot of other people to no good cause except to prove that they can do it. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes!