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Bradley Manning and the Two Americas
https://medium.com/medium-long/b695860cb6d6A very good read
Somewhere in the Iraqi desert in 2009 in the middle of a flailing war, a soldier committed a seemingly small crime. Private Bradley Manning didn’t kill anyone, or rape anyone, but by nabbing information from his commanders and giving it to WikiLeaks, he lit up the world, like a match discarded into a great parched forest.
...
The choice of the data he sent to WikiLeaks is full of contradictions people struggle with to this day. The data was both vast and selective. It was unreadable by a single person in any reasonable time frame, and yet reasonable in terms of data analysis. It was a fraction of what was available to him in a SCIF in the Iraqi desert. In the data he chose, Manning was both careful and reckless. As a dataset, his process was select. As human readable material, it was indiscriminate.
...
The Internet built Wikipedia, Linux, and Facebook, but the old and slow hierarchies don’t understand those things very well. It was the empire that went to the moon, built bridges and ADA ramps across America, and invaded the beach at Normandy. It’s the old way that keeps the electricity running and cables connected to the net, and for this reason, it feels no small bit of entitlement to its power and control.
We don’t know yet if networked communities can manage trash collection and bridge maintenance. And we don’t know if old empires can live peacefully with the roving spirit of creative and loud humans who just change what they don’t like without asking anyone’s permission.
...
The choice of the data he sent to WikiLeaks is full of contradictions people struggle with to this day. The data was both vast and selective. It was unreadable by a single person in any reasonable time frame, and yet reasonable in terms of data analysis. It was a fraction of what was available to him in a SCIF in the Iraqi desert. In the data he chose, Manning was both careful and reckless. As a dataset, his process was select. As human readable material, it was indiscriminate.
...
The Internet built Wikipedia, Linux, and Facebook, but the old and slow hierarchies don’t understand those things very well. It was the empire that went to the moon, built bridges and ADA ramps across America, and invaded the beach at Normandy. It’s the old way that keeps the electricity running and cables connected to the net, and for this reason, it feels no small bit of entitlement to its power and control.
We don’t know yet if networked communities can manage trash collection and bridge maintenance. And we don’t know if old empires can live peacefully with the roving spirit of creative and loud humans who just change what they don’t like without asking anyone’s permission.