Re: <nettime> Iceland's fight for press freedom

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Yes, both are essential -- establishmentarian, reputable (best,
slightly disreputable for edgy allure) outlets for those who must have
an authoritative source of information and outlets for those who must
ignore established, partonizing, parental, authoritative outlets.
Both feed each other and act as checks on vainglory and corruption
inevitable in closed enterprises, and both seed each other with
inspiration and revulsion.

Learned from the Internet hegemon is that it is not trustworthy,
but that it is not untrustworthy, it is a mix of the two and for
that reason beneficial in the spread of skepticism about unilateral
solutions for information sharing whether police-spy centralized or
outlaw-paranoic diffuse, Mossad and Hamas forever bound in mutual
gratitude.

Fantastically diffuse social media, lawful or unlawful, has fast
become too trivial and voluminous to absorb, as with the bulk of human
babble, now Musakish, electromagnetic staticky. Where once email
hawked and spat now Twitter projectile vomits.

Aside: moderating of email, policing, has almost killed it, certainly
robbed its vitality of disputation and passionate discourtesy.
Exception: Nettime's cops are dirty by design.

But then in the face of this shift in public fascination with its own
navel rather than lipsmacking at the celebrated's, the authoritative
media have beefed up shallowness, imitation, plagiarism, phoniness,
endlessly breaking news and unauthorized-to-speak unnamed sources,
to be indistinguishable from resume padding and spin-doctoring --
advertising editorialism, compulsive exaggeration, ombudsperson
apologia tomfoolery.

Disreputable sources of information, leaks. are a branded,
copyrightish product, imitating the samzidat, the storefront art
gallery, the "little-known genius" MacArthur grantee, the You Name It
without Borders. That's just evidence of success by carefully limited
risk-taking, the last also a registered authorial conceit requiring
LOC protection.

Control of centralized outlets of information will always be possible
through finance due to the high cost of centralization, and loss of
control of the control of these nodes will always be generated by
internal corruption of and competition among the staff and leaders and
the staff's hatred and envy of those at the top of the centralizing
heirarchy.

For the gangs amok, sell-out and co-op and rat-finking are
unavoidable. Che will be betrayed for marketing his vaunted resume,
more valuable dead than Mandellized.


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