WikiLeaks has been all over the world news headlines this past week after the Daily Beast reported that Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning released 260,000 classified documents to the controversial journalism network. Wired.com has followed up on story with reports about Manning’s conscience and WikiLeaks’ intention to provide him with legal help.

In related news, the Guardian reported on Friday that the FBI is looking for WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, in hopes of preventing him from publishing those documents. But WikiLeaks has not yet confirmed that they actually received 260,000 internal Army documents — maybe because the U.S. government seems so concerned about the situation. Manning also claimed to have leaked the 2007 Apache helicopter video that I discussed here in April.

Apparentely The New Yorker chose a really good time to publish a 10,000-word feature about Julian Assange. The story “No Secrets” by Raffi Khatchadourian was published on 6/7/10, the day before the news broke about Manning. I’m extremely interested in Assange and the WikiLeaks organization, but I was still surprised when I got sucked into this article. Assange is a fascinating character — the type of person who you don’t usually hear about because governments hate him so much. But he’ll likely be an important figure in the time ahead, so I wanted to present excerpts from the story in a convenient run-down.

On the hope for a new “scientific journalism” and their approach to the Apache helicopter footage:

If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.’ Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative. In the case of Project B, Assange wanted to edit the raw footage into a short film as a vehicle for commentary. For a while, he thought about calling the film ‘Permission to Engage,’ but ultimately decided on something more forceful: ‘Collateral Murder.’ He told Gonggrijp, ‘We want to knock out this “collateral damage” euphemism, and so when anyone uses it they will think “collateral murder.”’

On Assange’s upbringing and self-directed education:

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. ‘I didn’t want their spirits broken,’ she told me. …[Assange] took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. ‘I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,’ he recalled.

This bit shows a prominent aspect of WikiLeaks in its formative stage. Assange was arrested in 1991 for hacking with a group that went by the name “The International Subversives”:

‘Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot,’ Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. ‘He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.’

On Assanges’ budding life philosophy and the need for an organization that would foster information leaks:

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by ‘patronage networks’—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled ‘Conspiracy as Governance,’ which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in ‘collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.’ He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

On realizing the shortcomings of traditional journalism and mass media:

In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—’a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,’ as he once put it. …in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, ‘We are not the press.’ He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, ‘the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.’

On WikiLeaks’ main objectives:

Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006, he wrote, ‘Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.’ He has argued that a ‘social movement’ to expose secrets could ‘bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US administration.’

On justifying the potential for damage:

At the same time, Aftergood told me, the overclassification of information is a problem of increasing scale—one that harms not only citizens, who should be able to have access to government records, but the system of classification itself. When too many secrets are kept, it becomes difficult to know which ones are important.

Khatchadourian’s skeptical remarks about the long-term tenacity of WikiLeaks:

But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

On objective and subjective approaches to journalism:

‘It was surprising to me that we were seen as such an impartial arbiter of the truth, which may speak well to what we have done,’ [Assange] told me. But he also said, ‘To be completely impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have been killed.’

You can read the entire feature here.

Icky poo poo wires make me feel dirty in my digital crotch

It’s been a long, strange month since I last posted here, and now I have 37 drafts to catch up with. If you haven’t heard, I’m now a resident of the Republic of Saint Kitts and Nevis, located in the Eastern Caribbean. My girlfriend is attending vet school at Ross University, which means we’ll likely be living on St Kitts until August 2012. I spent two or three weeks in a mad rush preparing for the move, and the last two weeks adjusting to life in a different (less “developed”) country.

I probably won’t be able to post very often at first. We have really poor Internet connectivity at our apartment (it’s out half the time, and when it’s on the speed is usually around 0.3 MB/s), so it not only takes longer to post but it’s also risky business (since WordPress doesn’t auto-save well when Internet is slow. Just after typing this sentence, my Internet went out — and I’m at the Ross campus!). And also, I’m still in the “struggle through each day” phase of starting a new life.

To get back into the groove, I figured I would offer a retort to an essay by Virginia Heffernan from the most recent New York Times Sunday Magazine, entitled “The Death of the Open Web.” It seemed relevant to me because the Times plans to put up a paywall for regular users in 2011. The essay basically argues that more people are starting to prefer a limited Web experience — like that offered by apps on the iPhone — because it’s cleaner and easier than the open Web.

At first it seems that the author is lamenting this change. That’s even stated clearly in the article’s conclusion. But between the lines she indubitably sends the message that the “gated communities” of the web’s “suburbia” will, in the coming years, be infinitely preferable to the “urban chaos” of free websites. The author states in various ways that the World Wide Web is “haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are mobbed, and signs of urban decay abound in broken links and abandoned projects.”

But now, with the purchase of an iPhone or an iPad, there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates. In the migration of dissenters from the “open” Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight.

First of all, this is a blatantly racist statement that equates the open web with places where “minorities” live (i.e., where they are corralled into), sneakily sending the message that you should move far, far away… wherever the digital country clubs are located — that is, if you intend to be an advanced member of Web society. (It also implies that white flight was justified in the real world.) Second, the Web has NEVER BEEN CENTRALIZED OR ORGANIZED!!! The fact that it cannot be ordered into a traditional hierarchy is its greatest attribute!

They are presenting a myth for people who have only ever used AOL, MySpace, or Facebook. The myth strengthens their goal: the normalization of paid web content:

All these things make spaces feel “safe” — not only from viruses, instability, unwanted light and sound, unrequested porn, sponsored links and pop-up ads, but also from crude design, wayward and unregistered commenters and the eccentric ­voices and images that make the Web constantly surprising, challenging and enlightening.

When a wall goes up, the space you have to pay to visit must, to justify the price, be nicer than the free ones.

After convincing the audience that paid content is normal, the author hopes to show them that highly processed Web apps heighten the online experience.

The far more significant development, however, is that many people are on their way to quitting the open Web entirely. That’s what the 50 million or so users of the iPhone and iPad are in position to do. By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web.

Nevermind that smartphones running Google’s Android OS — an open-source platform and direct antithesis to the top-down control employed by Apple — have begun to outsell iPhones! The author fails to mention that, while continuing to manipulate you into thinking she actually likes the open Web. She presses on with more metaphors and a subliminal punch to the openness of Web 2.0.

Perception, after all, is everything: many apps are to the Web as bottled water is to tap — an inventive and proprietary new way of decanting, packaging and pricing something that could once be had free.

Apps sparkle like sapphires and emeralds for people bored by the junky nondesign of monster sites like Yahoo, Google, Craigslist, eBay, YouTube and PayPal.

To finish things off, she reminds the reader to think about his or her own ego when deciding how to approach the Internet.

Even to the most committed populist there’s something rejuvenating about being away from an address bar and ads and links and prompts — those constant reminders that the Web is an overcrowded and often maddening metropolis and that you’re not special there.

Since late 2008 I’ve been a big fan of NYT’s Sunday Magazine, but now I’m not so sure. From now own I pledge allegiance to no media company. This media industry growing efforts to get us to pay for content will fail. For every company that tries to make us pay, five others will pop up with more interesting insights, videos, and even applications that cost nothing.

I can say right now that Supraterranean will never put up a paywall. We may show advertisements, and we’ll have to ask for donations — but if you ever catch us requiring payment to use the site, please send us repeated hate mail until the idiocy stops.

Back in February when Kaliptus was planning the Tryptophantasia event, his friend Salma posted an interview with him on the site Evolver.net, a new social network with the slogan “It’s our world to change.” Naturally, I signed up for the site right away (here’s my profile).

I quickly learned that Evolver is connected with an online magazine called Reality Sandwich. Now the team behind the two websites are working on starting up the Evolver Social Movement, which is essentially their attempt to make the ventures financially sustainable (their primary investors bailed). Membership does require a monthly payment, but you get to choose the dollar amount (they’re asking for $10 per month, but it’s wide open).

At the end of March, Evolver/RS editorial director Daniel Pinchbeck published an essay explaining how these projects came to be and why they were now asking for money. Daniel has some very interesting views about the world in which we live (he has also authored three books), and some of his opinions on topics like literary hipsters are very close to my own (I posted a comment on his essay to let him know). With that said, I thought I would excerpt some parts of his essay that really grabbed me.

On what he did before Evolver/RS:

While my pool game improved, my life was stagnating. I was working on fiction but experiencing little success with it, while I wrote freelance magazine articles to make a sort of living. For various reasons I began to feel increasingly alienated and depressed – as I discuss in my books. Eventually I began to spiral deeper and deepr into a massive spiritual crisis and depression, often feeling I was on the verge of going crazy.

I simply couldn’t understand what the point of any of it was as it seemed we lived in a nihilistic universe, a secular materialist prison. In my social set at that time, to open up big philosophical questions about the nature of reality and the soul was only to invite sarcasm and hipster dismissal. My friends conceived literature as a way of seeking the proper pose or stance in relationship to a world that had no meaning outside of one’s personal style and ability to see through it with a perfectly jaundiced eye and finely-turned phrases pitched just right.

On straying from the world of hip lit:

I increasingly felt that literature as well as much contemporary art had become distraction mechanisms, ways of contemplating the degraded and fragmented state of our world from a safe distance instead of making active efforts to change anything in it.

On the immediate positive reaction to Reality Sandwich:

It was clear that there was something important happening here – some nexus between psychedelic and mainstream political and ecological thought that needed to happen. We also noticed that some articles got hundreds of comments, and that the commentators often wanted to find others in their area.

On our present moment and the role he sees RS playing:

My research for my last book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl convinced me that this is indeed a time of intense transition – that humanity has to either evolve its consciousness and take individual and eventually species-wide responsibility for its effects on the planet, or we won’t have a future here. Evolver – and now the Evolver Social Movement – are the best way I have been able to conceive to contribute to this transformative process, by helping to build a viable alternative culture in local communities, and by producing media that spreads the word.

In New York City, where I live, I find that most people are not able, at this point, to understand that the way of life to which they and the multitudes have become accustomed is soon going to end. This will come about through some combination of possibilities that include a much deeper crash of the economic system, shortages of fossil fuels and other necessities, an intensifying series of disasters like the earthquakes that recently wracked Haiti and Chile, or civil unrest and tax rebellion. I am pretty sure this will be the case at any rate – although, admittedly, I am not a fan of our current civilization, and look forward to seeing it give way, though I hope this happens through some process that doesn’t cause too much death or misery. People are so locked into the matrix, its narrow rewards system, that they are incapable of looking beyond it.

More on urban hipsters:

There is a tendency toward fatalism and almost a romanticization of our current society’s horrible state. I believe that this is due to a cultural indoctrination by a media that makes people feel passive, cynical, and alienated. The media has a large role in producing and framing the type of consciousness that can be expressed at the time. Therefore, I believe we have a real need for “interdependent media” that expresses a different viewpoint, recognizing that the fall we are already experiencing is necessary to bring about a shift into a different form of society.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, consider having a look at their operation.

The second reason is more complex, but it relates to my skepticism over the value of contemporary publishing. I’m sure there’s a long catalog of works that try to explain the reasons for the degraded efficacy of modern literature: people watch too much TV and movies, play too many video games, aren’t educated enough, or are tasteless, unrefined cretins. That’s without even mentioning the publishing industry’s concerns over lagging profits. Of course, the assumption there is that the publishers deserved whatever success they had enjoyed up until recent times.

My opinion is quite different. Media is media; corporations are corporations; profit is profit; greed is greed. From a top-down perspective, book publishers are no different than the people who sell movies, shows, or albums. That publishing model undermines the very mission behind literature: to teach, to open minds, to ask important questions, to unveil fears and insecurities — all in all, to push mankind forward.

Now I’m approaching one of the founding concepts behind Supraterranean: to reinvent the way publishing is done. I don’t expect the site to accomplish that goal on its own, just to state it “for the record,” and to contribute to the evolution that is far overdue. And as e-readers begin to proliferate the market, we all have a duty to try and stop the content industry from controlling what people can access on those devices. If it all ends up being subscription-based stuff filtered through a semblance of the Internet, we might as well throw those tablets in the trash.

At the very least, I want Supraterranean to be a resource to ensure that anyone who wants to present their creative work to the public can do so. My biggest issue with the industry (by which I’m referring mostly to companies who publish books and literary journals for for money) is that it’s founded on the concept of authoritarian control. And, at least with the biggest publishers, the goal is not to identify and support the best writers or books; it’s to find and mold the books that can produce the biggest dividends, that book clubs and academics alike will gush over, that can skyrocket to a bestsellers list after being displayed (courtesy of massive payola) at the front of every mega-bookstore in America.

This is really no different than the way I feel about the major labels of the music industry, and (to a lesser exdegree, in terms of anger) about the big film studios. (I’ve ranted about the music industry many times on my MusicEdge Blog, most notably in this comment reply from April ’08. For more thoughts on the book industry, have a look at this Refractor Blog post about literary agents from about a year ago.)

* * *

Now that I’ve vented, re-read what I wrote so far, and had two glasses of wine, I realize that I haven’t even begun to discuss what I had originally planned. Here’s the story. In August 2009 I read the New York Times Sunday Book Review of Zeitoun, a nonfiction book written by Dave Eggers about a single family’s tribulations as Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans in late August 2005. I had never read anything by Dave Eggers, but I quickly gathered that he is one of the most well-known writers working today. I was more intrigued after learning that his own company, McSweeny’s, published the book. Perhaps, I thought, an independent publishing venture would allow a much more vivid, more experimental, more truthful account of what actually happened down there. Back when it happened, I was admittedly oblivious to the news reports, and I felt it was time that I learned more about it.

However, if I were to rate the book, I’d probably give it about a 3 out of 5. I’ve come to hate ratings, but here’s it appropriate — since I agree with those who gave it that rating on Amazon.com. Follow this link to see a three-star review by “exBFF,” who calls it a “great first draft.” I think that’s dead on. The comment author also points out the heavy, recurring use of foreshadowing — another keen observation.

I can’t think of a more appropriate word for the book than “mainstream.” And clearly the book is selling well, since it’s it’s been sold out everywhere since Christmas, until mid-February at the soonest. There were some redeeming qualities to the book, despite the fact that I didn’t learn all that much about Katrina, and the story itself wasn’t very captivating. But I’ve crossed my 600-word limit, so I’ll have to get to that tomorrow.

I think the take-home point of this post is that I am trying to expose myself to new literature, partly because I want to be more involved in the “literary scene.” It’s just a long, hard process, and I haven’t had any sort of writing or lit/comp class since 12th grade, so I have no guide here. I’m skeptical about whether the Editors can find and support all the talented writers, and I’m convinced that a good amount of worthwhile writing goes totally unpublished. I think one way the Internet will help is to find the right audience for a certain book or writer, instead of forcing every author to aspire to the tastes of the literary status quo. That’s not so unreasonable a hope, is it?

I thought it sounded like a great idea, and I was totally willing to foot the $250 for the actual printing of the books. I even rushed to cut my essay down from almost 12,000 to just under 10,000 words, to stay within their submission guidelines. I printed and mailed the literary spawn, and I waited patiently. Then on Sunday night I got an email notification that my essay was rejected. They received 14 submissions and had picked three for publication.

Here’s their email:

Dear Nick,

Thank you for your submission to the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press. Our readers evaluated fourteen manuscripts for this round and chose three for publication. Although your manuscript was not selected, we cannot emphasize how much we appreciate your participation. Receiving so many quality submissions for this fifth year of our publishing project bodes well for the continued success of the Cooperative Press. We hope that you will try again.

Please check the website for further updates. Again, thank you for sharing your work with us.

Sincerely,
Marcy Branski,
Co-President
Michigan Writers, Inc.

Denise Baker
Co-President
Michigan Writers, Inc.

Michael Callaghan
Chair, Cooperative Press Committee
Michigan Writers, Inc.

The rejection itself doesn’t bother me so much as the the nature of the rejection. Here’s a group that charges $35 in membership fees and claims to exist in order to help budding writers. Yet because I my essay was turned away, I didn’t learn a thing about publishing — except what I already knew about it: it’s an extremely flawed process.

You may know that Supraterranean was founded in part to present an alternative to the current state of the publishing industry (more info on the About page). But what I soon realized is that letting anyone publish whatever they want isn’t the perfect solution. There is some kind of value in having to overcome obstacles, if it helps make someone a better writer. But there should be many more avenues to publication than there are currently. The literary world is way too stagnant and stale, partly due to the nature of writing (it’s a slower process than other creative work like music or painting), but partly due to the extreme level of control that currently exists in the industry.

In the coming months I will be thinking often about this topic, trying to identify ways to build upon the current model for Supraterranean. And I’ll be looking for other venues to publish my essay. For now, here’s my response to the Cooperative Press rejection. I’ll be sure to inform you if they write back.

Dear Marcy, Denise and Michael,

I would really appreciate further explanation. According to your website, the Cooperative Press is meant to “help emerging writers” and teach them about the publishing process, and the mission of Michigan Writers is to “[provide] opportunities for networking, publication, and education.” With that in mind, it would seem appropriate for you to provide some feedback to the writers whose submissions were not selected, including but not limited to:

- Suggestions for improving this specific piece
- Recommendations for building our craft in general (which could be as simple as pointing us to reading material)
- Connecting us with a writing mentor
- Pointing us to suitable publications where we could submit our work

I also have a proposition for you. We are at the dawn of a new age of publishing. Print is giving way to the e-reader and the computer screen. Perhaps Michigan Writers could help produce, offer, and/or distribute e-books. If you’re not willing or able to provide help with editing or creation of PDF files, you could at least create a “Self-Published” section on your website, assist us in submitting our work to Amazon’s Kindle store (and other such e-book stores), and offer some kind of promotion services.

Forgive me for being straightforward, but I was expecting Michigan Writers to be a sort of incubator, and not return a bloodstained 10,000-word essay with the same generic two-paragraph denial as any other publication.

Best,
Nick Meador