We’re Watching Big Brother
Posted by Kevin Carson on Dec 15, 2009 in Commentary • 4 commentsDemocracy Now’s Amy Goodman was stopped on November 25 en route to Vancouver, where she was scheduled to speak at a benefit for public radio stations. Armed border guards ransacked her car (and papers and laptop hard drive), and interrogated her for ninety minutes. Their line of question leaned heavily on the subject matter of her planned remarks at public appearances in Vancouver and Victoria. They seemed especially concerned (not to say obsessed) that she might make negative comments about the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
Goodman actually had a hard time figuring out what the goons were talking about. At first, she thought they were worried for some reason about Obama’s recent effort to promote Chicago as an Olympic host. When they explained their concern over the Vancouver Winter Olympics, her response was “Oh I hadn’t thought of that.” In her subsequent remarks on the event, she gives every indication that their chickenshit Winter Olympics were the last thing on her mind.
Well, if she hadn’t thought of it before, she certainly has now—and so have millions of other people who otherwise wouldn’t have given it a second thought. The border goons’ attempt to suppress negative comment on the Winter Olympics was about as ineffectual—and comical—as Basil Fawlty’s attempt to avoid talking about the war.
In an interview with the Globe, she said she planned on discussing the border incident in her public appearances. “Clearly,” that is, “if it’s okay with the border police.”
This is a classic example of the Streisand Effect at work. Attempts to suppress negative publicity lead to far worse negative publicity—worse by several orders of magnitude.
Rather than a relatively small number of people hearing what Goodman thinks about the Winter Olympics, a very large number of people will hear about border guards trying to shut her up about the Winter Olympics. As Keith Olbermann said, if they’re worried about Goodman embarrassing them, it’s pretty counterproductive to provide her with a script for the next day’s show. Not only have the border goons done more to cause the Winter Olympics more negative publicity than Goodman could ever have dreamed of (assuming she’d been bored enough to bother), they’ve make themselves look like a bunch of incompetent buffoons in the process.
This is just another example of what a hard time the old state and corporate hierarchies are having adjusting to a networked world. We see them constantly being blindsided by negative publicity. They’re still encultured to a world of unidirectional broadcast communications with centralized, high-cost hubs, where a quiet phone call or lunch with the right person could hush things up just fine. They’re just beginning to learn that that world is gone forever.
Every attempt to nip bad publicity in the bud, by schmoozing with some gatekeeper, winds up exploding in their faces. And no matter how many times it happens, it never stops being funny. Imagining the looks on the faces of Trafigura management and those Canadian border clowns, I laughed the way I used to at the sight of Elmer Fudd after a shotgun blew up in his face.
We can talk to each other now, and replicate suppressed information infinitely (or as near as dammit), with near-zero transaction costs. Not only can’t they shut us up, but their attempts to do so just cause more embarrassment. Every attempt to suppress a leaked document winds up being circulated over the Internet. Every police beating winds up on YouTube. They can’t hide any more.
As Sheldon Richman put it, in commenting on an earlier column about the Streisand Effect, “We’re watching Big Brother.”
The attempts to suppress information are clumsy now, but they will get better at it. We’ll remember this as the “good old days” of free speech.
On freenet, you will find that all the stuff that various intel organisations use to ‘control’ their marks. A good deal of it is free.
So if you hunt around a bit, you can buy the naughty video of the daughter of the then Minister for Immigration (in Australia) – which helps explain his strange stance on Israeli espionage in this country at the time.
Likewise, there is abundant surveillance footage of political nomenklatura with prositutes of various ages and genders… it’s not as if the people who take that sort of footage have huge moral scruples about selling it.
Spend $5k on there and you can be absolutely certain that you would obtain enough political ‘juice’ to enable you to do whatever you like, with absolute impunity.
Humanity has evolved past the point where it can be treated like livestock.
This was one of the most positive and hope-filled posts I’ve read in a while. Hardly anything bores me as much as “Canada” or “Winter Olympics,” but this has gotten me intrigued! You are bound to get the inevitable comments about how statists will eventually “shut down” the Internet, and while it is true that when Al Gore “invented” the Internet, he left room so that the statists could do just that, you’ve already spoken to the bigger picture of just how obvious that would look and just how lame that would be.
I remember being harassed by the Canadian Border Patrol. I was on a bus en route to Vancouver when those State-sanctioned thugs detained myself, an elderly lady, and an earthy-looking father-son duo.
The elderly lady had tried to -ahem!- smuggle in some sort of unauthorized bread or fruit or something like that for her daughter. The State agents emptied out her bags and spread her possessions all over a table in the middle of the detainment room. They then proceeded to yell at her threatening remarks about smuggling illegal goods into Canada.
I was never able to find out what happened to that poor old lady because I got kicked out for having a DUI on my record.
I know the father-son duo were going to be in deep shit because I helped them eat some of the mushrooms the were trying to bring into Vancouver…