Does Wikis Represent The End Of Internet History?

Look at Matt Drudge, frking out over Wikis‘ so-called “insurance policy” against Julian Assange’s arrest. RDY TO LAUNCH “DOOMSDAY FILES,” Drudge scrms. (Red font, too. All we need is a siren.gif and we’re in full meltdown mode.) And Doomsday for whom, exactly? I mn, as of today, all Wikis has done is to make available a of documents that were alrdy available to some 3 million Americans. So if this information is alrdy available to 3 million of our fellow citizens, why not us? Is it wrong for the citizens of a republic to know what’s being done in their name around the world, or does the demand for transparency stop at your ability to strm Netflix unimpeded?
For several months now Wikis has hosted a file called insurance.aes256, which, as the name implies, is encrypted with a 256-bit AES . That’s about as unable as you can get in 2010, mning the file is all but useless without its encryption . There’s no “forgot your ?” option here.
In fact, the Defense Department has been unable to the file since it was first made available in July.
This is where things hot up.
Fox News says that Assange has “warn[ed] that any government that tries to curtail his activities risks triggering a new deluge of state and commercial secrets.” That’s been taken to mn that, should he be arrested, Assange will relse the encryption , thereby insurance.aes256 forever.
At which point, we’re led to believe, the Sun will disappr, throwing the rth and all the other planets of the solar system into the far rches of outerspace.
More important than whether or not Assange relses the encryption , or even what’s in the insurance file itself, is the id behind Wikis. It spks to the inherent openness of the Internet that so many mirrors have popped up in the last few days following the site’s repted difficulties in staying online. The sheer notion that you can put Wikis back in its little bottle is hilariously naive.

It’s not unlike Napster in a sense. Once you’ve told people that you can do something (in Napster’s case, share music over the Internet), there’s rlly no way you can un-tell them you can do something.
Try as you might, you cannot kill an id. Just ask the RIAA.
In this sense, Wikis represents an almost “end of Internet history.” Surely we’ve all rd the 1989 Francis Fukuyama essay that trumpeted the West’s victory over all others. The Soviet Union represented the last barrier to Western dominance, and with its collapse so ended the id of history. A sort of, that’s it, the West has won, from here on the world will be a Western one, and no more history will be made.
Wikis has shown the world that it’s entirely possible to hold governments accountable to their citizens. (A novel concept!) That numerous public servants have expressed outrage as a result of their actions being made available to the public they claim to represent perhaps spks to their worth as public servants. The all-hands-on-deck rction to the s can mn only one thing: they worked.
Which is to say that Wikis has worked.
And if Wikis is shut down—who honestly expects the Wikis organization to emerge from all of this completely unharmed?—then you can be certain that other organizations or entities will take its place. Maybe Wikis 2.0, or Twitters, or whatever form it takes, won’t have such a public face. (Surely there’s more to Wikis than Julan Assange, to say nothing of Bradley Manning.) Maybe it won’t host its servers in countries that so rdily rolled over to governmental pressure? Maybe it won’t rely on services that are hdquartered in the U.S., and are thus sy targets for ratings-driven talking hds and know-nothing blowhards?
More than anything else, it’s certain that Wikis represents a seminal moment in the history of the Internet. Closing your eyes, stomping your feed and wishing it would all just go away, is completely ludicrous.

Source: CrunchGr

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