Naked displays of power are still apparent today. However, overt displays of violence and coercive force are now frowned upon, unless you are the preponderant hegemon (the United States). It is perhaps no accident that Julian Assange and the entire motive force animating Wikileaks have targetted the US in their ‘exposes’. The ‘US’ is not so much a territorial entity here as an ideational construct representing who and how power is wielded in the world. Since entities such as Wikileaks cannot contest the ‘US’ in terms of the old definition of power, they find ways to diminish newer ways in which power is exercised today.

Military might still matters, but its successful deployment rests on other structural capabilities. Sheer force has not uprooted terrorist networks. The most sophisticated combat technology has not won the Afghan front. In the 21st century, most citizens will not tolerate being made to comply at a gunpoint. In time, power has come to rest on holders’ ability to penetrate the lives of the governed and to convince them of the existing holders’ legitimacy.

Compliance is won through the production of knowledge and the ways in which this
shapes the governed’s behaviour. The struggle to win people’s assent rests on shaping how people think about authority. The fourth estate then becomes a battle ground of sorts, where competing factions attempt to influence producers and gatekeepers of information.

Today technology has made it possible to decentre the production and distribution of knowledge. Some of the old gatekeepers have closed shop as the world prepares to make way for new means for information to reach its intended audience. It is not the content of Wikileak’s dispatches that matters, it is the concept of Wikileaks itself. Commenters have called this the first global ‘infowar’, a war of information. At stake, first and foremost, is control. Old media – newspapers, radio, television – have been struggling to keep market shares in competition with the internet. Today it is not unusual to claim that one no longer watches television. For those of us with the luxury of access, the internet is king.

Wikileaks has thrown power-holders for a loop. It has shown that information, in this day and age, can be likened to water. No matter how tightly we screw on the lid, or how carefully we seal the cracks, information will leak. The idea itself may not be novel. There have been whistle blowers before. What is new are the players and the terrain in which this phenomenon has unfolded. It is an infowar of a truly global scope. How many hundreds of mirror sites have sprouted in the past few days? The ‘soldiers’ are the computer-savvy of many nations who hold no allegiance to flags – only a shared set of values – whatever they may be.

The struggle to plug the leaks has meant coercing other ‘territorial’ players like PayPal and banks. Julian Assange has recently surrendered himself to the British police. Wikileaks may be under intense pressure, and the sheer might of the ‘US’ will probably manage to bring it down one way or another. But this event has happened, the first global skirmish in the struggle to control information, i.e. power. It cannot be unheard or unseen. It is now in the collective memory of the global public.

Wikileaks has shown that it can be done – that the secrets of those to whom we entrust the power to govern – can be divulged in such a scale. Has this ‘diluted’ the authority or legitimacy of our governments? Perhaps not. Are we necessarily surprised by the information revealed to us? Perhaps not. We probably already know some of these things, the conspiracy theorist in us has always wondered. What matters is not that we have lifted the veil of ignorance to actually ‘see’. What matters is that Wikileaks has shown that it can be done. The organisation has targetted not only the mightiest conventional power, but perhaps the preponderant technological power as well. The US military-industrial-scientific complex created the internet. It was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Cyberspace is as vast as fibre optic cables and data havens will allow.

In the past decade, power-holders have been successful in colonising the internet for commercial purposes. Now, if they are to maintain power, they must find ways to control it. There have been attempts in the past to ‘regulate’ the internet. The likes of Julian Assange now assure that the clamp-down will now sit on top of the agenda. The question is, for those of us who share, in varying degrees, the same values and principles animating Wikileaks, how do we respond?

Given yesterday, we were talking about how the Internet ought to be a human right, how lately twitter has been buzzing with Iranian elections and how Filipinos have been using Facebook and Twitter to get our point of view across, this tedtalk by Clay Shirky asks a very important question: “How can we best make use of this media, even though it means changing the way we’ve always done it?”

my thanks to @mlq3 on twitter for sending this link.

Boulder County adopted ElectionAudits, an open source software program that implements a “risk-limiting” audit system modeled after the concepts described in Principles and Best Practices for Post Election Audits—a guide that is endorsed by the Brennan Center for Justice, Verified Voting, and a number of various state-based election integrity advocacy groups.

What do you think? This thing can be adopted to work in country?

MLQ3 cited Randy David’s view that the real issue is the “crisis of modernity” gripping our society; observing how Pinoy politicians now increasingly resort to voodoo and prayer as a means to ameliorate our society’s fortunes.

Mr. hawaiianguy provides a bit more clarity in his comment by asserting that:

[...] the crisis is brought about by the failure of society to keep up with the gains of modernity (aka “progress”) that is built on science and rationality [...]

Thus society, in an apparent failure to cope with progress built on advances in science, technology, and Western Philosophy, is reverting to mystical approaches to make sense of the rationality that underpins this progress.

I don’t know if this will result in a debate on whether our march to “modernity” on the back of science technology is sustainable. Maybe the collective intellect is already creaking under the weight of the increasing complexity being created by this progress. If global thermonuclear war won’t do the job (as was the thinking during the Cold War), maybe it is this more insiduous complexity creep that will eventually do us in — bomb our minds back to the stoneage.

Rich media is already doing that — making information so seductively visual (and the content riding on it so shallow) as to atrophy an entire generation’s ability to assimilate rich knowledge the hard way — through back-to-basics reading and comprehension of text. Until the technology to download knowledge straight into the brain is developed (a la The Matrix), the only way to acquire rich knowledge is through reading and low-tech learning (i.e. practice and concentration). Anyone who’s read a book and seen the movie version of said book will catch my drift. Watching a podcast or taking in The Discovery Channel (while made out — through clever marketing — to be the killer knowledge-sharing apps of our age) is no substitute for reading text, say in a newspaper or a good book (or a good blog).

So it seems that the irony that is often glossed over is that the technology that underpins the “Knowledge and Information” Age is actually dumbing down the children of this age — propagating lazy, vacuous, right-here-right-now, attention-deficited attitudes and minds that are now being highlighted by the growing Gen-Y Bashing movement. In fact a new elite is being created — one that is immune to the descent to mysticism and shallowness afflicting the ordinary schmoe. This emerging elite possesses the intellectual horsepower to understand (and I mean really understand) the science, technology, and rationality that underpins the sleek gloss that the merely savvy see and consume.

As the common wisdom goes, technology made advanced enough can be pitched as magic to the ignorant. It is already happening. A new elite churning out the technology and an old elite joining the ranks of those constants-of-human-history — the ignorant masses — to consume and gawk at the magic.

Whereas computer savvy once meant being able to code one’s own games and apps, now it means merely being able to download music from iTunes and cobble together a Facebook profile. Whilst one needed to be a true geek to use a computer back in the 80′s, today any moron can lay claim to the label “computer literate”. The now widely-held belief that we are an information and knowledge generation is a triumph of shrewd marketing. An increase in access to technology was not, as we are led to believe, accompanied by any real information savviness today any more than an increase in the number of cars on the road did not increase the proportion of motorists who know how to build or service a car with their own hands. Cars today are in fact vastly less home-serviceable than a 1980′s Toyota Corolla, just as a crashed PC today renders its data utterly inaccessible to most ordinary users.

An increase in functionality is accompanied by an increase in the complexity of the entities that deliver this functionality. As more people understand the complexity less, the more their regard for the functionality takes on a mystical approach. while I use technology to illustrate this trend, I believe the principle applies to society at large.

If we lack the intellectual breadth to manage the complexity, it turns into a monster.

Such is the problem of humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels. Progress in the last two centuries was built on the back of labour saving devices that were powered by fossil fuels. The economics and finance devised to track and manage the productivity gains delivered by these technologies failed to take into account the cost to the environment.

Those fossil fuels represent billions of tonnes of carbon compounds and billions of joules of solar energy progressively stored over geological timescales (hundreds of millions of years). All of that is being burned and released within human timescales (mere hundreds of years). One split-second revolution of a Hummer’s engine probably releases a quantity of energy that took Nature thousands of years to capture and store in the form of oil. The scenario that we might see the Earth’s atmosphere reverting back to pre-Cambrian (or worse) compositions within the next several hundred years is quite possible.

If nature does not punish us for this, our flawed economics will. As “jude” points out in his comment bringing the whole discussion back to the ground. Stagflation may be the optimistic scenario in this case. We don’t know yet if there is a sudden implosion still lurking underneath the unfathomable complexity and convolusion of the world market.

Rich societies with highly-educated populations struggle with modernity. I do wonder how a relatively ignorant, primitive, shortsighted, and inward-looking society such as ours will.

Of course, I did have to take the numbers provided in the study with a grain of salt (especially since I am not certain if the Philippine numbers did include our compatriots overseas), but the trends do provide interesting insights that just might influence the thinking of political strategists.

See, despite the relatively low internet penetration in the Philippines, I am certain that cyberspace will be one of the battlegrounds for the hearts and minds of the Philippine electorate.

Let’s see what we can glean from the study, shall we? Let’s dedicate this post to political strategists for 2010 candidates.

First, let’s get some of the numbers from the study. Do note that the study, as far as I can tell, uses these assumptions:

- The study will look only at the behavior of “active internet users” (those who use the internet every day or every other day).

- The age demographic of the population of internet users being looked at is between 16 to 54 years old (which means some of the respondents are not yet qualified to vote).

- Numbers (“market data”) are from TGI, Simmons or their equivalent, and these were correlated with Internet World Stats, CIA World Factbook and Comscore.

With these assumptions and correlations, these were the findings:

- The Philippines has 15.4% internet penetration of the total population, with 3.7M active internet users. Again, it must be said that these may not include the internet penetration of our expats and OFWs, who quite likely go online as a means of communicating with the folks at home.

- Of the Philippines’ active users, 90% of active users read blogs/ websites, and 65% of active users have started blogging.

- 83% of the Philippines’s active users use social networking sites, with a whopping 89% of these users on Friendster. Photosharing remains the major use of such sites, with 86% of social network subscribers sharing their photos, with 60% of these users using their sites to share videos as well.

- The number shouldn’t be surprising, but almost every single active user (99% of active users) in the Philippines watches YouTube. On the other hand, podcasting cannot yet be counted out, with 62% of active user has downloaded a podcast.

- Nearly half of active internet users seem to want high volumes of information made available to them, with 45% of active internet users using RSS.

With these numbers, let me try to posit some of the things that political strategists should probably keep in mind.

Connect or Perish

In the battle for hearts and minds in cyberspace, the first front must be that of social networking sites. To my way of thinking, this is one of the reasons why Senator Antonio Trillanes IV was able to get a significant edge over the candidates he beat, what with Sonny’s Friendster pages.

The first recommendation, therefore: at the very least, set up a Friendster site and blurb yourself; spread your mug via your supporters and invite as many people to be your “friends”.

The second front would be that of the blogosphere; either set up a blog for your politician boss and make him populate it, or blog for his benefit (like say, “mylifewithchiz.com” or something). Now, here’s the thing — if your content is by and large repeats of press releases or news reports, you won’t be able to get a large following; by blogging about “personal matters”, your content will quite likely go viral (note that the vast majority of the Philippine blogosphere are “personal” blogs).

Recommendation number two, then: be not afraid of the blog and start posting, with recommendation number two-dash-A, which is learn from Barack Obama’s example and get on Twitter. Recommendation two-dash-B would be to make your blog or website RSS friendly, so that you can increase the size of your audience; recommendation two-dash-C would be to subscribe to your opponents’ feeds, so that you can keep an eye on them… and perhaps write posts to demolish their arguments (don’t forget to link back so that we can take a look at your opponents’ posts too and be thereby amazed at the strength of your position).

The third front would be to generate downloadable content, by which I mean videos on YouTube, photos, and podcasts (yep, in that order; note that video clips are the fastest growing platform). Upload your political ads and stuff like that; make sure that if you are interviewed by the networks, you have a staff flunky taking the same video (note that networks generally edit so that you only take 15 seconds of airtime). Upload the ten-minute video on YouTube so that viewers get to download and take around with them on their iPods. Upload photos on your blog or website of you speaking on the Senate floor, arguing in front of the en banc Supreme Court, or whatever, and upload the mp3 recording of your speech for people to download.

Recommendation number three would then be this: Upload content so that users can download them and take around, listen to them, and share with friends.

Obviously, the internet cannot yet replace radio and TV as the primary media for image building, but a strong cyberspace presence will doubtless put a candidate up close and personal with the online-capable electorate. I’m thinking that a candidate who successfully goes viral will quite likely gain at least a million votes, easy.

Moving on, let’s talk about how a political strategist can convince his boss, the crusty old politician, why he should risk going online.

Plug and Play
Your boss will likely be leery to go online because his website could very well be a nest for his detractors, but then again, he’d be right.

That said, tell him this — the more flamers he gets, the more visibility he gets on a Google Search, and the more visible he is, the better. Tell him that getting visibility is the first step to getting the cyberspace vote.

The next thing to tell him would be to quote this result of the study: “36% think more positively about companies that have blogs”. That said, tell him that being brave enough to go online would very well earn the grudging admiration of hardcore detractors, and would give his supporters’ niche in the blogosphere a rally point for them to start going viral for him.

The third thing to tell him would be to quote another result of the study: “34% of active internet users post opinions about products and brands on their blog”. With that, tell him that if he decides to actively engage his supporters in conversation and his detractors in debate on the online milieu, he could just be among the top searches on Google and Wikipedia, and with that a greater influence on students (who comprise a large slice of the potential voter pie), on OFWs (who collectively have the money to make or break political campaigns), and mainstream media (who will definitely scrape from the blogosphere because of the ease of use).

Tell your boss, in summary, that if he does not plant his flag in the blogosphere, he will lose his seat to some young upstart.

A caveat: you will not be convincing if the vast majority of the constituency your boss supposedly represents do not belong to the 3.7M online Pinoys.

But let’s talk about the political niche of the blogosphere itself — what does the study imply for 2010?

Racing The Red Queen

I’m guessing that popular pundits in the blogosphere will start exploring politicasting (okay, okay, I made that up — what I mean is that pundits will start vlogging and podcasting about their views and issues), and thus carving their own path as the “talking heads” of Generation Next. What will make this even more likely is that Generation Next — based on personal observation — wants their opinions heard, whether it be of support or counter-argument, and since cyberspace is the interactive medium that mainstream media is not, the younger voters will quite likely depend more and more on these online talking heads than, say, ANC (with the possible exception of The Explainer’s blogger and Ricky Carandang Reporting).

Online debates (in the form of blogs and bloggers duking it out with their posts and comments) will get even more fierce, especially with the capability to go at it without time and length limitations. If politicians decide to cash in on the blogging phenomenon, they will be able to gain a direct, extrapolatable measure of public support (and thus react and modify their strategies in almost real-time).

Mainstream media (if they decide to get their heads out of the sand) will have more valuable backstory and information readily available through Google searches instead of providing ten-second soundbites that really don’t provide much in the way of data towards making informed choices (yes, friends, MSM will increase the rate of their scraping). Mainstream media will quite likely picks up on the more fiery debates and the more viral punditry; with that, AM radio and on cable TV news channels will perform the offline viral work for them by themselves giving their two cents on them.

As a techie, I’m looking forward to watching the 2010 intramurals from the technological perspective, and admittedly this post is merely skimming the possibilities. This much I will say, however: cyberspace has yet to exercise direct and palpable influence on Philippine politics.

Key operative word: YET.