Sunday, December 05, 2010

Wikileaks

The cables in the latest Wikileaks release "date from 1966 up until the end of February this year" (from Wikileaks, it took me 20s to find it). For my country there is one single cable in that release. My country is Romania, a NATO member with an important geogstrategical position. There are American military basis in Romania. It was a transit point for American military resources during the war in Iraq. Romania neighbors Serbia, and it allowed American military air passage during the American intervention there. Yet Wikileaks published one single cable, which addresses the issue of ... adoptions. It is obvious that Wikileaks has handpicked cables which do not endanger anybody, but are relevant for the correct information of the citizens. Those who say otherwise do not know how to use the Internet to verify their arguments, and therefore they miss completely the relevance of this story, as I am going to show you in the next paragraphs.

We do everything on the Internet. We work, communicate, buy and sell, manage our bank accounts, make friends, live virtual lives. We do everything on the Internet, except politics. We still read newspapers and vote every four years. The distance between the way our societies function and the way we control our governments could not be bigger. Our societies are fast, well informed, active 24 hours every day. We control our governments every four years, through a yes or no question! This difference means that our governments are on the loose! We should use the Internet to monitor more real time public data, to discuss new politic strategies, and to make more real time political decisions, which our governments should be forced to take into account.

This is a problem of power sharing. There is a new world, the Internet, and some people will control it. Our governments moved in, secret organizations moved in, only we, the people, are missing. If we fail to control the Internet and to use it to manage our societies then a strong imbalance of power will result. Powerful people will make public decisions against the common interest of the members of our societies, and, as a result, our civilization will be in danger to free fall. The Wikileaks story shows that the revolution has started. We should make it succeed as nonviolently and as smoothly as possible.