Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, December 6, 2010

Mark Pesce on Assange and Wikileaks

By John Ballard


Assange has set off a media blowout, most of it like the one from BP  -- crude.
This link is more refined.


Mark Pesce is an inventor, writer, educator and broadcaster. In 1994 Pesce co-invented VRML, a 3D interface to the World Wide Web. Pesce has written five books, including The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination, which used toys such as Furby and PlayStation to explain our interactive future. As an educator, Pesce founded graduate programs in interactive media at both the University of Southern California�s world-famous Cinema School, and the Australian Film, Radio and Television School.


With every day, with every passing hour, the power of the state mobilizes against Wikileaks and Julian Assange, its titular leader. The inner processes of statecraft have never been so completely exposed as they have been in the last week. The nation state has been revealed as some sort of long-running and unintentionally comic soap opera. She doesn�t like him; he doesn�t like them; they don�t like any of us! Oh, and she�s been scouting around for DNA samples and your credit card number. You know, just in case.

None of it is very pretty, all of it is embarrassing, and the embarrassment extends well beyond the state actors � who are, after all, paid to lie and dissemble, this being one of the primary functions of any government � to the complicit and compliant news media, think tanks and all the other camp followers deeply invested in the preservation of the status quo. Formerly quiet seas are now roiling, while everyone with any authority everywhere is doing everything they can to close the gaps in the smooth functioning of power. They want all of this to disappear and be forgotten. For things to be as if Wikileaks never was.


~~~�~~~


A few months ago I wrote about how confused I was by Julian Assange�s actions. Why would anyone taking on the state so directly become such a public figure? It made no sense to me. Now I see the plan. And it�s awesome.


You see, this is the first time anything like Wikileaks has been attempted. Yes, there have been leaks prior to this, but never before have hyperdistribution and cryptoanarchism come to the service of the whistleblower. This is a new thing, and as well thought out as Wikileaks might be, it isn�t perfect. How could it be? It�s untried, and untested. Or was. Now that contact with the enemy has been made � the state with all its powers � it has become clear where Wikileaks has been found wanting. Wikileaks needs a distributed network of servers that are too broad and too diffuse to be attacked. Wikileaks needs an alternative to the Domain Name Service. And Wikileaks needs a funding mechanism which can not be choked off by the actions of any other actor.


We�ve been here before. This is 1999, the company is Napster, and the angry party is the recording industry. It took them a while to strangle the beast, but they did finally manage to choke all the life out of it � for all the good it did them. Within days after the death of Napster, Gnutella came around, and righted all the wrongs of Napster: decentralized where Napster was centralized; pervasive and increasingly invisible. Gnutella created the �darknet� for filesharing which has permanently crippled the recording and film industries. The failure of Napster was the blueprint for Gnutella.


In exactly the same way � note for note � the failures of Wikileaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it, and which will permanently leave the state and its actors neutered. Assange must know this � a teenage hacker would understand the lesson of Napster. Assange knows that someone had to get out in front and fail, before others could come along and succeed. We�re learning now, and to learn means to try and fail and try again.



Do read and ponder the whole thing. His final words should make you curious.


For the first time in my life I see the possibility for change on a scale beyond the personal. Assange has brought out the radical hiding inside me, the one always afraid to show his face. I think I�m not alone.



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