Public Sphere - n.n. Notes and Nodes by Felix Stalder

Enter the Swarm: Anonymous and the global protest movements

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This text was written for LeMondeDiplomatique, were it appeared their February 2012 issue. Below is the manuscript as I submitted it. Here's the published version in English , Deutsch , francais , Espangol , Brasilian Portuguese , Norwegian , Slovak , etc

In the course of just one year, using the identity “Anonymous” highly efficient digital attacks have been carried out against global corporations and national governments. All in the name of freedom of speech and social justice. The media coverage has done little to clarify the events, rather, contradictory characterizations of Anonymous have been espoused, ranging from an elite hacker conspiracy, to a loose network of ignorant teenagers, from a major cyber-terrorist threat to a mere nuisance driven by sophomoric humor. None of these characterizations is entirely incorrect, because each captures some fragments of the phenomenon, but they all miss the central element of Anonymous, namely that it is not one, but many, and that it is not a group or a network, but a swarm, or to be correct, multiple swarms that feed off each other.

Pourquoi les institutions peinent à conserver leurs secrets

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Pourquoi les institutions peinent à conserver leurs secrets

Un site Internet fait trembler l’administration Obama. Armé d’une copie pirate de centaines de milliers de communications diplomatiques, ce média d’un nouveau genre a commencé à les publier, le 28 novembre 2010, en lien avec plusieurs titres de presse. Les Etats-Unis ont réagi avec véhémence. Mais, quoi qu’il advienne de WikiLeaks, rien ne peut désormais empêcher ces « fuites » de continuer à se produire.

Leaks, Whistle-Blowers and the Networked News Ecology

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

[ ]WikiLeaks is one of the defining stories of the internet, which means by now, one of the defining stories of the present, period. At least four large-scale trends which permeate our societies as a whole are fused here into an explosive mixture whose fall-out is far from clear. First is a change in the materiality of communication. Communication becomes more extensive, more recorded, and the records become more mobile. Second is a crisis of institutions, particularly in western democracies, where moralistic rhetoric and the ugliness of daily practice are diverging ever more at the very moment when institutional personnel are being encouraged to think more for themselves. Third is the rise of new actors, 'super-empowered' individuals, capable of intervening into historical developments at a systemic level. Finally, fourth is a structural transformation of the public sphere (through media consolidation at one pole, and the explosion of non-institutional publishers at the other), to an extent that rivals the one described by Habermas with the rise of mass media at the turn of the 20th century.