By Michael Rutschky
Published on February 13, 2008
To Hell with election coverage, at least for now; the whole process is caught in this boring in-between stage in which the candidates are more or less confirmed, but there are still more primaries to go before the terror and fury of the General Election can be unleashed. In the meantime, I’d like to share some politically flavored side notes that I’ve been taking over the last couple of weeks.
The first of these miscellaneous musings is a YouTube channel that was introduced to me by a kindred spirit here at PJC, Sandi Droubay, professor of Anthropology. Sandi amazed me by knowing more about YouTube and social networking than me or most people my age that I know. Her channel, while not hosting any personal media, is an entire social network unto itself, a place for artists, poets, musicians, and political types to meet and swap content. You may not know it, but YouTube is more than just a poor man’s TiVo; it has immense potential as a forum for public and artistic exchange. It was here that she introduced me to the channel called <b><u><a href=”https://www.youtube.com/profile?user=conkling”>Conkling</b></u></a>, a channel that belongs to a Seattle musician named Ralph Buckley.
Buckley, while writing, producing, and recording all of his own music, has created nearly a hundred DIY music videos for the channel. The music he makes is beautiful and bluesy, the lyrics being both politically and spiritually inspired. His songs are as uplifting as classic Marc Bolan, as passionate as John Coltrane, and at times, as jaded as the most nihilistic punk rock. Buckley’s latest DIY album, “9/11 Conspiracy Blues,” embodies all of the confusion, frustration, and optimistic prayer that comes from living in today’s America. Even while voicing his fears of growing war and government corruption, he never loses sight of the beauty of being alive.
Thanks to networks like YouTube and people like Professor Droubay, artists like Buckley who, while being an incredibly talented musician and songwriter, could never hope to be mainstream finally have a means of reaching the world without selling out to the bloated and soulless music industry. In fact, if more artists take Buckley’s approach and create and distribute music while sidestepping the corporate middlemen that are really no longer necessary, we may see a new industry rise up and topple the current one. An industry that is centered around the idea that the artist is free to be an artist without being constrained by what non-artists want them to make. Who knows?
While we’re on the topic of underground media becoming the new mainstream, I just read a groundbreaking new graphic novel about citizen journalism called <b><u><a href=”https://www.shootingwar.com”>Shooting War</b></u></a>. The novel started as a serialized web comic written by journalist Anthony Lappe and illustrated by Dan Goldman before making the jump to hardcover graphic novel and has now been optioned as a TV series. It takes place in a world a few years ahead of ours, and tells the story of a young up-and-coming blogosphere personality, political vlogger Jimmy Burns, who through sheer luck (good or bad is hard to say) goes on to expose the side of the Iraq war that the media doesn’t show us. While recording a live video feed on the street below his apartment in New York, a terrorist bomb explodes in the coffee shop behind him. News services around the world patch into Jimmy’s feed as he is first on the scene to report on the mayhem. Jimmy becomes an overnight household name and goes to work as the embedded reporter for the same corporate news entity that he once despised.
Lappe, who produced the Amnesty International Award-winning Iraq documentary “Battleground: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge,” puts us at an incredible vantage point in Iraq a few years from now. As the American military, under the leadership of President McCain, continues to fight the war on fronts around the world, the situation in the Middle East escalates with the jihadist movement fracturing under idealistic rivalry. A more modern, media-minded terrorist faction is starting to emerge as the figurehead for the new Islamic extremist. This is an Iraq where McDonald’s and Starbucks signs saturate the capital city; a war in which US soldiers wear visors that show them their surroundings as a HALO style first-person shooter, and the Pentagon gets busted for hiring Pixar to produce fake al Qaeda tapes.
It’s heavily satirical but it’s a great example of the growing power of citizen journalism, which in my opinion is one of the most amazing things about growing up in the 21st century. For the first time ever people have the ability to not only capture images and write stories wherever they go using common mobile devices, but to instantly submit them to the entire world using YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. The founding fathers called the media the Fourth Estate, a watchdog branch of the Government to protect the rights of the people and keep the other three branches in check. Now the people are the watchdog.
This would be a good place to segue into my final story of the day, that of Wikileaks. Everyone knows about Wikipedia, the open source online encyclopedia that the public can log in to and edit as they see fit. Actually, this is only one application of the online Wiki technology; there are many more sites that use this kind of interface for a variety of different purposes. One of these is <b><u><a href=”https://88.80.13.160″>Wikileaks</b></u></a>, a site that uses the Wiki technology to create an untraceable database of leaked classified documents. Wikileaks claims that it’s goal is for maximum political impact in countries all around the world, and especially targets parts of Asia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet bloc.
The site provides an easy interface for spreading classified documents, simply log in to a secured server and upload the files. In 2007 Wikileaks made a name for itself among internet whistleblowers by publishing a military document called “Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta,” a handbook for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Currently the website has generated some buzz over a lawsuit with Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss Bank, for publishing confidential documents that allegedly show money laundering and tax evasion. Because of the lawsuit the website was forced to shut down it’s wikileaks.org domain, but can still be accessed using an <b><u><a href=”https://88.80.13.160″>FTP</b></u></a> address.
As much as it would be a shame to lose the site and all of the classified files that are now publicly available, if the site were to shut down it wouldn’t be the end of this kind of internet muckraking. In fact, if this Wikileaks is