Fit And The Conniptions LJ Page

(Previously posted to Google+, posted here on request.)

So here's a couple of links that have been bothering me today.

First up, pro-SOPA (and award-winning, apparently) songwriter Helienne Lindvall's mindblowing article in The Guardian explaining why it's worth shutting down the internet in order to preserve the business model of major music labels: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/jan/19/behind-music-anti-piracy-legislation

But that article has a soundtrack. It's this song, co-written by one H. Lindvall: Daniel Lindström - Got to be you.

Not sure if that's the one that won an award. I'll say this though - if you can make it both to the end of the song and the end of the article, you deserve an award yourself. (Comments on the article are worth reading also, except mine.)

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home

(Over on Facebook, I got into discussion my friend David Goo, an excellent musician and songwriter, over SOPA and the piracy issue. After he posted to the effect that pointed out that if he had received 50p for each of the 30,000 downloads of one of his songs, he'd be able to make a whole new album, my response got a bit long, so I thought I'd reproduce it here.)

David, I too am a copyright owner and content creator, and I too have had my music downloaded thousands of times over the last few years. That doesn't make me angry at all. It makes me happy. Very very dancing off the walls happy.

So happy, in fact, that my response is to accept it, to work with it, and to deliberately make my music available for free download via Bandcamp over on music.conniptions.org together with an option to pay. This model is working pretty well for me, and here's why.

First, some basic economics. When the marginal cost of reproducing a thing drops to zero, the intrinsic value of the thing also drops to zero. Period.

Recording "Wayne's Awesome Song" might have cost me years of blood and sweat and broken strings and sleepless nights and studio time and arguments with myself and musicians about arrangements and production and all of that malarkey, but in the end, none of that changes the fact that the file WaynesAwesomeSong.mp3 is now just a string of bits that can be reproduced at no cost and its intrinsic value is £0.

Everything is now both digital and networked. There is no more scarcity of digital media. There is no technological solution this without breaking the network, and it's not at all clear that that's even possible. Before the internet, yes, you needed a physical copy. Taking one was stealing. Now you don't. If you have a copy of my latest album it costs you nothing to make a copy for a friend. That's not stealing. At worst that's copyright infringement, but actually, I don't see it as a bad thing at all.

In fact, if you do have my latest album, let me urge now you to make a copy for a friend, preferably one who might like it. Seriously. Do it.

What the hell am I saying? Have I lost my tiny mind? Do I want to die starving and penniless?

No. I'm very clear about why I'm doing it this way and why it works. It's like this:

If you've never heard of me or my music (that goes for pretty much all of you), and you download WaynesAwesomeSong.mp3 on spec, one of two things will happen. Either you love it or you don't. If you don't, that's fair enough. Not everyone loves my music. You wouldn't have bought it anyway, and I have lost nothing.

But you might love it.

Now everything changes. You're in love with WaynesAwesomeSong.mp3, you think it's fucking great, and you're really excited to discover that I've got a website containing not just WaynesOtherAwesomeSong.mp3 but - oh my god - WaynesGreatAlbum. You can still download all of that for free if you want, but you'll have to type in £0 in order to do so. Chances are - you're an honest character - you find yourself paying £5 or £10 for the 'free' download.

Why? Because now there is value to you. The intrinsic value of the bits are still £0, but it's not just any mp3 we're talking about here, it's one of Wayne's. You have a relationship with my music now and you're prepared to pay for it. (You're not an honest character? Fine. Then you wouldn't have bought it anyway and I've still lost nothing. Oh, and screw you, dishonest character.)

This happens on my Bandcamp site all the time. Payment is optional, and loads of people choose to pay. They're the ones who actually like my music and want to support me to make sure I make more of it. The others? They're downloading on spec. They don't know me from Adam and if they had to pay, they wouldn't bother.

Those free downloads aren't lost sales and they cost me nothing. Some of those downloads will lead to sales in the future - the ones who actually like it. Others don't. I guess they just weren't that into me. But I don't care because it didn't cost me anything.

It's a great time to be a musician. We have more access to more music and more recording facilities and more distribution channels than at any time in history. There's also rather a lot of us. That's ok, because there's even more music fans than ever before, and they're out looking for the stuff they love. There's a lot to sift through, and that's why they're downloading things for free, on spec.

Bluntly, if people aren't downloading your music for free, you've got a problem, and your problem is that the music isn't good enough. Go practice. (David, you do not have this problem.)

Now, my Pay-What-You-Want model doesn't work for everyone. I'm hearing from musicians who have grown their listenerships from the hundreds to the thousands and the tens of thousands that at a certain point you do want to charge for downloads again. Those people still stream everything for free, though, and they make damn sure that if Blogger A likes their new album, Blogger A can stream it from their own blog. This leads to new listeners and new sales.

I'm saying all this out of love, David, because I love you and your music and I want you to thrive. Unauthorised downloads are now a fact of life, like death and taxes. It seems pretty clear to me that unless you embrace this fact and work with it, you'll be in trouble.

In the old music industry, everything was based on scarcity. Studio time was scarce, vinyl was scarce, music magazines were scarce, radio - decent radio - was scarce. A very few people made an awful lot of money, but - it's not hard to find the stories - most of the musicians and content creators made fuck all. That old industry is basically dead now, though the zombie-like corpses are still bumbling around walking into things and trying to break stuff.

In the new industry everything is available. Too much, even. Tiny one woman music blogs with a readership of less than 500 have a backlog of new albums to review going back a year. If you make your album artificially scarce by refusing to let people even stream it, they'll just go 'meh', and move on to the next thing. If it's one click away from an email, they'll have a listen. They'll write about it. They'll stream it on their blog. People will discover your music who never heard it before.

It's all about discovery. That's the bottom line about free downloads - you lose nothing but you gain listeners. In a world with ten thousand bands in every town, the question is not 'how can I get every single bugger who downloads my music to pay.' The question is - how can I get them to download my music at all.

And the answer is - by letting them.

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About ten years ago, back when I was still calling the band Fast Freddie Fourier and the Transforms, I recorded an EP called Bush of Thorns at Bonafide Studios in London.

The performances from the other musicians involved were great (Brian Hedemann was on drums, Alero Scott on backing vocals, Kevin G Davy on trumpet) but I was never all that happy with the final mixes - the drums were all way too loud, especially on Sleeping Beauty. That was entirely my fault. Waseem Munir, the engineer from Bonafide, had done a great job of tracking everything, but the mixes were all made in a big hurry, as I didn't have the money to pay for extra studio time to have them done properly. Not only that but we'd only managed to finish four of the eight tunes I'd started - I remember insisting that the last hour be spent burning all the stems to CD so I could finish it off at leisure some time.

That time is now. Today I finally dug out the old data CDs from 2002 and started trying to transfer them to the computer. The ones I'd made myself - the guide guitars and vocals and the backing tracks - all of which were recorded at home on Linux, all worked fine. The ones from the studio? Would. Not. Mount. Could not read them. Nothing worked.

Arse.

To cut a long story short - and if you too should have mysterious CD ROMs from circa 2002 burned by a Mac which you can't seem to get Linux to read - here's what I did to fix it.

First I had to install cdfs.

Doing so revealed that the CDs in question were indeed HFS of some sort, though mount -t hfs was still refusing to work. A bit of Googling turned up the existence of HFS+, which I'd never heard of. Trying mount -t hfsplus didn't work either, though, and left my system with an unkillable mount process, forcing me to reboot. Bummer.

Here's what did work:

First I mounted the CDs with cdfs:

sudo mount -t cdfs -o ro /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdfs

Then I mounted the HFS file that produced with hfsplus:

sudo mount -t hfsplus -o loop /mnt/cdfs/3.2.Apple_HFS /media/cdrom0

And bam - got my data back.

Now to load the lot up in Ardour and start mixing...

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It's so easy to take your eye off the ball.

And there are so many balls to keep an eye on nowadays - the death-throes of global capitalism as we know it, the constant protests and riots in major world cities, the shrinking polar ice-caps, the weird and extreme weather, the dismantlement of the NHS and Welfare State in the UK, Israel's descent as a state into increasingly open and belligerent racism, the collapse of the Euro, the turmoil of the increasingly misnamed Arab Spring, the spectacle of a dysfunctional nuclear armed state without a leader in North Korea and the equally alarming spectacle of the dysfunctional nuclear armed states with leaders in the US, Russia and elsewhere, and the fact that despite having the most demonstrably punchable face in British political history, no-one has yet laid out George Osborne. Yet at the same time there are so many shiny things to distract us - Charlie Brooker's new series, Minecraft, Twitter, Glitch, that great video of cats someone posted on Facebook or somewhere, that really interesting essay on Greek metallurgy on Metafilter, the Christmas display on Willesden Green High Road, and so on. This is not to mention the small matter of keeping going from day to day, going to work, keeping food on the table, making plans for the future, figuring out ways to stay sane and positive in a brutal and uncaring universe and so on. And, of course, not forgetting... ooh, shiny.

So I nearly missed the whole SOPA thing, until a friend posted this video of Dan Bull's excellent SOPA Cabana song on Facebook.

In short, SOPA is an attempt by US Congress to allow corporate copyright holders to demand the shutdown of any site they believe to be participating in or even just facilitating copyright infringement. That could include Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any site based on user-generated content. This isn't hyperbole. Google and Facebook (as well as Ebay, Twitter, and just about every major web based company you can think of) are taking the threat very seriously.

If you're in the US, you can do various things about this - there's information here on LifeHacker and more here from the EFF, plus (as usual) some great discussion on the subject on Metafilter and pretty comprehensive coverage on BoingBoing. If you're not in the US? I honestly don't know.

So I drew a silly cartoon. And now - it being arse AM - I'm going to bed.

I hope the internet is still there tomorrow.

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I am absurdly, childishly pleased with the redesign of the conniptions.org website that I did last night.

Certainly there are several improvements yet to be made - the rounded corners on the box in the middle need sharpening up, the banner image across the top is much wider than it needs to be on most pages and is shifted slightly to the right on the Posterous blog page for some reason, I have yet to add a commenting facility to the cartoons and the lovely bandcamp widget with the new album in it has a tendency to crash if you reload it too many times to soon, such as by reading through the cartoons.

On the other hand, the process of replacing the previous look and feel, which was based on artwork from the Live At Monkey Chews release from 2008, with something based instead on the new Sweet Sister Starlight release, turned out not to be the world of pain I had feared. Surprisingly few files had to be edited; mostly it was a question of deleting things that were now out of date.

Using a large top banner with an image map for navigation meant that large amounts of cruft and wrongness could be removed from the rest of the design - basic page to page navigation no longer needed to take up space elsewhere and important things like links to Twitter and Facebook could be placed discreetly yet visibly at the top of every page using icons from a free icon set (I got mine from here but the internet is full of them right now). It also meant that integration with parts of the site hosted elsewhere - on services such as Bandcamp (the music page) and Posterous (the blog) - was much much simpler than I'd thought it would be.

And I have a box with rounded corners! Welcome to 2003 (1998?), Wayne - nice to have you, since you missed it the first time. (Nested divs. Huh. Still sure there must be a better way.)

Inspiration, as ever these days, came largely from Steve Lawson, who has been using the top banner image map thing to integrate bits of web presence across multiple services since just about forever; the clarity and brevity of the icon thing came more from Laura Kidd - see She Makes War - but I am seeing customised social media icons all over the place at the moment. It is clear why - anyone who already knows what, for example, the exciting new Facebook-killing social media site Plonkr actually is will recognise the logo; mentioning the site by name isn't going to help and takes up far more space.

I deliberately chose not to use the icons for Myspace and Last.fm, as while I still have pages there I hardly use them any more and am suspicious that hardly anyone else does either. Do you? I could well be wrong.

Also, while I am banging on about how terribly clever I think I am, it is highly likely that I have screwed something up somewhere that I don't know about yet, so if anything seems borked on the site beyond things I have already mentioned, please do let me know about it so I can get it fixed.

In other news, the new album Sweet Sister Starlight is now finally available online to stream or download, and I am pathetically and profusely grateful to those of you who have already downloaded it, streamed it and/or clicked the 'like' button.

I'm equally grateful to Tom Robinson of BBC 6 Music who played Mistress Song on BBC Introducing on Monday and to Nick Tann, who played Sweet Sister Starlight on his Is This Thing On podcast the other week. Nick is also a very fine singer-songwriter whose latest project - well worth checking out - involves actually making a proper record out of vinyl. Not a bad idea that.

Now that my album is done, I'm back gigging again - I had a great time playing at Phibbers in Islington last Monday night - thanks to everyone who came down to that one - and there's a bunch of gigs coming up in Croydon, New Cross and Brick Lane to which I am also looking forward. Plus the Ashley Wood Festival in Tisbury, Wiltshire, in July.

I say 'done' of course, but I haven't had the actual CDs made up yet - that's going to happen over the next few weeks in preparation for a 'CD launch' towards the end of May - if you're really keen you can go to the Music page and pre-order one. That's because I'm also absurdly, childishly pleased with this album - so much so that I am releasing it twice, once online, and then again, some months later, on CD.

I hope that isn't an insanely wrong thing to do.

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Hello My Spammier Musician Friends On Twitter,

I'm worried that you haven't read this excellent short essay by Steve Lawson about how musicians can best use Twitter.

Twitter is a chatroom. It's the biggest chatroom in the world.

And you, your music is great. I like you and your music. We met once, I don't know how, through mutual friends or at some gig or other where we shared a stage; we stayed vaguely in touch, as musicians do. Myspace, Facebook, the odd further gig etc. And later, because this was a while back, I found you on Twitter and started following you.

I stopped following you soon afterwards, because you pretty much only tweeted links to your own stuff. Constantly. Nothing else. Or almost nothing else.

I don't really know you well enough to write and say 'hey, stop doing that'. That would be weird. The way you choose to interact with people online is your own business.

But seriously, Twitter is a chatroom, and no-one likes a spammer in a chatroom.

If all - or even the vast bulk - of what you have to say is links to your own promotional material, that's going to come across as very spammy. I wish you wouldn't do that. I like your stuff and I still wish you wouldn't do that.

I'm not saying you shouldn't talk about your work or link to the stuff you've done. We all do - it's inevitable. It's what we're doing.

But getting the balance right is a question of how much, how often, and whether there's also a sense that you are entering into the idea of Twitter as a chatroom where you are having conversations with people on a range of subjects extending beyond yourself and your work, or whether you are using it purely as a marketing tool.

If it is the latter, you really need to go and read both the above link and this other essay by Steve Lawson on how musicians can best use social media.

Essentially it boils down to this: Twitter is a chatroom, not a rolling billboard.

Stop being that guy.

I still like your music. I do. Really I do. That's precisely why I want you to stop spamming your Twitter followers with it.

Love,

Wayne

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Today I thought of a random music discovery game, as follows:

Choose a word - any word. Google it, along with 'bandcamp'. Click
until you find some music you like.

I tried it with 'elephant' and got this:

Wow.

When The Worms Dry Up, The Birds Turn To Ashes, by Elephant was the
first result. I couldn't stop listening to it. It's broadly folk punk,
by turns fragile and violent, occasionally both at once, and it
totally pinned me up against the wall and wouldn't let me stop until
I'd listened to it all.

See what you think. Or choose your own keyword and see what you find.

Please do let me know if you find anything good, and I bet you will.

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Who would not want to live in a world without rape culture?

Judging by his post on the rape allegations against Julian Assange, Dave Winer does, or at least thinks he does. His piece is an honest attempt at something relatively non-incendiary which - to be fair - manages to avoid many of the squares on the Assange Rape Apology Bingo card, though it does hit one or two them pretty squarely. Winer also makes it clear that he is open to discussion: at the end, he writes: "I look for charged issues like this one to explore, because these are the places where the greatest growth is available."

His writing has a utopian sheen to it, as if all the battles of feminism had finally been won and true equality in all things across genders had been achieved. Underlying the text is the idea that sexism is genuinely now a symmetrical two way street - that we live in a world where women were just as capable of discriminating against men as men are against women. And most importantly, he writes as if he has never heard of the idea of rape culture.

It is hard for men to accept the existence of rape culture. As a man it has been hard for me. It's not something men like to think about. We tend to see it as an attack on ourselves and we brush it away as such. But we are wrong to do so.

Men don't like to think about the fact that around one in four women will at some point get raped, or that the overwhelming majority of rapes go unreported, or that when a woman does report a rape she is always - 100% of the time - accused of lying, and must endure the kind of close examination of every detail of her life that makes it seem as if it is her, the victim - not the attacker - who is on trial, while study after study shows that false rape accusations are actually incredibly rare, or that the vast majority of rape cases do not end in a guilty verdict, or that the vast majority of rapists get away with it without being prosecuted, or that the vast majority of convicted rapists have committed the crime of rape multiple times before they are finally found guilty by a court, or that penalties for rape are often bizarrely weak, or that a large proportion of women who are raped know their attacker very well and are often in a relationship with them, or any of the other horrible facts about rape widely available online and backed up by study after study into the astonishing - to men and not to women - prevalence of rape among human beings.

Being human, since men don't like to think about those things, we tend not to think about these things. We forget about rape culture, because it is not something that we need to think about every day when we are just popping down the shops or meeting someone for a drink. We forget about rape culture because we can.

When Winer accuses some of 'condemning men in the cause of feminism', talks of 'simply flipping the genders', and says 'it's never as simple as one gender doing it to the other', he is going one step beyond forgetting about rape culture:
he is showing either that he has not heard of it or, if he has, that he does not believe it exists.

I have outlined my views on the Assange rape allegations before - once in this cartoon, and once in this longer post on the subject. I agree that Winer is quite right that it should be kept separate from Wikileaks, and that the timing of the whole thing stinks. But he is dead wrong about the context, and - which is key - he is also dead wrong about the presumption of innocence.

The presumption of innocence is incredibly important and should be maintained in rape cases just as with any other. But if there is to be a presumption of innocence for the accused, how much the more so should there be a presumption of innocence for the accuser.

In rape cases, the accuser is always presumed to be guilty of lying until proven otherwise. That's what makes them so difficult. That's also the reason that most rapists get away with it. Any woman accusing anyone of rape is always and immediately counter-accused of making a false claim. This idea is so deeply embedded in English speaking world that there is even a phrase for it: 'crying rape' - the assumption is - always - that the claim is false. In order to prove her case, the victim has to prove that she is innocent of 'crying rape'. This is why many rape victims never bother reporting the crimes against them in the first place.

This lack of presumption of innocence - for the victim - is the central plank of rape culture.

And this is why people are getting so exercised over the Assange affair. As with every other rape case ever in history, people - mainly men - are lining up to say that the women involved are liars and waving their bullshit detectors around proudly. That's exactly the problem.

In the case of rape, it really is as simple as "one gender doing it to the other". If there is one good thing that comes out of the Assange affair, it is that it has caused many people - including myself - who have previously either dismissed, ignored, or not been aware of rape culture - to really sit down and think about it a bit. Or even a lot.

If Dave Winer really is looking for the place where "the greatest growth is available", here it is. To eradicate rape culture, or at least start, is something that goes way beyond feminism. It is something which is only connected to feminism in the sense that it was feminists who first raised it and it is largely women who write about it; these women still find themselves not being listened to or dismissed - bizarrely and ridiculously - as 'sexist' themselves. But if we ever are to eradicate rape and rape culture, it will require men first to become aware of it and to work in some small way towards stopping it.

Then we'll finally have the world without rape culture that Winer believes he already lives in.

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Do you believe that more or less most women have been or will at some point be raped or sexually assaulted?

Do you believe that most men tend to underestimate the ubiquitous reality of rape and immediately question any allegation of rape outside of the stranger-attack jump-in-the-alley context? That victims of rape must expect to undergo such a humiliating and debilitating process from police and lawyers in order to get justice for the crime committed against them that many simply do not bother? That rape and victims of rape are routinely joked about and trivialised both in mainstream media and popular perception to the extent that there appears to be such a thing as 'rape culture' - a culture where all but the worst and most violent rape offences are effectively condoned and, where possible, brushed under the carpet for the sake of protecting the offender at the expense of the victim?

If you believe these things, it will be clear to you that the allegations against Julian Assange - like all rape allegations - must be taken very seriously and that he must go to Sweden to answer them in court.

Do you believe that there is something deeply rotten at the heart of most, if not all Western democracies?

Do you believe that the secret services of Western democracies effectively operate outside the jurisdiction of the law and are quite prepared to do absolutely anything - including murders, smear campaigns and honeytraps - to further their own ends? That even democratic states such as the US and the UK will do whatever they believe they can get away with behind the scenes - regardless of international or domestic law - in order to further their own interests? Do you believe that the culture of secrecy in government is the key factor protecting this kind of behaviour, and that Wikileaks is the first organisation to truly strike a blow against this culture of secrecy, something that has genuinely scared the living daylights out of powerful individuals, governments and institutions across the world, and that has caused them to react accordingly.

If you believe these things, it will be clear to you that the rape allegations against Julian Assange are nothing but a particularly blatant honeytrap smear campaign designed to stop his active participation in Wikileaks, and hold him in place, either in the UK or Sweden, until grounds can be found to extradite him to the US, where the life expectancy of his activity in Wikileaks, if not his actual life expectancy in general, will be pretty short.

It will be clear to you, that is, unless you also believe in the first set of things, in which case, like me, you've probably spent the last little while with your head on fire, trying to balance the two sets of ideas.

The circle has been squared by several writers: Johann Hari, Cath Elliott, Amanda Marcotte, Laurie Penny and Kate Harding have all written excellent essays attempting to explain why - given the existence of rape culture - there are serious problems with all attempts to pre-emptively defend Assange against the rape allegations even in the face of the explicit, public, US-led threat to 'get him' at all costs.

Other writers - people that you might perhaps have thought would have known better - such as Craig Murray, Michael Moore, John Perry Barlow and Naomi Wolf, have written defences of Assange that all have one thing in common - they trivialise these specific rape allegations in order to defend Assange.

The problem has perhaps best been summed up by Katrin Axelsson of Women Against Rape, whose letter to the Guardian on the subject is here. The key phrase is this: there is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety.

If you support Wikileaks but don't accept the existence of rape culture, of course, sorting out the Assange case is easy - it's all a honeytrap smear campaign straight out of the CIA Dirty Tricks textbook. If you do accept the existence of rape culture, however, you'll realise that misguided ideas about what is and is not acceptable behaviour and what is and is not rape are so widespread - even among those ostensibly committed to social justice - that it is not in any way reasonable to rule out the possibility that Assange actually might have done it. After all, the best way to frame someone you want to frame is for something they actually did. The full power of the State will - not wrongly - get behind you in seeing the person you want eliminated put away.

That's the chilling answer to Craig Murray's litany of political whistleblowers who mysteriously have subsequently faced allegations of sex crimes - such things are so widespread that it's perfectly possible that all those allegations are actually true: in a world where most sex offenders get away with it, only those who also act against the interests of the State are in trouble.

If you're paranoid about what organisations like MI6 or the CIA might do to people who they see as enemies, don't think for a single moment that they would bother wasting time setting up a brand new honeytrap for a guy they already knew to be a little bit off when it came to the boundaries of consensuality in sex. They'll just use that knowledge instead - even if - purely hypothetically - both women involved were actually big supporters both of Wikileaks in general and Assange in particular.

Two final points. Firstly, the underlying mechanism and philosophical underpinning of Wikileaks has now effectively been open-sourced. There already exist other organisations based on the same principle: in order to force so-called democracies to operate with just governance, it is necessary to provide whistle-blowers a method for safely and anonymously leaking secret and damaging documents which can then be sent to the press and publicised. To that extent, while it is clear that Wikileaks specifically has yet to release every document in its possession, its major mission has been accomplished. Kill Assange tonight, and you will still have a constant stream of no-longer secret documents being released from now until the heat-death of the internet.

Secondly, those who are aware of the existence of rape culture have an enormously long way to go in order to persuade people - even on the progressive wing of politics - that such a thing even exists. There's an awful lot of eye-rolling going on on feminist blogs at the moment; an awful lot of 'I really can't be bothered to explain any more.' And that is understandable. But there's an awful lot of explaining left to do.

Because most guys - even on the left - don't yet get it.

Most guys don't yet know that more or less most women have been or will at some point be raped or sexually assaulted.

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Well did you?

I don't mean Charlotte Metcalf's piece in the Mail about how hard it is to afford Christmas when your income has dropped to £26,000 a year. That was not annoying at all: I found it hilarious. What annoyed me was Christina Patterson's attack on Wikileaks and Julian Assange in the Independent, to which the rest of this post is my response, also posted on the Independent website as a hideously over-long comment. I've edited it a bit to remove the parts that don't fit with it being a blog post rather than a comment. You might want to read Patterson's piece first, if the below is to make sense.

The claim that Wikileaks has put the lives of Afghani (and other) informants in danger by releasing their names has been widely repeated. I have repeatedly looked for and failed to find evidence for this claim. All I can find is articles like Patterson's, which repeat the claim but provide no evidence.

Meanwhile, the US and its allies continue to pursue their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in which thousands of entirely innocent men, woman and children have been and continue to be maimed or killed. No further evidence need be released for this to be an unarguable statement of fact, whether you support the wars, and believe these deaths to be acceptable collateral damage, or whether you oppose the wars, and believe such deaths not to be acceptable.

These wars, moreover, which some claim to be illegal, have been entered into or continued by politicians who, according to Patterson, are 'accountable to the people who elect them'. One would expect, in that case, given that the wars continue, that the wars have widespread support. Yet they manifestly do not: polls differ but all show that while there is a good deal of support, there is also a good deal of opposition; some show that there is more opposition than support.

Some might conclude from this that perhaps our politicians aren't quite as accountable as Patterson suggests.

Given that Assange and Wikileaks have acted and continue to act in a way that the Pentagon and the CIA do not like, it is no surprise that there have been many clear statements of intent from members of the US government to have him stopped, and the site shut down. As such, Patterson's response to Assange blaming "the Pentagon, and the CIA" for the rape charges seems highly disingenuous.

"I thought that that was the kind of thing that someone would say if they had something wrong with their head," she writes, as if, rather than threatening his life and his project, both the Pentagon and the CIA had in fact released statements to the effect that if they ever met Julian Assange they would clap him heartily on the back, shake his hand and buy him a drink.

Some might think that Patterson's response is the kind of thing that someone would say if they were being highly selective with their facts in order to construct an argument.

Finally, Wikileaks being a project involving at root a general infrastructure for supporting the release of information that various Powers That Be would prefer not be released, it seems both churlish and ignorant to call it 'just a website'. I don't know about Christina Patterson's, but my website does not do that. Even the Independent's website is only capable of doing such things up to a certain degree: one of the points made by many people examining Wikileaks is that it and other projects like it fill a necessary journalistic gap left by the often over-cosy relationship between press, politicians and business leaders.

That makes the conclusion of Patterson's article on Wikileaks somewhat tenuous, given that several if not most of the points in the argument leading up to it turn out not to hold. "Freedom of information," Patterson concludes, somewhat out of the blue, "is quite likely to make people less free."

Power without accountability is indeed dangerous, which is why politicians abusing that power and avoiding that accountability are currently being attacked by men and women with websites who would like to make people more free and to remove power without accountability. Those men and women are naturally quite secretive, since they are taking direct aim at very powerful organisations that want to keep us less free.

It is true that 'what some people called "freedom of information"' is 'quite likely to make people more paranoid', but only some people, specifically, those people in government who are engaging in behaviour that needs to be kept secret in order to continue. That sounds a lot like 'power without accountability' to me, and if there is one thing that Christina Patterson and I can agree on, it is that power without accountability is dangerous.

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home