Rule by celebrity, die by infamy


When the Internet became widely populated, it was an invaluable tool for prying open previously impenetrable fortresses of hierarchical oligarchy and replacing them with what was hoped would be a peer promoted meritocracy. Unfortunately, neither the hierarchical tools or the hierarchical methods of collaboration changed, so the Internet simply replaced rule by institutions with rule by celebrities.

So-called thought leaders have become the new traveling priests, roaming the globe with familiar comforting mantras, providing a well lighted path for those stumbling from the wreckage of institutions. Panels and conferences are the churches and revivals of the secular with orderly rows of believers gazing up for guidance and simplistic instruction. Intriguing quotes are plucked from their origins and added to the repertoire of the talking elite, edges softened and context free. Horizontal movements create celebrity speakers, NGO’s monetize grass roots movements and the faces begin to look like institutions.

News delivered in neat soundbites from talking heads is replaced by celebrity journalists dropping into crisis zones to deliver documentaries celebrated as gritty and real despite being delivered by cam-filtered tourists. Free Harry Fear! reads the protest sign outside the Israel embassy. And once Harry Fear is freed perhaps we can look past him to the 1.7 million Gazans without his UK passport.

Angelina Jolie, that living avatar of US military propaganda, is also the living avatar of the refugees created by the weapons industry when they are not advertising their latest equipment as props in her movies. “Don’t rape,” she murmurs to the UN before wafting away on a jet stream of war money.

Celebrity journalism is the future of journalism! crow billionaires craving edginess. Only if David Beckham is also the future of football. Silicon valley has reached the age of decayed empire where it only recognizes the revolutionaries we have already decapitated. They are still mistaking the post-NSA drums beating for their own heads as a cry to their cavalry to save us all.

Celebrity oligarchy was definitely progress. The peer promotion was real and the celebrities come without the black boxes the institutions hid in. But it is not a final product.

Silicon valley thinks it is. Twitter allows blue checked voices to mute all the un-blue riff raff from their stream. Direct message your followers back without actually following them! You can benefit from their input without acknowledging publicly that they exist! Twitter is heavily banking on its new elite, as are klout and many other social media tools. Silicon Valley doesn’t have a clue who uses their products or why.

Celebrities that popped out of horizontal movements certainly do though. There is a pallor that falls on accounts when their first 5000 or so followers turn on them, the painful sight of 7-digit follower accounts who are lucky to get forty retweets. If the core is offended, every tweet is met with a barrage of negative replies. On the Internet, any publicity is not good publicity.

As I mentioned earlier,  horizontal governance does not mean no one gets a voice, it means everyone does. Devoting all of your work to a brand that will be used to create a bloated central figure who will then be able to control the messages of everyone while dining out on ill-gotten celebrity and collecting brand donations is no different than passing all your money to the Unification Church.

The old “Don’t trust anyone over 30” is now “Don’t trust anyone with a follower count > n”. Where celebrity is not tied to genuine expertise or acceptance it does not carry the power many expect it does. When celebrity accounts betray their stated principles, those who gave the celebrity feel as betrayed as they would by a corrupt politician.

The power of shunning may not dismantle a celebrity as quickly as they were created but when necessary, it will happen. Tools that pander to celebrity hierarchy can be hacked, reworked or deserted. There is a better way to work, coming very soon.

Good-bye Wikipedia, hello something else


Wikipedia was the first great, high profile success story of Internet mass collaboration and produced a well-loved reference used with obsessive frequency by an entire generation. But it is past time for us to build new forms of knowledge commons.

Wikipedia is a website, controlled by a foundation. It is the work of, theoretically, the entire Internet but it is not a global commons. One tiny group can, and did, blackout the entire site for a period specified by them. Wikipedia has survived so long by being hyper aware of and sensitive to their user community, it is highly doubtful they would ever become evil, but it is nevertheless centralized control of what ought to be a global commons. And centralized power always ends up doing things like this.

As an old node in the idea of free information, Wikipedia has a rigid hierarchy of tradition and established editors. Contributors with different ideas cannot just create what they wish and allow people to use it or not, as they can with blogs, tweets, pearltrees or other tools. Wikipedia does not play nicely with a decentralized Internet of information.

When Wikipedia was created, in 2001, it was a fascinating and liberating tool to work with. Now it is as archaic as a box of punched cards. We have made incredible progress in data mapping and modeling tools and we have software which makes graphically linking relationships intuitive and obvious. We also have tools that are designed for use on mobile phones and tablets, where most of the world is. We need to build to our new capabilities.

We also need new information in the repository. Wikipedia has been criticized often for their over representation of one tiny demographic of the world’s population. They have attempted to address their bias but it is very apparent that this is not working, neither women nor non-western men are very interested in editing Wikipedia.

The reason why is obvious, even if it escapes the Wikimedia Foundation board. The Wikipedia game is rigged against everyone but western men because it is a glorification and amplification of mainstream media. You cannot write a Wikipedia article unless you have mainstream media sources; news from mainstream media is considered the official verified version. Anyone who is not a western man must prove to many western men that they are newsworthy before they are included in Wikipedia. The entire Wikipedia repository is contaminated as a result.

A knowledge repository should rely on primary source material, interviews endorsed by all participants or affidavits. All of these types of material can be linked with no reliance on third party media. If citizen journalism is to replace corporate media it must not rely on corporate media to interpret data.

To be a stigmergic project instead of a cooperative one, each contributor must be free to work according to their own ideas and the power of the user group must be limited to acceptance or rejection of the final project for their own use only. This is simple in a structure like pearltrees where everyone creates their own pearls or pearltrees and others link to them or not as they see fit. It is simple in an RSS or Twitter feed where anyone can create their own list of voices to follow. It is impossible in Wikipedia.

The silence surrounding Omar Khadr

Omar Khadr was a Canadian kid caught in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. He was captured by the US and tortured at Bagram and Guantanamo for ten years. Eventually, he signed a plea deal admitting guilt in killing Special Forces Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer during the battle. He continues his legal saga in solitary confinement in Canada. 



At Guantanamo, his conversations with other captives, guards and even his lawyers were strictly controlled. His defence counsel Dennis Edney says he was repeatedly dragged off to a cell by guards simply for asking his client “What’s wrong?” Edney was accompanied to the washroom by guards and if he had been discovered smuggling news to Omar (which he did) he would have faced thirty years in a US prison himself. Omar’s counsel were even prevented from playing dominos and chess during counsel visits. “There was no attorney – client privilege,” says Edney.


Omar told Edney during the August 2010 Guantanamo commission trial, “We’re embarrassing ourselves by being here.” He boycotted the proceedings in July, saying “How can I ask for justice from a process that does not have it or offer it?” Videos of Omar’s interrogation in a documentary by the same name show him telling his captors, “You don’t like the truth.”





Edney described the testimony of OC-1 to me. “He told the judge, the firefight is what he would refer to as a clusterfuck. He enters the compound, shoots one man in the head, sees Omar with his back to him and facing a wall – Omar is screaming from his injuries from the bombing – and OC-1 shoots him twice in the back. OC-1 then exits the alley. In doing so he hears a grenade being thrown. He does not see who threw it. What is also significant is that he orders everyone to leave the compound as it could not be secured as there were other Taliban around – meaning other individuals could have thrown the grenade.”




Omar’s cellmate Omar Deghayes had his eye gouged out by a Guantanamo guard during an interrogation, but has never received compensation. Neither has Omar ever received compensation for his ongoing injuries.

“Our definition of sexy was something like Khadr.”







The US was left with the task of inventing a court and some crimes to apply retroactively. They destroyed evidence, disallowed defence witnesses, used evidence obtained under torture and hired the best discredited witness money could buy. All of this to get Omar labeled with a guilty verdict and out of Guantanamo as the only person charged with murder despite the 6,735 US military killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Five years after Omar’s capture, the first incarnation of the Guantanamo trials began. Omar was selected, out of all the possible contenders, to represent the so-called ‘worst of the worst’ at Guantanamo and stand trial. There was no question his case would have appeal, Chief Prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis said. “Our definition of sexy was something like Khadr. People understand murder.”




“Serious legal consequences”

In 2011, Edney, Omar’s most outspoken advocate and legal counsel, was planning on bringing a challenge to Omar’s verdict. In April 2011 we had a taped conversation which we agreed to resume when he returned from seeing Omar at Guantanamo. Edney was concerned that if the full information in the interview was printed at that time, he would not be allowed on the plane to Guantanamo as had happened in the past. When he returned from Guantanamo he was fired by Omar, who told several sources he was given misinformation to encourage him to do so. Omar’s new counsel had a gag order on Edney.





“A right-wing terrorist group”


I have started a spreadsheet charting media coverage of Omar Khadr for the last eleven years. The spreadsheet so far includes all of the Star coverage since the trial week, beginning in October 25, 2010.









“You killed yours; we starved ours to death.”




