Wikileaks and The War In Vietnam

Mark Rudd at the Columbia University student protests in 1968

In my last post (see RIAA and MPPA Go Down) I predicted that the future of protest was changing and that we would increasingly see more activists banding together in unconventional ways (e.g. hacker attacks) to protest.

Well we didn’t have to wait for long. This now seems like the normal state of affairs. This past week several hacker groups attacked Amazon and Paypal for canceling their business relationships with Wikileaks which recently released vast quantities of US diplomatic cables.

This isn’t about which laws were broken but a moment for us to start asking questions on the very nature of political protest.

In 1773 it seemed right to us to throw some tea in Boston harbor. These past months in France large demonstrations were held in the street to protest changes in the retirement age. And, in Myanmar supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi recently celebrated in the streets after her release after 15 years of house arrest.

What do you do when you can’t throw some tea or take to the streets? How do you get your voice heard? Is the only way left hacking? Can we learn to protest in a non-violent fashion? Is violence only the sort of actions resorted to when no other options are available to you? These are the questions we need to ask ourselves.

Newspapers who always served the purpose of reporting on the wrong actions of government are losing their readership – think of Common Sense by Thomas Paine published in 1776 or the Pentagon Papers published by The New York Times in 1971. New forms of communication are taking over (e.g. The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast). But, are these new voices enough to wake the citizenry? Or, are these voices so soft that only small communities actually hear them?

So, if today you were protesting the Vietnam War what would you do? Would a post be enough? Would telling your neighbors be enough? Would a whisper be enough to spark change? What would you do?

[On the business opportunity front I’ll predict that we are going to see more Wikileaks like sites and all manner of sites devoted to public protest. ]

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