The article “Wikileaks and the Unmasking of the Global System” provides an interesting insight as to how Wikileaks and social media started worldwide revolutions and how those movements evolved.
Wikileaks is described as a non-profit organization that specializes in leaking classified or government material attained by anonymous sources. The organization gained significant media attention after releasing around 100,000 classified documents surrounding the Afghanistan war. This organization was instrumental in providing information to the general public that proved corruption in government. As a response, people began to organize, and demand government reform in countries from North America to Europe to Africa to the Middle East. The article explains how the movement spread:
Egypt was the ne
xt to topple a dictator and soon enough Tahrir Square became an emblem of popular struggles. The same model was later exported to the Puerta Del Sol in Madrid as it spread across Spain, then Europe, and finally to North America, where Occupy Wall Street took the protest to the physical heart of the issue. The bold move received widespread support in the U.S. As other cities followed their lead, and the media began paying attention, the movement went viral.
This was not an isolated incident, but an actual political movement. What resulted from it was a revolution in two forms: the physical revolution where people would actually camp outside of institutions in protest, and a digital movement where corporations who were viewed unfavorably were hacked via cyberspace. What’s noteworthy is the means in which these protests were organized. They did not have a formal system of government; they were organic in nature. The Occupy protestors organized themselves into a communal form of democracy. All decisions made were by group consensus, with no singular leader. Whatever the community needed was provided by the community. In terms of the Anonymous movement, they ope
rated in a similar manner, with decisions made by the community, with membership open to everyone.
One aspect of these protests that I found interesting is how they ran parallel to each other and at the same time helped one another. “When the uprisings in North Africa started, Anonymous and various other hacktivist groups defaced and shut down websites related to the Egyptian and Tunisian governments, who were censoring and repressing their citizens”. Not only does this show that the members of these movements are thinking in a global sense, but it also illustrates the larger underlying question that the article points out: Where is civilization headed? This is an important question to address, because our world has much more connectivity than it did ten or twenty years ago. With the internet, everyone has access to information, not just a select few. And with social media, anyone can start a protest or become a citizen journalist. People can no longer afford to think purely on a national level. The world has become so restructured that we must now think globally.