AshleyMills.com

I posted this on the wikileaks forum, but didn't receive any response. I'm replicating it here just for the sake of it. Note that when I speak of assassination I mean figuratively as well as literally.

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I visited The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis recently. It is built on the hotel where Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. He was in Memphis assisting a campaign to help impoverished and downtrodden garbage workers obtain better working conditions when he was shot.

The museum had a significant impact on me in several ways, but the manner in which it is pertinent here concerns: his assassination, its impact on the morale of that movement, and the lessons that can be learnt from this.

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Julian Assange has been chosen by the majority of media outlets as a figurehead of Wikileaks. No matter what you think of this, and notwithstanding the grossly unsubtle point that Julian Assange is not the only member of Wikileaks, the impact of his probable assassination should not be under-estimated.

Clearly the organization is attempting to mitigate this event by instantiating various insurance policies and employing appropriate security measures.

But this is not enough.

In addition to mitigation, the movement should work towards ameliorating the deleterious effects of its inevitable happening.

Ideally, it could be argued, that the assassination of one member of a movement should have *no* affect on the morale of that movement. But this is however untenable; the members of every movement are human (despite the proclamations of their oppressors), and so when a figurehead is destroyed, so are some of the heartstrings upon which the figurehead had chanced to tug.

What can be done about this? Can a movement, can this movement, take steps to counter such an attack?

I believe it can, and I believe the first step is to accept that Julian Assange is probably going to be assassinated, so that when it happens, it will come as less of a shock. Have in mind what your reactions shall be upon that day, and follow them through.

When it happens, let preparation grant only a glancing blow.

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It is easy to write this, and it is even easier to preach that people should attach themselves more to the message than to the messenger. It can even be said, that as a mantra with which to inculcate oneself, such a message is a useful ally.

But this is not enough.

Great movements have always had great speakers and this movement is no exception. Is it not only the message which is of so great importance. The message finds its equal in the manner in which it is delivered.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr was one of the greatest orators of contemporary history. When he was killed the movement lost along with the man, his capacity to capture and excite, in those who heard him, those tenuous fibres which lead us to inspiration.

Do not let this happen here.

The means by which I propose this to address this problem may at first sound ridiculous, but ridiculous or not, it may also be possible.

My answer lies in replication.

So that the loss of one figurehead cannot derail the movement, can there not be many figureheads?

Now I do not mean, simply multiple individuals that all claim to be the figurehead, no, they must be oratory equals. And they must, and this is essential, not differ significantly in the content and delivery of their messages.

At first this may seem impossible. But I would ask you: is it not possible to be moved by actor who plays a character whose origins are borne in reality? Is it not possible for the impressionist to capture certain ephemeral qualities of the impressioned? Such that in the mind of the observer the spark of recognition is ignited? I think it is.

Imagine the simultaneous delivery of speeches worldwide, all possessed of the same oratory force and conveying the same message, all representing the same organization. Imagine if this were possible. What would be required to make this possible?

My proposal is as follows: The movement selects by evaluation and democratic process from amongst its own ranks those who possess the greatest capacity for public speaking. These people (under the prior assumption that they and the figurehead are willing) are trained to emulate any figurehead the media choose to latch onto (starting with Julian Assange). The aim is to replace any single individual that the media and authorities begin to focus on, with a collective of ideally indistinguishable individuals that are essentially interchangeable when it comes to public speaking. When the members of the collective are sufficiently trained, the media would receive a rotation of its members so that no single individual could become the focus of attention and thus be at risk from a devastating assassination.

Loss of life should never be trivialized and is always a tradgedy. But this Hydra, if constructed correctly should be immune to any individual assassination. Such that the movement it figureheads would benefit from a greater degree of robustness. Having the attention focused on multiple individuals should also help to guard against the dangers posed by individual egos, megalomaniacal tendencies, etc.

The figurehead would be subject to two requirements:

1. The movement must be able to decide its members and be able to change them.
2. The movement must be able to decide its message and be able to change it.

Members of the movement who are not part of the limited figurehead collective would retain their own individuality, and convey their own messages with their own voices as usual and as they do today. Should any of them however rise as oratory stars and attract significant attention from the media or authorities, then the strategy would be applied again to turn them into a Hydra (should they agree).

What do you think?

Ashley

I'd like to argue against a ridiculous notion that has irked me on a few occasions recently with regard to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. A poll on the Daily Mail site asks "Does Julian Assange have a right to privacy?". And the Telegraph asks us "Is Julian Assange a coward or a hypocrite?" I cite these papers since their readerships are particularly docile, but there are many other examples of this deliberate juxtaposition of state and personal privacy in the media of late.

The position seems to be that for free speech to be considered just and right, it must result in the forfeit of personal privacy. Since exercising the former without incurring the latter is considered "hypocritical" and therefore a bad thing. How preposterous!

In lay-mans terms this is what certain elements of the media expect or want us to think: "Assange has exposed these private secrets so he's clearly a hypocrite if he tries to protect his own secrets, especially considering the magnitude of the secrets that he has exposed.".

The strategy is to make people believe that personal and state privacy are commensurate things, in order that an individual's strong feelings concerning the former are confused with the latter. In the ideal case this should result in a perverse viewpoint and a desire to protect the latter. This is quite a clever strategy.

Corporations and governments however, should not be prescribed the same rights, privacy or otherwise, as persons. And I implore those that side with the outlined position to see it for what it really is: propaganda that is harmful to individual freedoms.

This is what Jeremy Hunt, Conservative MP, had to say regarding why the Conservatives did not vote against the debill being rushed through (as taken verbatim from the letter I was sent referenced in my last blog post):

Blocking these measures in their entirety would have risked hundreds of thousands of jobs in the TV, film, music and sports industries and therefore not something we are willing to do.

Hearing this man, and his party's concerns, one might have been fooled at the time the bill was being passed into believing that the content industry was in dire straights. Imminently set to explode due to an overwhelming and relentless tide of ubiquitous pirating. He certainly seemed concerned. But what is the truth of the matter? How is the content industry really doing?

To address this question, let us take the information directly from the horses mouth and take a look at BPI's (British Phonographic Industry's) own figures on record sales for the past 10 years.

Note that BPI obtain these figures themselves from The Official Charts Company. These figures have a lot more impact when you see the graph, check this out:

So for the album sales, considering the variance shown, and the relatively small difference between the 2009 sales when compared to 2001. I wouldn't like to make a prediction about long term trends. Perhaps album sales are on the decline, but the argument is pretty irrelevant when you consider the singles sales

For singles sales, the trend is clear: over the past 5 years singles sales have seen a huge growth. What is all this nonsense about the music industry teetering on the edge of destruction? This could not be farther from the truth.

But where has this growth in singles sales come from? BPI can tell us that too. Here are the figures of physical and digital singles sales for the past 8 years, taken from a BPI press release concerning 2009 being a record year for singles sales:

This was published before the year end, so the 2009 totals are cut short. Ignoring the fact that these figures don't match up with the other ones... I'll just plot the first 7 years of data, and nominally assume values of zero for the digital sales in the years 2002 and 2003:

How very curious. It seems that about 5 years ago, digital music sales exploded. And so it would seem that the very medium they strangled was responsible for the huge growth seen in their sector.

How can anyone, seeing this kind of growth, come to the conclusion that the music industry is being pirated out of business? Even if these figures are grossly incorrect, these are the figures promoted by the BPI! The very people so vehemently lobbying for the bill to pass? So why wasn't this mentioned in the house of commons during the debate? Why did Jeremy Hunt want me to believe that the situation was so dire, so critical, that debate and democracy had to be steamrolled? Why indeed I ask, why indeed.

One last thing. I plotted these graphs in Octave a free and open-source Matlab clone (they probably won't like me saying it's a Matlab clone, but what's free speech for afterall). Here is the code to reproduce the graphs: