Wikileaks and the photophobic spasm
Dec. 26th, 2010 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andygatesI'm seeing a pattern in exposure, and it's this: Stone lifted, the entity underneath kicks and squeals while it works out what to do with all this damn light. Onlookers take the kicking and squealing -- which is the reflexive response of suits, wonks and fans -- as evidence of wrongdoing; the organism/organisation responds to the light as an intolerable stimulus with which it just cannot work. After a time, the entity gets used to the light and kicks and squeals less. Its instinctive reaction was just that; its defenders mostly as irrelevant as an onlooker who says, "let that hung-over drunk sleep, the light is hurting his eyes."
It took about a year for the CRU email hack to go through this process. Ignore the ideologues, who are vindicated by whatever they are preconditioned to see in the data regardless of actual content: they'll be matched by the "burn the banks" crew in a sec. For the rest of us, grubby linen was displayed in public: the workings were seen to be solid, the process was given some improvements. It's not been anything like comfortable. It's mostly over now.
The diplomats are well in the spasm, and this poses an interesting side-argument: will the process be dependent on the size of the organisation, or is there some half-life to exposure that runs to its own rules? Wonks and fans get bored; operating individuals can react at their own pace (in the CRU case, climate-science types talked among themselves and arranged internet-based clearinghouses; do different chains of command have different impacts on the duration of the thrashing and twitching?).
The bankers are next up. They're getting proactive, shutting down the money streams, and that's finally been noticed by the press. They're pulling the bedding in tight around them, burrowing deeper under their rock, to avoid the squealing and kicking that'll be coming any time now. Public opinion will not be kind to the bankers; expect their fans (like the greenfans and superpatriots) to say that this is stupid and intemperate, that it won't fix anything, that this looks ugly but it's like sausages, and so on, and so on.
Too many secrets.
It took about a year for the CRU email hack to go through this process. Ignore the ideologues, who are vindicated by whatever they are preconditioned to see in the data regardless of actual content: they'll be matched by the "burn the banks" crew in a sec. For the rest of us, grubby linen was displayed in public: the workings were seen to be solid, the process was given some improvements. It's not been anything like comfortable. It's mostly over now.
The diplomats are well in the spasm, and this poses an interesting side-argument: will the process be dependent on the size of the organisation, or is there some half-life to exposure that runs to its own rules? Wonks and fans get bored; operating individuals can react at their own pace (in the CRU case, climate-science types talked among themselves and arranged internet-based clearinghouses; do different chains of command have different impacts on the duration of the thrashing and twitching?).
The bankers are next up. They're getting proactive, shutting down the money streams, and that's finally been noticed by the press. They're pulling the bedding in tight around them, burrowing deeper under their rock, to avoid the squealing and kicking that'll be coming any time now. Public opinion will not be kind to the bankers; expect their fans (like the greenfans and superpatriots) to say that this is stupid and intemperate, that it won't fix anything, that this looks ugly but it's like sausages, and so on, and so on.
Too many secrets.
