edward snowden

what do you build at the end of the End of History?

“If we want to build a.. or live, enjoy… the fruits of a better world. If we want to make sure that the rights that we have encoded into our laws are actually reliable. That we live with them and pass them to our children. This will never be the work of politicians. This can only be the work of the people. Of the population. Because politicians do not simply do what they think is best. They do what they think people want to hear. They do what they think will gain them support. And ultimately if we want to see a change we must force it through ourselves. If we want to have a better world we can’t hope for an Obama, and we should not fear a Donald Trump, rather we should build it ourselves.”

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Jake’s an ever more polished statesman for the nascent postgeographic pirate civilization. Population: $COUNT, Territory: fractal and multidimensional.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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If Snowden had gotten things his own way, he’d be writing earnest op-ed editorials in Hong Kong now, in English, while dining on Kung Pao Chicken. It’s some darkly modern act of crooked fate that has directed Edward Snowden to Moscow, arriving there as the NSA’s Solzhenitsyn, the up-tempo, digital version of a conscience-driven dissident defector.

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But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.

Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed.

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Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.

There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department.

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Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.

More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.

Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.

https://medium.com/geek-empire-1/a1ebd2b4a0e5

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You’ve just spent five weeks in limbo, stateless, living in the interzone of an airport terminal.

Your rival for Technomad Citizen#1 was under “house arrest” in the country estate of a sympathetic aristocrat.

Fleeing the might of the Empire, he’s now residing in the diplomatic safe zone of a South American embassy, from which he conspired to break you out of Hong Kong with the power of the network and the voodoo magic of temporary papers he conjured up with his host, hacking Authority.

You’ve been granted a solar year of asylum in the bounds of the Russian Federation, formerly trading as the Evil Empire ™. Anna Chapman has already proposed to you. You can regroup at an undisclosed location of your choice. You literally left paradise when you began this journey. You are a massive geek, and are well aware that it would be an easier and less perilous to take a rocket to the ISS, than travel anywhere else on Earth.

Maybe you make this your temporary base of Bond Villain operations.

(You definitely aren’t still part of the Company. This isn’t a massive psyops action.)

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Think, for example, of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in west London, or of Edward Snowden, the Prism whistleblower currently in his Hong Kong hotel. Both are now in exceptional spaces, holes in the continuum of globalised digital space. These strange anomalies are perhaps the only escapes from the ever-present digital backdoor, the only respite from the colonisation of earth by digital culture.

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/06/21/sam-jacob-opinion-technology-companies-affecting-design-urbanism/

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