The recent Cablegate Wikileaks release of hundreds of thousands of cables from U.S. diplomats is more than just a massive “leak”. It is an elbow point, a no-turning-back further realization that our global internet web is forever changing the public/private/secret landscape generated by the informational artifacts we produce.
It reminded me of a prescient comment written way back in 1973, in what could be called the dawn of the public web, which was Community Memory, the world’s first public computerized bulletin-board and info-flea-market system.
This comment also suggests how the net of information can provide a virtual layer of tracking of the effects of our actions on our planet, and how that could be an ongoing container for wealth as Buckminster Fuller defined it: sustainable forward days of survival.
Excerpt from Resource One Newsletter:
We supply the planetary common wealth in acting in total communication with our various actions and their respective back and forth sequencings. Where we get stuff, what we do with it and how, and where it goes afterwards – staying in touch with such data is what constitutes wealth, survival possibility – and this information flow is the crucial missing link in the survival worthiness of ourselves-together-with-our-planet. The medium for this release of valuable (valued for livelihood) messages is developing amongst us – electronics media in general, basically, and specifically public accessible memory storage – leave your real-time messages for other people, and you begin to provide other people access to your history, your calendar, your time(s). We all get “on the air”. Whether this is claustrophobia, or intolerable honesty, or space of shared patterns-of-common-history; whether this requires our becoming more and more like public parks, or whatever – is up to us to create. There can be no doubt, though, that at the least, the very least, we are being thrown communicationally together.