Last week I found out that one of the founders of a site I like to go to committed suicide. Like so many others out there I’m now left wondering why?

Ilya Zhitomirskiy of Diaspora (an open and user-owned social network) was found dead in his room at the San Francisco apartment he shared with some roommates. There were conflicting reports about the suicide note he left, but one of his roommates stated that it simply said:

“Thank you to everyone who was kind to me, this decision is purely my own.”

I can’t help but wonder if much of what put him in the mindset of ending his life was related to the extreme stresses of a project like Diaspora.

The Diaspora project looks to do nothing less than free modern social networking from being in the exclusive power of big corporations.

But like most projects with such an ambitious goal there were many incredibly difficult challenges to deal with, not the least of which was the media’s pigeonholing of Diaspora as a site that would either take down or replace Facebook in a short amount of time…or be a failure.

This set an unreachable bar in the public sphere for Diaspora because, well, 1) Facebook is a behemoth to say the least and 2) Diaspora wasn’t even trying to do that.

Though this kind of publicity helped Diaspora raise more funding than it probably would have otherwise I think it poisoned the process quite a bit. The world was now waiting for these four guys in their early twenties (who were setting out on their first venture no less) to take down Facebook, and fast.

It didn’t happen. And when Diaspora ran into other troubles I saw many people declaring them to be failures or questioning their motives. This must have been hard to hear for someone who’d put their soul into the project.

When I recently read that one of the co-founders was leaving the project due to that universal red flag “personal reasons” I thought to myself that things must have gotten really bad behind the scenes for the group. I had no idea that not much later I’d be reading about the suicide of one of them.

By all accounts Ilya Zhitomirskiy passionately cared about creating technology that would protect and empower people instead of mining them or limiting their rights to make money. And he was one of the rare few who not only cares about helping people but steps up to actually do things to help as many people as possible.

It’s a crushing blow when the world loses someone like this, RIP Ilya.

Surely you’ve seen the epically amazing Trololo video by now, but did you ever wonder what the song was actually about?

Or maybe it didn’t even seem like the song could be about anything considering the lyrics are, well, there aren’t any really other than lololo and lalala type stuff.

But there is a story behind the song and here it is as explained by Edward Khil, the Trololo man himself:

“John on a mustang is riding across a prairie to his love Mary who is waiting for him and knitting him a woolen sock.”

There was one big problem though: the song was written in Soviet Russia and so a story about an American cowboy riding free on the range had no chance of making it past the censors back then.

It had to be changed. John and Mary were dropped and the officially sanctioned story of the song became “A man is merry he walks and sings for himself. He is glad and everyone around him is glad.” Talk about typical Soviet era censorship lol! We are all very happy and everyone is glad…lololo.

But the spirit of the song lived on in between the lines and the sound of the song was kept in the American style as much as was possible. You can hear a bit of this specifically in the ‘Aiieeee’ part that sounds a lot like it came from a cowboy song.

Another interesting Trololo related story is that Edward Khil had no clue that he was super famous on the internet until his grandson came home one day humming the Trololo song:

“I asked him what that was about. He answered that I am not keeping up to date and that in the internet all America is singing it while I am sleeping at home…”

I watched a video of an interview with him, turns out he’s a pretty awesome guy overall and even took all the Trololo parodies in stride. I can only hope to be that layed back about things when I’m seventy-five years old.

source: spb.kp.ru

I was surprised to get an email the other day from an artist in Belgium who had seen the Julian Assange page and made illustrations based on the quotes there.

His name is Caryl Strzelecki and when I asked him what originally inspired him to make the illustrations he said:

Watching the Wikileaks Video: US forces killing innocent people with an US Apache helicopter in 2007 made me realise that wikileaks is just a very important news and information bringer. I think everybody knows that we are living in a difficult and hostile World. We can’t change everything but we can (only) try, just like you are doing.

…This Time I did not put a signature on the illustrations. Why? So everybody can be free to publish it freely and also without permission, it’s totally free!

I used well known cartoon characters and famous people, it’s easier for people to recognise.

I think Wikileaks art is a great idea, I wish there was more of it out there. Following this post are the images that Caryl made. Message me if you have any of your own art you’d like to share :).

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The Julian Assange (from Wikileaks) Quotes page got linked to by @wikileaks yesterday. I have major respect for them so it was a very cool thing to see!

So the story behind the whole quotes page thing is:

While watching videos of talks by Julian Assange on YouTube I realized that some really enlightening things were being said and decided to type them up. The quotes gave some insight into the ideas of Wikileaks and also showed many of the deep revelations that leaked documents have provided.

I put them all into a quote generator because I’ve found that’s an effective way to revisit important info over time…then made the more static quotes page and txt download to go along with it.

Didn’t think many would stop by or be into either page much (but thought it would be a shame not to post it anyway)…so yeah was very surprised yesterday. Happily surprised.

The quotes pages are ongoing projects so more quotes will be added regularly. If you want to find out more about Julian Assange or about what Wikileaks is doing see Wikileaks.
 

“What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.”
 

This page lists all the quotes from the Julian Assange Random Quote Generator, a generator I made with quotes from speeches/interviews by Julian Assange who is a representative of Wikileaks.

It’s a simple and interesting way to see the ideas of Wikileaks and also many of the deep insights that leaked documents (and the subsequent reactions to them) have provided.

This is an ongoing project and will be updated regularly. If you would like to download the current batch of quotes to your computer (in text format) right click and “save as” this link.

If you want to learn more about Julian Assange or about what Wikileaks is doing see Wikileaks.
 

There are currently 63 quotes available. Newest quotes are first.
 
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“(About the Afghan War Diary)
 
And to some degree it is of such scope that it eclipses the economic ability of the press to go through it. It’s going to require not just the press but all interested parties to understand this material.
 
And that is why we have endeavored to put it into a format that is easy for people to go through and comprehend.” (source)
 
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“If journalism is good it is controversial by its nature.” (source)
 
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“It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abuses.” (source)
 
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“(A Little Bit Of Effort)
 
There’s enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legistation around the world -within the EU, between China and the United States. Which way is it gonna go? It’s hard to see.
 
That’s why it’s an interesting time to be in because with a just little bit of effort we can shift it one way or the other.” (source)
 
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“Capable generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.” (source)
 
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“(About His Personal Core Values)
 
Capable generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims. That’s something from my father and something from other capable, generous men that have been in my life.
 
…and I’m a combative person so I’m not actually so big on the nurture (laughs). But there is another way of nurturing victims which is to police perpetrators of crime.” (source)
 
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“Which country is suffering from too much freedom of speech? Name it, is there one?” (source)
 
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“(The Aim Of Wikileaks)
 
The aim of Wikileaks is to achieve just reform around the world and do it through the mechanism of transparency.
 
Our particular view on the mechanism of transparency is to selectively go after material that is concealed. Because organizations that have material and want to conceal it are giving off a signal that they believe there will be reform if that material is released.
 
So we can do things very efficiently by selectively trying to get that material and stick that into the public intellectual record where it can be used by everyone to inform their decisions.” (source)
 
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“The aim of Wikileaks is to achieve just reform around the world and do it through the mechanism of transparency.” (source)
 
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“Our particular view on the mechanism of transparency is to selectively go after material that is concealed. Because organizations that have material and want to conceal it are giving off a signal that they believe there will be reform if that material is released.” (source)
 
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“…we in the West have deluded ourselves into believing that we actually have a truly free press. We don’t. And we can see that in the difference between what Wikileaks does and what the rest of the press does.” (source)
 
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“(Unprofitable)
 
And now we see that the function of censorship has also been privatized.
 
And what that means is that litigious billionares and big companies are able to effectively prevent certain things appearing in public.
 
Or reduce the number of those things appearing in public by using the legal system or by using patronage networks and economic flows to make it unprofitable to talk about certain things most of the time.” (source)
 
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“We know for sure that one big media company in the US had the ‘Collateral Murder’ video for years and did not release it.” (source)
 
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“(Why do journalists censor themselves?)
 
…I think there is a fear about the response from those people who are offended…
 
…And the journalists think that, incredibly, that it would not be in their career interests to pursue that material. So even if they’re personally interested in the material they think perhaps the editors would not approve.” (source)
 
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“(Too Late)
 
So secret planning is secret usually for a reason, because if it’s abusive it is opposed.
 
It is our task to find secret abuse plans and expose them where they can be opposed before they’re implemented. Because if they’re exposed by the implementation -by people suffering from that abuse- then the abuse has already occurred and it’s too late.” (source)
 
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“It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they’re going on.” (source)
 
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“In this broader framework of what we do it is to try and build an historical record, an intellectual record, of how civilization actually works in practice.” (source)
 
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“If we don’t have Western countries as a beacon on the hill for enlightenment values what countries are left to hold that value?” (source)
 
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“(Privatized Censorship)
 
We should not be too proud about our sense that there is no state censorship, because we have privatized state censorship. We have made it more complex and not as obvious. …the brutality is hidden in its complexity.” (source)
 
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“(Unequal Access)
 
Censorship also is not only a mechanism that is employed by the state it is something that can be hijacked by wealthy plutocrats, by big companies to use the coercive mechanisms of the state through the judicial system -through unequal access to the judicial system- through patronage networks have material removed permanently from the historical record.” (source)
 
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“(Secret Gag Orders)
 
In the UK right now there are 300 secret gag orders. Those are gag orders that not only prevent the press from reporting corruption and abuse, they prevent the press from -reporting- the press has been gagged.” (source)
 
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“That endeavor has been successful in putting over a million restricted documents into the historical record that weren’t there before. That’s more pages of information than is in Wikipedia.” (source)
 
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“(one way Wikileaks successfully defends against litigation) …by using every trick in the book that multinational companies use to route money through tax havens -instead we route information.” (source)
 
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“We have, in the process, become the publisher of last resort.” (source)
 
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“Censorship in the West is also a problem. And censorship in the West is used to legitimize censorship in other countries.” (source)
 
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“When countries and organizations fight to suppress things you know you have a foot in the door, you know you have a chance for reform. In other countries where information seems to be free maybe actually the basic structures are so locked up that it’s going to be hard to make an effect.” (source)
 
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“(Complexity Tax)
 
I think fiscal relationships have been engineered in such a way that they’re complex and opaque. …How can people become angry with information that’s that complex? It’s hard. You have to work a lot harder as a journalist to turn that into an emotionally impactful story. So that’s a kind of tax on powerful revelation.” (source)
 
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“…it’s much harder to affect fiscal relationships through free speech than it is to affect political relationships.” (source)
 
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“…the basic structural relationships in highly developed Western countries are fiscal, they’re not political.” (source)
 
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“We’re a specialist publisher. Our speciality is the hardest publishing case -where publishing includes how people get material to the public and how they keep it up before the public.” (source)
 
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“Gag orders are easy to deal with, we just need somewhere in the world that is happy to reveal the gag order about somewhere else in the world.” (source)
 
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“We’re the canary in the coal mine because we take the hardest publishing cases.” (source)
 
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“All media is going on to the internet. All old media and new media.” (source)
 
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“There is globalization occurring that is leading to interaction -fast interaction- between states and legal jurisdictions that was previously slow and non-existent. That pressure is driving the tendency to harmonization of legal regimes.” (source)
 
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“(about the UK) Is that really a liberal democracy, where the press has secret gag orders?” (source)
 
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“We got hold of NATO’s master narrative for Afghanistan. Now this is something that may come as a surprise to you that NATO even has a master narrative?” (source)
 
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“If you feel like you’re about to be injuncted give us the material and tell us when you’re publishing it and we’ll publish it at the same time. And that will undermine the attempt to take it down.” (source)
 
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“(Ten Minutes)
 
That night RUV, the national broadcaster of Iceland, decided to make this document and it’s contents their major segment for the evening, their first and major segment for their 7pm broadcast.
 
It’s 6:55pm an injunction landed on their newsdesk saying that they couldn’t say anything about the content whatsoever. But they had nothing else to say. And I suppose they in living memory had never had this situation happen before.
 
So instead…they just left up our front page (Wikileaks website) for about ten minutes on Icelandic tv.” (source)
 
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“Documents like this perform a legitimate role, even if it’s not something you can see occurring in public.” (source)
 
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“(talking about an important document that was ignored by mainstream media) What I feel is that even if the media doesn’t work this thing is here for historians, this thing is there for those countries that are subject to their governments being undermined.” (source)
 
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“…that hasn’t been picked up, why not? It’s current policy.” (source)
 
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“…that hasn’t been picked up, why not? It’s current policy. It says in this manual that the Geneva Convention says one thing but…US military policy is to do something else.” (source)
 
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“(Media Economy)
 
Here’s an example of something that wasn’t picked up. And why things like this are not picked up is very very interesting and tells us something about our media economy.” (source)
 
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“I don’t think it’s possible for systematic administrative injustice to occur without written records.” (source)
 
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“…with primary sources there is so much you can do to undo that kind of deception, when it’s black and white and in policy.” (source)
 
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“(Undoing Deception)
 
…the main manual for Guantanamo Bay, in fact two editions, which reveal that black and white as a matter of policy that the guards there were to hide people and everyone who came in for the first month, from the Red Cross.
 
And they were to forge the paperwork, allow the Red Cross through, that they had certain sections that were ‘show prisons’.
 
And when this came out the spokesperson for Guantanamo Bay denied the whole thing and said ‘That was then, it’s all changed.’ And as a result of that another source came forward and gave us the next year’s manual and showed no actually it had gotten worse.
 
So with primary sources there is so much you can do to undo that kind of deception, when it’s black and white and in policy.” (source)
 
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“…in fact the exchange rates of Western countries are pumped up by the looting and thievery from the developing world.” (source)
 
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“(about Wikileaks) From our perspective we are an international public service. We represent sources and journalists in the same way that lawyers represent people who are going before court.” (source)
 
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“Political reforms are driven by fresh information.” (source)
 
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“There can be no useful reportage unless the journalist has a fresh source.” (source)
 
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“The primary driver of reforms that wouldn’t have otherwise happened is unauthorized disclosures.” (source)
 
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“…actually getting documents is not so hard, the problem is publishing them and keeping them up in the face of attacks -both economic and legal.” (source)
 
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“And while some people have to be public, what we really encourage is for other people to not be martyrs but to give us material. Keep your job, sit down and relax, let us do the work. We’ll protect you as best we can and we have never lost anyone so far.” (source)
 
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“We have protected people through technical processes, through legal processes, and most importantly through public sanction against attack.” (source)
 
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“In all these cases there’s complex layers as to why people do things. Including attacks on us which seem like they might backfire but actually are in deeper analysis are a forced move by intelligence agencies or corporations or groups of lawyers that have attempted to sue us in different jurisdictions.” (source)
 
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“(The Difference Between Sunshine Press And Wikileaks)
 
Sunshine Press is a network of journalists, activists, lawyers, and some individual donors who made some money in the tech revolution. And Wikileaks is the platform that we use to try and realise our ideal.” (source)
 
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“If tribunals try to hide their sources of funding then at the very outset we have to be suspicious about their conclusions.” (source)
 
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“The West through it’s own corruption supports and extends corruption in developing countries.” (source)
 
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“(about Wikileaks) We try to tackle the hardest cases in publishing in the world…and succeed.” (source)
 
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“(about the US system of justice) …I would not say that there is inherent justice. There is a possibility of justice and that’s very important, that’s not true everywhere.” (source)
 
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“(about Wikileaks) We’re a specialist publisher.” (source)
 
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“(Illusions)
 
What I have seen over the past two years of the way of being leaking and disclosing documents to the public en masse is very different to what I saw as a journalist before.
 
I thought I was hard bitten and cynical and had seen a lot of the world, but what I discovered is that actually I was very ignorant. And what most people see is an illusion.
 
Because what most people get is news that comes from press releases. Or it’s news that even comes from a human rights organization that is writing news in part to tell you something but also in part to keep its funding. And that most information that comes to you is targeted at you. It is designed in some small way to manipulate you, so it is a deviation from the truth.
 
But the internal documents of major corporations and intelligence agencies and governments are designed for their internal use. For some internal process that is occurring, some internal logistical structure. They’re not designed to manipulate you. And because of that difference in perceived audience you can start to see how major organizations work, and it’s not how people think they work -it’s something different.
 
And if we are to produce a more civilized society, a more just society, it has to be based upon the truth. Because judgements which are not based upon the truth can only lead to outcomes which are themselves false.” (source)
 
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“What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.” (source)
 
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Illustrations have been made inspired by the quotes on this page. Click over to the Wikileaks art page to see the rest.