We are the 99%. We are the hands and minds that allow the corporations and institutions of society to function and grow, to produce and profit. Our capability for global decentralised communication allows localised acts to transform the global landscape almost immediately through our ability to shift perspective faster and more effectively than ever before.

Because of this, we have ultimate power over our future existence; but this also means we have a responsibility to act collectively towards a higher mode of being.

The revolution begins now, with you.

Active and vocal resistance such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and its global counterparts must be supported wholeheartedly, but such expression is only one component of the transition that can occur once we hold as sacred our ability to connect and share. An uprising of the 99% is not a call for violent revolution – unless in explicit contexts of violent oppression – but is instead a sign that the global community is beginning to embrace a new way of being. Wherever possible this must manifest through peaceful means that embody the true depth of human communication rather than revert to the easily accessible hatred and anger that our primal instincts might instill within us.

Our focus should be on formulating a collective understanding of the ‘common good’ and how it relates to corporations, governments and communities. Discuss privately and publicly what it means to better these areas; how one can identify and encourage such behaviour; what alternatives or options might exist and how they might allow us to grow and evolve into the multitude of different contexts and forms that transform society.

As a society we have to better understand the difference between desire and need, to recognise when we have enough of a personal share and it is time to distribute of ourselves to others in greater need. Our demand is that we renew society around a central proposition of fairness and equality, arrived at through transparent representation, rather than remain with the status quo that often serves only the needs of a self-perpetuating elite.

We must not dismiss the true hardship of life that countless face, barely finding the capacity to eke out a meagre existence within the current order. Nor should we ever allow ourselves to forget that almost half the planet lives on the equivalent of $2 a day, experiencing difficulties that many of us cannot even fathom. But we must recognise that to make demands of an amorphous and unaccountable ‘They’ will not bring about the revolutionary change that is needed in the very fabric of society in order to ensure a fair and just future for all. Injustices should always be fought against within specific contexts and towards particular guilty parties; but the wider movement overall must focus on proactive progression towards equality and liberty that transcends national borders and uplifts the exploited rather than focuses too narrowly on tearing down the impenetrable.

We cannot progress on opposition alone, for we must also provide the solution and become an active participant in its manifestation. The momentum being gained through the current physical expression of discontent must be harnessed and utilised to bring about a positive change in the many and varied structures of global society. You are the revolution!

In order to see progress we have to start acting upon our grievances, for it is only through action that we can improve our understanding of goodness and life; of justice and peace. Embrace openness, and always maintain the peaceful composure of genuine fraternity whilst not holding back from standing up to those who attempt to break down the bonds of society. The 1% are not to be identified through a bank account balance, but rather those working actively against the common good, looting the global community in order to ensure dominance, and rejecting transparency in instances where openness will benefit a large proportion of society.

Where are the practical suggestions behind these words of idealism? Even whilst reading this you are already imagining them, picturing them each to your own context and capacity. You already know what to do, or at the very least how to make a start. Particular actions can’t be dictated to you, because the reality is that a truly revolutionary movement must find its birth in all of us. By doing so it manifests across all social strata and circumstance and builds strength through the bridges formed between different local situations. Transformative power emerges from the unique perspectives of all those who participate. The one thing you must do now is start participating with open sincerity and pure intention.

The popular occupation movement cannot in and of itself lead to the change demanded, but what it does very successfully is galvanise those who hear its message from the influence of a deeply corrupted system. A system that promotes narcissism over compassion and thrives on our capacity to feel powerless and apathetic amongst the distractions and noise of modern life. Stand in peaceful unity when you see such a movement emerge in your locality, but know that you do not do this just to represent your own particular beliefs and values; you do this to change the world for the better of all that wish to see humanity flourish in its diversity.

No matter what community you identify with, you have a sense of what it means to belong and an empathy that can extend its membership beyond the immediate and increase your networks. Always seek to widen your capacity to give and receive. Be emboldened by the magnificence of life and the miraculous nature of creative endeavour.

It is important that we overcome the disgraces of the modern world with a joy that signifies our hope in the inherent goodness of humanity. An uprising of this nature means nothing if we will merely fall back onto the old tropes of xenophobic tribalism and selfish endeavour. True activism requires one to shift the entire momentum of their life and to shift it in such a way that maximises positive impact in whatever context we find ourselves in.

Do not reject authority outright, do not fall into the trap of blind anti-authoritarianism that often serves to weaken the possibility of representation and participation. Strive for ownership of government, not rejection of it. Recognise that government exists in a wider sense than just the halls of parliament, and that we are all guardians of a just and honest society. Radicalism for its own sake runs the risk of serving up change without true form, of revolution without recreation. It also runs the risk of playing into the very hands of those who seek to oppress this movement by undermining the deeper and wider message of participation that it represents.

It is vital to keep a strong basis of peaceful solidarity and not be goaded into actions that undermine the core message. Aggression must sometimes be used against particular injustices in order to overcome their influence, however true systematic change cannot be predicated on hostility but must rather be built upon foundations of charity. To stand together arm in arm, literally and figuratively, is to create a unified solidarity that will embolden those who come into contact with it. It will allow and encourage them to make the changes in their lives that are required on an individual level, across millions and millions of people, in order to make a lasting difference.

This is why, if nothing else, it is your duty to identify that you are part of the 99% and that you do so not just because you are angry but because you are hopeful. There is no fixed political message, no ideology or dogma other than an acceptance that the way forwards is to be built upon equality, openness and mutual understanding. Be very wary of those who would seek to undermine this message with calls for violence based upon hatred, for they are either seriously misguided or attempting to provoke you away from productive action.

The moment to physically stand up and be heard is right now, but what must come afterwards requires a concerted effort to move the message beyond the picket lines and into the heart of our collective being. It’s about recognising how to actualise the capacity for charity and compassion that the wisest throughout history have promoted as the peak of human endeavour.

We must continue to be vigilant against injustice, but at the same time also accept some responsibility for allowing such grievances to occur in the first place.  We must stand in solidarity alongside the vulnerable and exploited around the world, but at the same time recognise that standing alone is not the only action needed. Once we have accepted this responsibility we can make a solemn commitment to no longer be culpable either through action or inaction. This will be the watershed moment that brings about a true revolution and recreation of society.

We are the 99% and there is no need to expect us because we are already here. Those who make decisions and act contrary to the tenets of goodness, justice and equality are not afraid of resistance; they are afraid that we might realise that they can be ignored and sow the seeds of a new form of social existence. Now is not the time to tear down the 1%. Now is the time to make them irrelevant.

For more information see United for Global Change – 15th October 2011 and Occupy Together

“Now, ultimately, this issue isn’t just about information freedom; it is about what kind of world we want and what kind of world we will inhabit.  It’s about whether we live on a planet with one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors.” – Hillary Clinton, 21st January 2010.

My how times have changed, eh Ms. Clinton?

I doubt that there is anybody reading this blog that isn’t already aware of the WikiLeaks juggernaut that continues to gain steam both in the press and in the reaction from various governments around the world.  With each passing day we are being provided with more information showing all of us just how government bodies work, and perhaps unsurprisingly the amount of underhanded activity that takes place.

What is also becoming more clear with each passing day is just how much effort is being placed into bringing the site down.

Emerging over the past week is a clearly co-ordinated attempt to remove WikiLeaks from the internet, and even to end its existence as an organisation.  So, what I wanted to do with the discussion this time is look at whether or not WikiLeaks can actually be shut down – and what this very serious precedent might set for the future of internet neutrality.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in discussions of whether or not the ‘scandal’ surrounding WikiLeaks is deserved.  There are many naysayers (as there always are with any kind of large game-changing event of this nature) that will happily dismiss the leak of 250,000 cables as irrelevant and uninteresting.  To be honest, I don’t particularly even want to take part in such a discussion.  Except to make two statements:

1) WikiLeaks is currently being used as a test-case for just how much ideological freedom the internet possesses and how easily that freedom can or cannot be circumvented.

2) It is kind of disheartening to see just how jaded some people have become in regards to true betrayals of trust perpetrated by those who are supposed to represent the common good.

With that said, let’s survey the recent week in the fascinating struggle to keep us all from viewing WikiLeaks and its recent release:

A massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack takes place from an unknown source (often linked to a Lone Wolf operator known as th3j35t3r - ’The Jester’).  This amounts to essentially flooding the servers that WikiLeaks resides upon with a massive amount of data requests in order to clog to internet pipelines (estimated at up to 10Gb/sec); forcing the site to become unavailable for various periods of time.  Despite DDoS attacks clearly being illegal under various jurisdictions such as the UK and Sweden (unlike WikiLeaks), no attempt is made to condemn or discover the source of the attacks.

Calls from various right-wing fronts of the US Government to remove WikiLeaks from accessing any kind of internet services – most notably from Senator Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin.

WikiLeaks moves to the Amazon cloud service in order to scale up according to how strong the DDoS attacks are coming in.  Amazon soon after drops WikiLeaks, citing a breach in its Terms of Service as reason.

everyDNS.com drops WikiLeaks from its Domain Name Server service, thereby removing the ability for people to access the site through a normal web address (i.e. http://www.wikileaks.org).  The site can still be accessed directly through one of its IP addresses, and a few days later it moves its DNS capabilities to Switzerland.

The French servers that were hosting some of the leaked material mysteriously go offline, coinciding quite neatly with calls from people within the French government to remove any assistance for the organisation.  The material is quickly brought back online via The Pirate Party in Sweden, and subsequently a French court declines to force the permanent removal from French servers.

PayPal freezes the WikiLeaks donation account, taking hostage an amount of roughly US$60,000.  The banking arm of the Swiss postal service, Postfinance, quickly follows suit by cancelling Assange’s account – which has since prompted a DDoS backlash in its own right.  In a seemingly unrelated postal incident – the Melbourne based post-office box for WikiLeaks will face closure (the number 4080 will never be the same again).

Mastercard and Visa both remove their support for their customers who wish to make donations to the various WikiLeaks funds – citing again Terms of Service breaches and ongoing investigations into the legality of the organisation.  It should be noted that Mastercard at least still enables people to donate to white supremacy causes such as the Ku Klux Klan.  Facebook and Twitter won’t join the lynch mob until true evidence of law-breaking is proven – showing that innocent until proven guilty can thankfully still apply.

Julian Assange gives himself up to authorities following an Interpol request for his custody via Sweden for unrelated allegations of sexual misconduct.  He is quickly arrested and a few hours later brought to court in which he is refused bail and is currently being held in a remand prison in the UK.

The US government has outright stated that it is trying to find a way to charge Assange through its Espionage Act; Senator Joe Lieberman also goes on record stating that the New York Times should also be investigated for reporting on the leaks.  A press conference with Barack Obama goes by without a single question being asked about the affair…

So, that’s most of the story so far; and we can be assured that there is yet still much to come in this struggle to keep WikiLeaks available to those who wish to view the material they have published.  What is interesting to watch is just how desperate many powerful people are to see the site be taken offline, and even more interestingly just how futile their attempts are proving to be.

Can WikiLeaks be shut down for good?  All things point to this never being able to occur.  Firstly, the site and its content has already been mirrored over 1,000 times; covering pretty much every jurisdiction on the planet.  A number of news outlets hold in their possession the complete files and can release findings at their leisure (and the Guardian newspaper from the UK should be commended for its stellar and continued coverage); and there’s also the fact that a few hundred thousand people have downloaded the archive in encrypted (and therefore inaccessible) form via bit.torrent.  All of this is even before we begin discussing other whistleblowing websites that have existed for many years, and new ones that are preparing to launch as all of this takes place.

To top it all off, an encrypted insurance file allegedly containing numerous more leaks and sensitive material of an unknown nature has been disseminated amongst tens of thousands of people in the case that anything might occur to Julian Assange (such as an unfortunate ‘accident’) or WikiLeaks as a whole.  All that is required is an encryption key to be released and I fear the world’s media outlets might implode with information overload!

WikiLeaks, at least when it comes to the totality of the material they have in their possession as of this moment, is not going anywhere – ever.  The people behind it are technically savvy enough to have ensured they remain one step ahead of those trying to silence them.  Whether or not they will be able to continue to release future leaks of this magnitude (such as the alleged leaks covering a major US bank) is yet to be seen.  However, undoubtedly somebody will else will just step in or the organisation will change form.

Overall, this is actually a wonderful testament to the true power of internet neutrality and the ability for information to remain available no matter who wants to censor it.  What we have here is the first test case for global freedom of information – truly what we are seeing here is the power of the people over government in its full glory.

Now, I’d like to go on record and state that I’m definitely not advocating that the internet should just be some kind of Wild West (an appropriately cynical historical analogy if ever there was one) where any kind of activity, criminal or not, is allowed free reign.  But clearly there is an issue of public accountability and transparency at hand here – the information being fought over is already changing the global stage in immeasurable ways, and there is more than enough support for it around the world to put forward a very solid case that it should not be allowed to be censored (if democracy is what we really want here).

What it really comes down to is that it has yet to be established that WikiLeaks have broken any laws – and therefore the constant and sustained harassment and persecution of the organisation should be viewed very dimly indeed by people concerned with human liberty and a global freedom of speech.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton and the US Government subscribed to such a world-view less than a year ago…

Since this is a discussion, I’m going to leave further comment until we hear from some of you.  So, what do you think?  Can WikiLeaks be shut down for good?  If so, should it be shut down?  What does this mean for the future of the internet?  For the integrity of investigative journalism?  For the future of freedom of speech?  Can the US still host World Press Freedom Day in 2011 with a straight face?  I look forward to your responses.

For many years now we have seen a forthcoming global catastrophe.  It is one that will impact many millions of lives, leading to widespread conflict and quite likely forced migration.  It is also one that at this stage is inevitable, in fact it has already started.

If you say all of those things to somebody and ask them what you are talking about the first answer you will get is: climate change.  If you press a bit further, and amongst particular crowds, you might hear another answer: peak oil.  What you are unlikely to hear is the answer that is probably most pressing and the nearest upon us: water shortages.

For those of you who don’t know, today is Blog Action Day 2010.  Each year on October 15^th bloggers around the world come together to write on a particular central topic.  Last year the topic was ‘Climate Change’ (and it’s interesting, mainly for myself, to see the Future Conscience post from way back then).  This year, the topic chosen was ‘Water’ – and it is an interesting one because with the focus of my post this year I am going to by implication admonish the topic of last year!  This is because water shortages, or more accurately speaking ‘water deficits’, around the globe are going to be one of the most pressing and controversial issues of the next twenty years – and yet, nobody is talking about it.

Well, of course there are many people who are talking about it; and it certainly isn’t a completely forgotten crisis as organisations such as the United Nations and many governments around the world put it on their agendas.  However, when we look at mainstream conversation and dialogue; it is for the most part an unspoken crisis.  You will rarely see any coverage in the mainstream media, and it comes up even less in discussions with altruistically minded individuals across various sectors.  Amongst all of this, the global financial crisis has itself caused almost all charitable discussion to take a back seat in mainstream society; and water was already overlooked to begin with!

To be fair, there have been some heartening increases in public awareness surrounding such campaigns as Make Poverty History; and the impact of water deficits are tied to poverty in obvious ways.  However, I don’t think enough is being done to truly focus upon the impact of water shortages around the globe – particularly given the fact that they are emerging right now, in many different areas.

In a similar manner to last year, I would like to direct readers to organisations that cover this topic very well and deserve a lot more attention at the end of this post.  But before I do so, let’s take a moment to consider just why it might be that water shortages are an unspoken crisis.

Firstly, it is a matter of where we get our information from.  Even in this online era, where we are increasingly procuring our knowledge through social networks, the predominate source of information are the media conglomerates.  If it’s not in the ‘papers’, it’s nothing to be too concerned about.  Obviously, this is one of the major ideological issues that modern society faces today – and it is one that is slowly righting itself through the wider communication networks that are now available to a growing number of people around the world.  We need to make a conscious effort to seek knowledge outside of the half a dozen or so channels most provided to us; we need to truly take advantage of the communications boom that the last decade has gifted us with.

Secondly, I think there is a tendency towards cataclysmic fascination when it comes to speaking about concepts such as climate change, peak oil or the ‘threat’ of global terrorism (to name but three moral agendas that are often spoken about in mainstream media).  Part of what makes us such a slave to mainstream media conglomerates is our fascination with the darker side of humanity and our existence.  Not to mention our short attention spans and desire for sensationalism.

With the water crisis, it is difficult to truly envisage the impact of low water supplies.  Climate change has images such as those recently widely seen of London succumbing to rising sea levels; peak oil immediately brings about images of World War; and the fear surrounding terrorism is self-evident.  Unfortunately, it is these images of devastation and fearful ideas that sell and are shared; leading to higher advertising and circulation revenues, which is the game that the mainstream media plays.

Last, but by no means least (and please do leave comments if you have any other thoughts on this!), is that water shortages in the immediate future can be solved through the development of more effective forms of desalination.  Unlike climate change – the mechanisms of which are still being debated – this crisis has a reasonably clear solution.  It is through the treatment of sea-water that we will be able to solve this issue, and there are a number of companies (such as Water Resources Group) developing cutting-edge technology in order to do so as cost effectively as possible.

Regrettably, financial cost (and often, profit) is still of primary concern when it comes to delivering clean drinking water to those in need.  When this reduces significantly, or the situation becomes acutely desparate, solutions will be provided for those most in need.  Hopefully this will occur before any true calamity or conflict arises because of this dire situation – which is not to say that we should be complacent, by any means!  The last thing I want to do is become a part of the problem with this last point, but I do feel it is an aspect that should be acknowledged.

Blog Action Day isn’t just about words, though, it is also about practice.  If you are reading this post, please take a moment to consider the possible ways that you may be able to alleviate the many problems surrounding clean water that a rapidly increasing number of people are faced with each and every day.  The easiest way to help is in spreading the message through your social networks both online and off (often disparagingly and incorrectly referred to as ‘Slacktivism’ – don’t listen to the naysayers, it helps!).  There are also quite a few initiatives surrounding Blog Action Day 2010 in particular, and I would encourage you to look into those.

Finally, for more information and if you would like to get more involved in charitable work surrounding water through either donations or personal efforts, please have a look at the following organisations that are doing a great job in trying to overcome this growing issue:  Water.org; The Water Project; End Water Poverty and the Water Financing Programme.