source
"Let me first frame this. I looked at something that I had seen going on
with the world. Which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts.And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one
can sort of say, well what are your philosophical axioms for this? And I
say I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And
it is an axiom because it is that way. And so that avoids, then, getting
into further unhelpful discussions about why you want to do something.
It is enough that I do.
So in considering how unjust acts are caused and
what tends to promote them and what promotes just acts I saw that human
beings are basically invariant. That is that their inclinations and
biological temperament haven't changed much over thousands of years and
so therefore the only playing field left is: what do they have? And what
do they know? And "have" is something that is fairly hard to influence,
so that is what resources do they have at their disposal? And how much
energy they can harness, and what are the supplies and so on. But what
they know can be affected in a nonlnear way because when one person
conveys information to another they can convey on to another and another
and so on in a way that nonlinear and so you can affect a lot of people
with a small amount of information. And therefore you can change the
behaviour of many people with a small amount of information. So the
question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce
behaviour which is just? And disincentivise behaviour which is unjust?
So all around the world there are people observing different parts of
what is happening to them locally. And there are other people that are
receiving information that they haven't observed first hand. And in the
middle there are people who are involved in moving information from the
observers to the people who will act on information. These are three
separate problems that are all coupled together. I felt that there was a
difficulty in taking observations and putting them in an efficient way
into a distribution system which could then get this information to
people who could act upon it. And so you can argue that companies like
Google are involved, for example, in this "middle" business of taking...
of moving information from people who have it to people who want it.
The problem I saw was that this first step was crippled. And often the
last step as well when it came to information that governments were
inclined to censor.
We can look at this whole process as the Fourth
Estate. Or just as produced by the Fourth Estate. And so you have some
kind of... pipeline... and... So I have this description which is...
which is partly derived from my experiences in quantum mechanics about
looking at the flow of particular types of information which will effect
some change in the end. The bottleneck to me appeared to me to be
primarily in the acquisition of information that would go on to produce
changes that were just. In a Fourth Estate context the people who
acquire information are sources. People who work information and
distribute it are journalists and publishers. And people who act on
it... is everyone. So that's a high level construct, but of course it
then comes down to practically how do you engineer a system that solves
that problem? And not just a technical system, but a total system. So
WikiLeaks was and is an attempt - although still very young - at a total
system. .."
