Posted on Jul\u00a018,\u00a02013<\/h4>\n\n<\/p>\nBy Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch<\/b><\/p>\n
This piece first appeared at TomDIspatch. Read Tom Engelhardt\u2019s introduction here<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\nDear Edward Snowden,<\/p>\n
Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I\u2019m sure, you.<\/p>\n
I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety\u2013if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served. I fear you may pay, if not with your death, with your life\u2013with a life that can have no conventional outcome anytime soon, if ever. \u201cTruth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,\u201d you told us, and they are trying to stop you instead.<\/p>\n
I am moved by your choice of our future over yours, the world over yourself. You know what few do nowadays: that the self is not the same as self-interest. You are someone who is smart enough, idealistic enough, bold enough to know that living with yourself in a system of utter corruption would destroy that self as an ideal, as something worth being. Doing what you\u2019ve done, on the other hand, would give you a self you could live with, even if it gave you nowhere to live or no life. Which is to say, you have become a hero.<\/p>\n
Pity the country that requires a hero, Bertolt Brecht once remarked, but pity the heroes too. They are the other homeless, the people who don\u2019t fit in. They are the ones who see the hardest work and do it, and pay the price we charge those who do what we can\u2019t or won\u2019t. If the old stories were about heroes who saved us from others, modern heroes\u2013Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi\u2013endeavored to save us from ourselves, from our own governments and systems of power.<\/p>\n
The rest of us so often sacrifice that self and those ideals to fit in, to be part of a cannibal system, a system that eats souls and defiles truths and serves only power. Or we negotiate quietly to maintain an uneasy distance from it and then go about our own business. Though in my world quite a few of us strike our small blows against empire, you, young man, you were situated where you could run a dagger through the dragon\u2019s eye, and that dragon is writhing in agony now; in that agony it has lost its magic: an arrangement whereby it remains invisible while making the rest of us ever more naked to its glaring eye.<\/p>\n
Private Eyes and Public Rights<\/strong><\/p>\nPrivacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians<\/a> fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies<\/a> violate in every way that\u2019s profitable and expedient. Our lack of privacy, their monstrous privacy\u2013even their invasion of our privacy must, by law, remain classified\u2013is what you made visible. The agony of a monster with nowhere to stand\u2013you are accused of spying on the spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy\u2013is a truly curious thing. And it is changing the world. Europe and South America are in an uproar, and attempts to contain you and your damage are putting out fire with gasoline.<\/p>\nYou yourself said it<\/a> so well on July 12th:<\/p>\n\u201cA little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone\u2019s communications at any time. That is the power to change people\u2019s fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the U.S. Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice\u2013that it must be seen to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n
They say you, like Bradley Manning, gave secrets to their enemies. It\u2019s clear who those enemies are: you, me, us. It was clear on September 12, 2001, that the Bush administration feared the American people more than al-Qaeda. Not much has changed on that front since, and this almost infinitely broad information harvest criminalizes all of us. This metadata\u2013the patterns and connections of communications rather than their content\u2013is particularly useful, as my friend Chris Carlsson pointed out, at mapping the clusters of communications behind popular movements, uprisings, political organizing: in other words, those moments when civil society rises to shape history, to make a better future in the open world of the streets and squares.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The goal of gathering all this metadata, Chris speculates<\/a>, \u201cis to be able to identify where the \u2018hubs\u2019 are, who the people are who sit at key points in networks, helping pass news and messages along, but especially, who the people are who spread ideas and information from one network of people to the next, who help connect small networks into larger ones, and thus facilitate the unpredictable and rapid spread of dissent when it appears.\u201d<\/p>\nMetadata can map the circulatory system of civil society, toward what ends you can certainly imagine. When governments fear their people you can be sure they are not serving their people. This has always been the minefield of patriotism: loyalty to our government often means hostility to our country and vice-versa. Edward Snowden, loyalist to country, you have made this clear as day.<\/p>\n
Those who demonize you show, as David Bromwich pointed out<\/a> in a fine essay in the London Review of Books<\/em>, their submission to the power you exposed. Who stood where, he writes,<\/p>\n\u201cwas an infallible marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian. What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment \u2018he must be prosecuted\u2019 obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.\u201d<\/p>\n
You said<\/a>, \u201cI know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.\u201d Who you are is fascinating, but what you\u2019ve exposed is what matters. It is upending the world. It is damaging Washington\u2019s relations with many Latin American and some European countries, with Russia and China as well as with its own people\u2013those, at least, who bother to read or listen to the news and care about what they find there. \u201cEdward Snowden Single-Handedly Forces Tech Companies To Come Forward With Government Data Request Stats,\u201d said a headline<\/a> in Forbes<\/em>. Your act is rearranging our world. How much no one yet knows.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nWhat You Love<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat\u2019s striking about your words on video<\/a>, Edward Snowden, the ones I hear as your young, pale, thoughtful face speaks with clarity and incisiveness in response to Glenn Greenwald\u2019s questions, is that you\u2019re not talking much about what you hate, though it\u2019s clear that you hate the secret network you were part of. You hate it because it poisons what you love. You told us<\/a>, \u201cI understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions\u2026 [but] I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.\u201d You love our world, our country\u2013not its government, clearly, but its old ideals and living idealists, its possibilities, its dreamers, and its dreams (not the stale, stuffed American dream of individual affluence, but the other dreams of a better world for all of us, a world of principle).<\/p>\nYou told us where we now live and that you refuse to live there anymore:<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that\u2019s not something I\u2019m willing to support, it\u2019s not something I\u2019m willing to build, and it\u2019s not something I\u2019m willing to live under. America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.\u201d<\/p>\n
Which is to say you acted from love, from all the things the new surveillance state imperils: privacy, democracy, accountability, decency, honor. The rest of us, what would we do for love?<\/p>\n
What is terrifying to the politicians at the top is that you may be our truest patriot at the moment. Which makes all of them, with their marble buildings and illustrious titles, their security details and all the pomp, the flags, the saluting soldiers, so many traitors. The government is the enemy of the people; the state is the enemy of the country. I love that country, too. I fear that state and this new information age as they spread and twine like a poison vine around everything and everyone. You held up a mirror and fools hate the mirror for it; they shoot the messenger, but the message has been delivered.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis country is worth dying for,\u201d you said in explanation of your great risks. You were trained as a soldier, but a soldier\u2019s courage with a thinker\u2019s independence of mind is a dangerous thing; a hero is a dangerous thing. That\u2019s why the U.S. military has made the Guardian<\/em>, the British newspaper that has done the key reporting on your leaks, off limits<\/a> to our soldiers overseas. Whoever made that cynical censorship decision understands that those soldiers may be defending a set of interests at odds with this country and its Constitution, and they need to be kept in the dark about that. The dark from which you emerged.<\/p>\nWhen the United States forced the airplane of Evo Morales, Bolivia\u2019s democratically elected head of state, to land in Austria, after compliant France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy denied him the right to travel through their airspace, all South America took it as an insult<\/a> and a violation of Bolivia\u2019s sovereignty and international law. The allied president of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, tracked the incident<\/a> in a series of tweets that demonstrated an openness, a principledness, and a strong friendship between Morales, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa, and her. It was a little window onto a really foreign continent: one in which countries are sometimes headed by genuinely popular leaders who are genuinely transparent and governed by rule of law. It\u2019s a reminder that things in our own blighted, corrupted, corporate-dominated country could be different.\u00a0<\/p>\nBuilding a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century<\/strong><\/p>\nHow did we get here? In 1996, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pushed the dreadful slogan \u201cbuilding a bridge to the twenty-first century.\u201d It was a celebration of Silicon Valley-style technological innovation and corporate globalization, among other things. At the time, I put \u201cbuilding a bridge to the nineteenth century\u201d on my letterhead. It turned out that we were doing both at once: erecting a massive electronic infrastructure that outpaces our ability to democratically manage it and shifting our economy backward to recreate the chasms of class divide that marked the nineteenth century. The two goals intertwined like serpents making love.<\/p>\n
The new technologies made a surveillance state that much more powerful and far-reaching; the new technologies replaced<\/a> many jobs with few; the new technologies created new billionaires<\/a> without principles; the new technologies made us all into commodities to be sold to advertisers; the new technologies turned our every move into something that could be tracked; the new technologies kept us distracted and busy. Meanwhile, almost everyone got poorer.<\/p>\nWhat the neoliberals amassing mountains of wealth for the already super-wealthy forgot, what the tax-cutters and child-starvers never learned in school, is that desperate people do not necessary simply lie down and obey. Often enough, they rebel. There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose. The twentieth century\u2019s welfare states, their pumped-up, plumped-up middle classes, their relative egalitarianism and graduated tax plans pacified the once-insurrectionary classes by meeting, at least in part, their needs and demands. The comfortable don\u2019t revolt much. Out of sheer greed, however, the wealthiest and most powerful decided to make so many of the rest of us at least increasingly uncomfortable and often far worse.<\/p>\n
Edward Snowden, you rebelled because you were outraged; so many others are rebelling because their lives are impossible now. These days when we revolt, the new technologies become our friends as well as our enemies. If you imagine those technologies as the fire Prometheus stole from the gods, then it works both ways, for us and for them, to create and to destroy.<\/p>\n
Those new technologies are key to the latest rounds of global organizing, from the World Trade Organization actions<\/a> of 1999, put together by email and epochal in their impact, to the Arab Spring, which used email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other means, to Occupy Wall Street. The technologies are double-edged: populist networks for creating global resistance are vulnerable to surveillance; classified reams of data are breachable by information saved to thumb drives or burned onto CDs by whistleblowers and hackers. They can spy in private; we can organize in public, and maybe the two actions are true opposites.<\/p>\nMeanwhile there is massive upheaval in Egypt and in Brazil, and in recent years there have been popular rebellions in many parts of the Arab world, Turkey, Iceland, Greece, Spain, Britain, Chile, and the U.S. itself with Occupy. The globe is on fire with popular outrage, with fury over economic injustice and, among other things, climate change spurred by the profits a few are piling up<\/a> to the detriment of the rest of us, generations to come, other species, and the planet itself. It seems that, surveillance or not, people are not about to go quietly into the nineteenth century or accept the devil\u2019s bargains of the twenty-first either.<\/p>\nPrometheus and Being Burned<\/strong><\/p>\nI think of a man even younger than you, Edward Snowden, who unlike you acted without knowing what he did: 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi<\/a>, whose December 2010 self-immolation to protest his humiliation and hopelessness triggered what became the still-blooming, still-burning Arab Spring. Sometimes one person changes the world. This should make most of us hopeful and some of them fearful, because what I am also saying is that we now live in a world of us and them, a binary world. It\u2019s not the old world of capitalism versus communism, but of the big versus the little, of oligarchy versus democracy, of hierarchies versus swarms, of corporations versus public interest and civil society.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nIt seems nearly worldwide now, which is why revolts all over the planet have so much in common these days, why Occupy activists last month held up signs in New York\u2019s Liberty Plaza in solidarity with the uprising in Taksim Square in Turkey; why Arab Spring activists phoned in pizza orders<\/a> to the uprising in Wisconsin in early 2011; why Occupy spread around the world, and Greek insurrectionaries learned from the successes of Argentina in the face of austerity and economic collapse. We know our fate is common and that we live it out together and change it together, only together.<\/p>\nThere were rumblings that you had defected, or would defect, to China or Russia, but you had already defected when we became aware of your existence: you had defected from them to us, using the power you had gained deep within the bowels of their infernal machines to empower us. What will we do with what you\u2019ve taught us? That\u2019s up to us, but for anyone who thinks what you did was not threatening to those in power, just look at how furious, how upset, how naked our emperors now are.<\/p>\n
And you, Prometheus, you stole their fire, and you know it. You said<\/a>, \u201cBeing called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, [Senator Dianne] Feinstein, and [Congressman Peter] King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.\u201d<\/p>\nSomeday you may be regarded as a Mandela of sorts for the information age, or perhaps a John Brown, someone who refused to fit in, to bow down, to make a system work that shouldn\u2019t work, that should explode. And perhaps we\u2019re watching it explode.<\/p>\n
The match is sacrificed to start the fire. So maybe, Edward Snowden, you\u2019re a sacrifice. In the process, you\u2019ve lit a bonfire out of their secrecy and spying, a call to action.<\/p>\n
I fear for you, but your gift gives us hope and your courage, an example. Our loyalty should be to our ideals, because they are a threat to the secret system you\u2019ve exposed, because we have to choose between the two. Right now you embody that threat, just as you embody those ideals. For which I am grateful, for which everyone who is not embedded in that system should be grateful.<\/p>\n
Love,<\/p>\n
Rebecca<\/p>\n
Like Edward Snowden, Rebecca Solnit has a GED, not a high-school diploma. She lives <\/em>in Silicon Valley\u2019s shadow<\/em><\/a>, in a city where billionaires race $10 million yachts and austerity is closing the community college. Her newest book is <\/em>The Faraway Nearby<\/a>.<\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n\nCopyright 2013 Rebecca Solnit<\/small>\n<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.truthdig.com\/images\/eartothegrounduploads\/9256803819_4f802eb5ba_c.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
castigated_fish<\/a> (CC BY-SA 2.0)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n
By Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch<\/b><\/p>\n
This piece first appeared at TomDIspatch. Read Tom Engelhardt\u2019s introduction here<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n Dear Edward Snowden,<\/p>\n Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I\u2019m sure, you.<\/p>\n I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety\u2013if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served. I fear you may pay, if not with your death, with your life\u2013with a life that can have no conventional outcome anytime soon, if ever. \u201cTruth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,\u201d you told us, and they are trying to stop you instead.<\/p>\n I am moved by your choice of our future over yours, the world over yourself. You know what few do nowadays: that the self is not the same as self-interest. You are someone who is smart enough, idealistic enough, bold enough to know that living with yourself in a system of utter corruption would destroy that self as an ideal, as something worth being. Doing what you\u2019ve done, on the other hand, would give you a self you could live with, even if it gave you nowhere to live or no life. Which is to say, you have become a hero.<\/p>\n Pity the country that requires a hero, Bertolt Brecht once remarked, but pity the heroes too. They are the other homeless, the people who don\u2019t fit in. They are the ones who see the hardest work and do it, and pay the price we charge those who do what we can\u2019t or won\u2019t. If the old stories were about heroes who saved us from others, modern heroes\u2013Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi\u2013endeavored to save us from ourselves, from our own governments and systems of power.<\/p>\n The rest of us so often sacrifice that self and those ideals to fit in, to be part of a cannibal system, a system that eats souls and defiles truths and serves only power. Or we negotiate quietly to maintain an uneasy distance from it and then go about our own business. Though in my world quite a few of us strike our small blows against empire, you, young man, you were situated where you could run a dagger through the dragon\u2019s eye, and that dragon is writhing in agony now; in that agony it has lost its magic: an arrangement whereby it remains invisible while making the rest of us ever more naked to its glaring eye.<\/p>\n Private Eyes and Public Rights<\/strong><\/p>\n Privacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians<\/a> fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies<\/a> violate in every way that\u2019s profitable and expedient. Our lack of privacy, their monstrous privacy\u2013even their invasion of our privacy must, by law, remain classified\u2013is what you made visible. The agony of a monster with nowhere to stand\u2013you are accused of spying on the spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy\u2013is a truly curious thing. And it is changing the world. Europe and South America are in an uproar, and attempts to contain you and your damage are putting out fire with gasoline.<\/p>\n You yourself said it<\/a> so well on July 12th:<\/p>\n \u201cA little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone\u2019s communications at any time. That is the power to change people\u2019s fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the U.S. Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice\u2013that it must be seen to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n They say you, like Bradley Manning, gave secrets to their enemies. It\u2019s clear who those enemies are: you, me, us. It was clear on September 12, 2001, that the Bush administration feared the American people more than al-Qaeda. Not much has changed on that front since, and this almost infinitely broad information harvest criminalizes all of us. This metadata\u2013the patterns and connections of communications rather than their content\u2013is particularly useful, as my friend Chris Carlsson pointed out, at mapping the clusters of communications behind popular movements, uprisings, political organizing: in other words, those moments when civil society rises to shape history, to make a better future in the open world of the streets and squares.\u00a0<\/p>\n The goal of gathering all this metadata, Chris speculates<\/a>, \u201cis to be able to identify where the \u2018hubs\u2019 are, who the people are who sit at key points in networks, helping pass news and messages along, but especially, who the people are who spread ideas and information from one network of people to the next, who help connect small networks into larger ones, and thus facilitate the unpredictable and rapid spread of dissent when it appears.\u201d<\/p>\n Metadata can map the circulatory system of civil society, toward what ends you can certainly imagine. When governments fear their people you can be sure they are not serving their people. This has always been the minefield of patriotism: loyalty to our government often means hostility to our country and vice-versa. Edward Snowden, loyalist to country, you have made this clear as day.<\/p>\n Those who demonize you show, as David Bromwich pointed out<\/a> in a fine essay in the London Review of Books<\/em>, their submission to the power you exposed. Who stood where, he writes,<\/p>\n \u201cwas an infallible marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian. What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment \u2018he must be prosecuted\u2019 obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.\u201d<\/p>\n You said<\/a>, \u201cI know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.\u201d Who you are is fascinating, but what you\u2019ve exposed is what matters. It is upending the world. It is damaging Washington\u2019s relations with many Latin American and some European countries, with Russia and China as well as with its own people\u2013those, at least, who bother to read or listen to the news and care about what they find there. \u201cEdward Snowden Single-Handedly Forces Tech Companies To Come Forward With Government Data Request Stats,\u201d said a headline<\/a> in Forbes<\/em>. Your act is rearranging our world. How much no one yet knows.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n What You Love<\/strong><\/p>\n What\u2019s striking about your words on video<\/a>, Edward Snowden, the ones I hear as your young, pale, thoughtful face speaks with clarity and incisiveness in response to Glenn Greenwald\u2019s questions, is that you\u2019re not talking much about what you hate, though it\u2019s clear that you hate the secret network you were part of. You hate it because it poisons what you love. You told us<\/a>, \u201cI understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions\u2026 [but] I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.\u201d You love our world, our country\u2013not its government, clearly, but its old ideals and living idealists, its possibilities, its dreamers, and its dreams (not the stale, stuffed American dream of individual affluence, but the other dreams of a better world for all of us, a world of principle).<\/p>\n You told us where we now live and that you refuse to live there anymore:<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that\u2019s not something I\u2019m willing to support, it\u2019s not something I\u2019m willing to build, and it\u2019s not something I\u2019m willing to live under. America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.\u201d<\/p>\n Which is to say you acted from love, from all the things the new surveillance state imperils: privacy, democracy, accountability, decency, honor. The rest of us, what would we do for love?<\/p>\n What is terrifying to the politicians at the top is that you may be our truest patriot at the moment. Which makes all of them, with their marble buildings and illustrious titles, their security details and all the pomp, the flags, the saluting soldiers, so many traitors. The government is the enemy of the people; the state is the enemy of the country. I love that country, too. I fear that state and this new information age as they spread and twine like a poison vine around everything and everyone. You held up a mirror and fools hate the mirror for it; they shoot the messenger, but the message has been delivered.<\/p>\n \u201cThis country is worth dying for,\u201d you said in explanation of your great risks. You were trained as a soldier, but a soldier\u2019s courage with a thinker\u2019s independence of mind is a dangerous thing; a hero is a dangerous thing. That\u2019s why the U.S. military has made the Guardian<\/em>, the British newspaper that has done the key reporting on your leaks, off limits<\/a> to our soldiers overseas. Whoever made that cynical censorship decision understands that those soldiers may be defending a set of interests at odds with this country and its Constitution, and they need to be kept in the dark about that. The dark from which you emerged.<\/p>\n When the United States forced the airplane of Evo Morales, Bolivia\u2019s democratically elected head of state, to land in Austria, after compliant France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy denied him the right to travel through their airspace, all South America took it as an insult<\/a> and a violation of Bolivia\u2019s sovereignty and international law. The allied president of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, tracked the incident<\/a> in a series of tweets that demonstrated an openness, a principledness, and a strong friendship between Morales, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa, and her. It was a little window onto a really foreign continent: one in which countries are sometimes headed by genuinely popular leaders who are genuinely transparent and governed by rule of law. It\u2019s a reminder that things in our own blighted, corrupted, corporate-dominated country could be different.\u00a0<\/p>\n Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century<\/strong><\/p>\n How did we get here? In 1996, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pushed the dreadful slogan \u201cbuilding a bridge to the twenty-first century.\u201d It was a celebration of Silicon Valley-style technological innovation and corporate globalization, among other things. At the time, I put \u201cbuilding a bridge to the nineteenth century\u201d on my letterhead. It turned out that we were doing both at once: erecting a massive electronic infrastructure that outpaces our ability to democratically manage it and shifting our economy backward to recreate the chasms of class divide that marked the nineteenth century. The two goals intertwined like serpents making love.<\/p>\n The new technologies made a surveillance state that much more powerful and far-reaching; the new technologies replaced<\/a> many jobs with few; the new technologies created new billionaires<\/a> without principles; the new technologies made us all into commodities to be sold to advertisers; the new technologies turned our every move into something that could be tracked; the new technologies kept us distracted and busy. Meanwhile, almost everyone got poorer.<\/p>\n What the neoliberals amassing mountains of wealth for the already super-wealthy forgot, what the tax-cutters and child-starvers never learned in school, is that desperate people do not necessary simply lie down and obey. Often enough, they rebel. There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose. The twentieth century\u2019s welfare states, their pumped-up, plumped-up middle classes, their relative egalitarianism and graduated tax plans pacified the once-insurrectionary classes by meeting, at least in part, their needs and demands. The comfortable don\u2019t revolt much. Out of sheer greed, however, the wealthiest and most powerful decided to make so many of the rest of us at least increasingly uncomfortable and often far worse.<\/p>\n Edward Snowden, you rebelled because you were outraged; so many others are rebelling because their lives are impossible now. These days when we revolt, the new technologies become our friends as well as our enemies. If you imagine those technologies as the fire Prometheus stole from the gods, then it works both ways, for us and for them, to create and to destroy.<\/p>\n Those new technologies are key to the latest rounds of global organizing, from the World Trade Organization actions<\/a> of 1999, put together by email and epochal in their impact, to the Arab Spring, which used email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other means, to Occupy Wall Street. The technologies are double-edged: populist networks for creating global resistance are vulnerable to surveillance; classified reams of data are breachable by information saved to thumb drives or burned onto CDs by whistleblowers and hackers. They can spy in private; we can organize in public, and maybe the two actions are true opposites.<\/p>\n Meanwhile there is massive upheaval in Egypt and in Brazil, and in recent years there have been popular rebellions in many parts of the Arab world, Turkey, Iceland, Greece, Spain, Britain, Chile, and the U.S. itself with Occupy. The globe is on fire with popular outrage, with fury over economic injustice and, among other things, climate change spurred by the profits a few are piling up<\/a> to the detriment of the rest of us, generations to come, other species, and the planet itself. It seems that, surveillance or not, people are not about to go quietly into the nineteenth century or accept the devil\u2019s bargains of the twenty-first either.<\/p>\n Prometheus and Being Burned<\/strong><\/p>\n I think of a man even younger than you, Edward Snowden, who unlike you acted without knowing what he did: 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi<\/a>, whose December 2010 self-immolation to protest his humiliation and hopelessness triggered what became the still-blooming, still-burning Arab Spring. Sometimes one person changes the world. This should make most of us hopeful and some of them fearful, because what I am also saying is that we now live in a world of us and them, a binary world. It\u2019s not the old world of capitalism versus communism, but of the big versus the little, of oligarchy versus democracy, of hierarchies versus swarms, of corporations versus public interest and civil society.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It seems nearly worldwide now, which is why revolts all over the planet have so much in common these days, why Occupy activists last month held up signs in New York\u2019s Liberty Plaza in solidarity with the uprising in Taksim Square in Turkey; why Arab Spring activists phoned in pizza orders<\/a> to the uprising in Wisconsin in early 2011; why Occupy spread around the world, and Greek insurrectionaries learned from the successes of Argentina in the face of austerity and economic collapse. We know our fate is common and that we live it out together and change it together, only together.<\/p>\n There were rumblings that you had defected, or would defect, to China or Russia, but you had already defected when we became aware of your existence: you had defected from them to us, using the power you had gained deep within the bowels of their infernal machines to empower us. What will we do with what you\u2019ve taught us? That\u2019s up to us, but for anyone who thinks what you did was not threatening to those in power, just look at how furious, how upset, how naked our emperors now are.<\/p>\n And you, Prometheus, you stole their fire, and you know it. You said<\/a>, \u201cBeing called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, [Senator Dianne] Feinstein, and [Congressman Peter] King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.\u201d<\/p>\n Someday you may be regarded as a Mandela of sorts for the information age, or perhaps a John Brown, someone who refused to fit in, to bow down, to make a system work that shouldn\u2019t work, that should explode. And perhaps we\u2019re watching it explode.<\/p>\n The match is sacrificed to start the fire. So maybe, Edward Snowden, you\u2019re a sacrifice. In the process, you\u2019ve lit a bonfire out of their secrecy and spying, a call to action.<\/p>\n I fear for you, but your gift gives us hope and your courage, an example. Our loyalty should be to our ideals, because they are a threat to the secret system you\u2019ve exposed, because we have to choose between the two. Right now you embody that threat, just as you embody those ideals. For which I am grateful, for which everyone who is not embedded in that system should be grateful.<\/p>\n Love,<\/p>\n Rebecca<\/p>\n Like Edward Snowden, Rebecca Solnit has a GED, not a high-school diploma. She lives <\/em>in Silicon Valley\u2019s shadow<\/em><\/a>, in a city where billionaires race $10 million yachts and austerity is closing the community college. Her newest book is <\/em>The Faraway Nearby<\/a>.<\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n \nCopyright 2013 Rebecca Solnit<\/small>\n<\/p>\n castigated_fish<\/a> (CC BY-SA 2.0)<\/a><\/p>\n <\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n