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" "I’m talking of the revolutionary quality of digitization. And I say it’s revolutionary because once information is no longer a bunch of box files or papers in a filing cabinet but just bits that fly through the air, it means that it’s so hard for people in power to control it. And it’s always been true that knowledge is power. And so once it becomes very difficult for people in power to keep hold of information it means that it becomes very hard for them to keep hold of power, because power just flows out. The default now is zero cost for information to spread instantly around the globe. And in fact you have to pay money to stop it now. That’s incredibly disruptive and revolutionary.
Heather Rose Brooke (born 1970) is a British-American journalist and freedom of information campaigner. The author of Your Right to Know, The Silent State, Assange Agnosties and The Revolution Will Be Digitised, Brooke was a 2010 winner of the Washington Coalition for Open Government "Key Award". Also known as the pioneer who forced the British Parliament to answer to its own freedom of information laws.
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I’m very much a free market capitalist, actually. I don’t agree with a kind of totalitarian, one government or sort of universal law. I think what will happen and what is happening now is, in the same way as… In the way that countries make themselves attractive to investors through different pieces of legislation they offer, whether it’s secrecy in the case of the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, I think the fact that some countries now are offering very robust publishing laws, it will be that as information is global, what you might see is that these big internet companies like Google or Facebook, that have their servers, will start to relocate those servers to countries where they have less interference. In a way, you’re creating a kind of free market of freedom of information law.
Suddenly other people thought me admirable and important. When they did, I felt good. But also nervous because what if they suddenly changed their mind? I could see other famous people fall from the public’s favour, admiration turning to envy or hatred. People wrote admiring letters to me, but I couldn’t take it in because I thought ‘they don’t really know me’. They only knew the version of me I put on display - that of the tough tenacious reporter, battling for the people’s right to know. They didn’t know my aching emptiness, my deep hunger to be known. I learned that being seen is not the same as being known. Outsourcing my self-worth to total strangers, I realised, was not a good idea.
Instead of real power - the power someone has when they know they are worthy, wanted and have what it takes to handle life - the insecure man seeks domination. He doesn’t feel worthy or wanted or that people will want to be with him on his own merits, so he sees manipulation and violence as the only way to be in relationship to others. He doesn’t feel he has what it takes to deal with life, so he seeks control.