Wikiterrorism

Did you know that we can fight terror with YouTube? Yes, we can, quite literally it would appear -- at least, according to Daniel Kimmage, who the International Herald Tribune identities as a "a senior analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty". In today's op-ed section of the IHT, this senior analyst presents a most peculiar argument about Al Qaeda which, he says, is very much of a Web 1.0 type of organization. In spite of its "advanced" media skills, Kimmage explains, the terror group has a control-from-above type of structure:

"But the Qaeda media nexus, as advanced as it is, is old hat. If Web 1.0 was about creating the snazziest official Web resources and Web 2.0 is about letting users run wild with self-created content and interactivity, Al Qaeda and its affiliates are stuck in 1.0."

Kimmage's argument is that Al Qaeda content doesn't do well on an uncensored network like YouTube, where the terror group's videos have apparently been satiricized by an Iraqi poet and where videos of Arab pop stars dramatically eclipse the puritanical Al Qaeda material in popularity. Open up the web to the people of the Moslem world, Kimmage says, and you get the wisdom of the Arab street. But the problem, according to Kimmage, is that Arab governments are themselves guilty of pursuing an authoritarian Web 1.0 strategy:

Unfortunately, the authoritarian governments of the Middle East are doing their best to hobble Web 2.0. By blocking the Internet, they are leaving the field open to Al Qaeda and its recruiters.

The American military's statistics and jihadists' own online postings show that among the most common countries of origin for foreign fighters in Iraq are Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. It's no coincidence that Reporters Without Borders lists Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria as "Internet enemies," and Libya and Yemen as countries where the Web is "under surveillance."

There is a simple lesson here: Unfettered access to a free Internet is not merely a goal to which we should aspire on principle, but also a very practical means of countering Al Qaeda. As users increasingly make themselves heard, the ensuing chaos will not be to everyone's liking, but it may shake the online edifice of Al Qaeda's totalitarian ideology.

But there's something absurdly spurious about Kimmage's logic. Is he really be arguing that Saudi Arabia is full of Al Qaeda sympathizers because the country doesn't allow people to express themselves on the Internet?  Isn't the reverse true? Isn't one reason that the Web is under surveillance in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria is to control Al Qaeda sympathizers? And isn't contemporary Iraq a bloody example of Web 2.0 anarchism in practice in the Arab world -- a so-called "democracy" which the vast majority of Saudis, Egyptians and Syrians could well do without?

Could Kimmage really implying that the principles of Web 1.0 media -- authority and expertise -- are somehow sympathetic to suicide bombers? After all, isn't his IHT op-ed a classic example of Web 1.0 opinion? Isn't he -- the "senior analyst" -- a classic Web 1.0 kind of guy? And isn't his organization -- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty -- the epitome of a Web 1.0 media. But none of them -- the IHT, Radio Free Europe or Kimmage himself -- are, at least to my knowledge, terrorists.

Kimmage is so infatuated with fashionable Web 2.0 terms that misses the critical point entirely. So, okay, maybe the hierarchical and authoritarian Al Qaeda is terrorism 1.0. But media technology doesn't create terrorism -- terrorists create terrorism. So what happens when the terrorists get hold of decentratlzed Web 2.0 social networks where there are no authorities? What does wiki-terrorism look like? My guess is that terrorism 2.0 will be more destructive, more difficult to fight and more seductive to the Moslem street. And I suspect that in the not-too-distant future "senior analysts" like Kimmage will be looking back nostalgically at Al Qaeda which, at least, had grey bearded leaders, loyal followers and a coherent message derived from an authoritative text.

Comments

[Vince Williams]

Al Qaeda (which means "the base" in Arabic) regrouped in Pakistan when the war on terrorism was outsourced to the unreliable Musharraf regime by a risk-averse Bush administration.

Now the base of Bin Laden's terrorist network is in the Waziristan region, where the tribespeople are of the same Pashtun ethnicity as the Taliban.

Somehow I thought Al Qaeda already had terrorist wikis. In any case, perhaps the metadata of every page on the web should include a verse of the Qur'an by default.

I try to imagine what Muslim jihadists of the sword would express in their social hive mind, and think how incomprehensible and mysterious their world view is to mine.

For them the Qur'an is the literal voice of God, and all the world is to be interpreted by its precepts.

I shudder to contemplate how unmysterious the content of our culture as served up by our media is to them, in the surety of their faith.

Yet I suspect that we in the West grant them much of their power by a kind of dehumanizing consensual hallucination.

[Ian Thorpe]

Having watched the development of traffic flows on websites I maintain for friends' businesses I see Kimmage's attitude as typical of the uninformed webhead, blinded by hype, ignorant of reality. While the openness of "Web 2" does negate any attempts to produce quality content, the old static web pages of a "web 1" html site have a much longer shelf life.

An atricle I posted on a web2 engine gathered 5000 hits in its first week then dropped off quickly as it receded from the top of the database and now, two years on, gets between 10 & 20 page views a week. The same item, edited to avoid its being identified as mirror content, in an html page gets on average 500 a week. Both are refreshed with new inward links regularly. Those who style themselves "scientists" may dismiss this as anecdotal but many people I have recommended this strategy to have observed the same result, a much longer tail for content items.

So it seems Al Qaeda may be using web2 very cleverly to attract people to their more significant content on web 1 pages.

One of the problems with the web as it stands is the people settng themselves up as experts know eff all about how the internet actually works.