Viva la revolución

“Wikileaks has not been a revolution, as I’ve heard people say... I’m sorry, but this may be many things, but a revolution it is not.”

“People in revolutions do a lot of things, they do almost everything... but one thing is certain: people in “revolutions” don’t stay quietly at home when they find out, with written proof, that they are being pushed around.”

“But what the internet gives us, it also takes away... Thanks to the internet we know about all these shady deals, but it is also the internet’s fault that we sit there in a stupor in front of the computer screen doing nothing else, except complaining... me first of all.”

The comment is by Javi Pelaez, and it appears in La Aldea Irreductible, regarding the Wikileaks leak about how the US government steered the drafting of Spain’s “Sustainable Economy Law”, or the Sinde Law as it is known over there (an episode that is the first written confirmation that exo-laws exist).

Speaking of which, I found it interesting how little enthusiasm the name Wikileaks, or Julian Assange, aroused yesterday at Blogpower. I think this is a revolution happening in very few heads; most people aren’t touched by the subject, and I even suspect they couldn’t care less.

The digital revolution, if it exists, is the gadgetization of the human being, the new digital hedonism, “internet is for p0rn”, and gamers displacing bloggers. There was more interest and participation in the activities for Gamers at Conecta 2010 than there were people interested in talking at Blog Power (many went for the T-shirts, and lost interest once Soledad Onneto, the TV news anchor, left (and that is not a criticism of the event, it is a criticism of the people attending the event (besides, how do you capture the attention of a gadget?))).

I understand there are people who have been sold on this whole digital revolution thing, and the democratization of knowledge, but the truth is that most people don’t care. They just want to be one more gadget connected to some big social network.