[P2P-F] "Ned" Snowden: Hedge-Levellers, Frame-Breakers and Whistleblowers

[Tom Walker]

In a comment<http://www.juancole.com/2013/06/government-whistleblower-snowden.html#comment-204534>
a
couple of weeks ago at Juan Cole's *Informed Comment* blog, Warren Lunsford
called Edward Snowden a "Luddite":

In this Snowden disclosures it appears we are finding standard Marketing
Science applied to National Security and Federal Criminal Investigations of
Enemies of our County. I would think Snowden is a Luddite. Just as a group
of early 19th century English workmen destroyed laborsaving machinery as a
protest, we find Snowden attempting the same activity against the
application of Modern Technology for National Security.

Lunsford was right but for the wrong reasons. There is indeed an important
parallel between Snowden's actions and the frame-breaking of the Luddites
(as well as the hedge-levelling of the commoners resisting enclosure). But
Lunsford got his chronology backward.


The enclosures of the commons and the mechanization of industry were
usurpations that disrupted long established regimes of property and
legality. The real innovation here was the *criminalization* of protest
against actions that previously would have themselves been regarded as
violations.

The law doth punish man or woman

That steals the goose from off the common,

But lets the greater felon loose

That steals the common from the goose.

Nicholas Blomley
(2007)<http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=944176>
wrote
about "the consequential and often contradictory role of material objects
in producing enclosure" emphasizing "the important work that hedges did,
physically, symbolically and legally, in the dispossession of the
commoner." I would argue, as did Marx, of course, that machinery performs a
similar function of physical, symbolic and legal dispossession of labor
power from the worker as does information technology dispossess citizens of
their privacy.


This is not to say that machines or IT, any more than hedges, are
*culpable* for
the dispossession. That would be to reduce them to their physical aspect
alone. Rather it is the interaction of this physical aspect with its
symbolic and legal interpretations that resulted and results in
dispossession.

-- 
Cheers,

Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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