A California court order takes Wikileaks down, over a juicy story linking a venerable Swiss bank to money laundering – something that the bank possibly has no idea is a perfect web conspiracy meme.
This makes everyone who has never heard of Wikileaks now know about its existence and at the time of this post, the site, stripped of its domain name, available at its skeletal Swedish IP: http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks is now down – not because the court demands it, but because it cannot handle the traffic.
Thanks to the court order, Wikileaks is here to stay, because of the will of the majority, not the powerful or vocal.
In the same way, Wikipedia is refusing to take down pictures of Mohammed and Scientologists have, for the first time, failed to carry through with threats to sue, over leaked videos of Tom Cruise.
However trivial or small scale these examples may seem at the moment, like someone refusing to move on a bus, my bet is that this is a genuine phenomenon with far reaching implications. These actions represent the will of the majority, independent of legal loopholes, swarm democracy with direct rather than elected representation. The middle man of the parliament, congress, assembly or court has been removed. The Internet is redefining the role of many middle men, from music industry executives to realtors, but this is the top of the pile.
It will be interesting to see if it remains benign, swarm democracy rather than mob rule, but if you buy the democracy schtick, then you have to allow it to be tested.