I Could Never Sell

My favorite story in Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies isn’t there. I lost some time looking. It’s the perfect groundswell story, I thought, so that’s where I looked.

The book by Forrester research talks mainly about business, the groundswell in business:

Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook.

If your new mop looks great and costs less but the refills are expensive, people will know. If your mortgage company underestimates how long the paperwork takes, people will know.

So clean up that mop!

But to my mind the best groundswell story is about the authorities that rule our lives.

“Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching,” said Thomas Jefferson, when the threat and hope that people will know depended on a primitive press:

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

– Thomas Jefferson

So I apologize to everyone I’ve sent to Groundswell for this story. Here, to my mind, is the groundswell’s greatest triumph to date:

In Trafigura Case, The Guardian and Twitter Untie Gag Order

– New York Times 19 October 2009

TWITTER has been credited with helping to organize political protests and shine a light on abuses around the world. At the same time, the ubiquitous service has been criticized for disrespecting the sanctity of once-private halls of deliberation — whether a criminal jury’s chambers or an N.B.A. locker room.

In the rarest of cases, apparently, Twitter can do both. That is the view of the editor of The Guardian in London, Alan Rusbridger, who, after prevailing in a legal fight over the publication of secret documents, wrote that “the Twittersphere blew away conventional efforts to buy silence,” as a headline on his column (see it here) put it.

Last month, a British judge ruled that material obtained by Guardian journalists about a multinational corporation had to be kept secret. Unlike other such injunctions, however, the “gag order” applied to the existence of the injunction itself. That is, The Guardian was forbidden to report that it had been gagged.

How clever of the company caught dumping toxins near a large African city, toxins that sent 85 thousand men, women, and children for medical help, and sent, at last count, eight to their deaths. Get sued in court, rather than reported in the news. Then for just the price of your legal team, you can bury the scandal for years in a landfill of sealed court documents.

How many more such stories do we know nothing of? We have no way of knowing. Some enormously wealthy companies have gone to great lengths to make sure.

But the groundswell may put an end to this trick, just as rising water chased rats out of hiding on the sinking Titanic. May the groundswell turn all such hideouts inside out.

The gag order should have kept the news from reporting that it had been gagged. This “superinjunction” was meant to defeat the groundswell:

“Presumably the reason for this expansive intrusion into liberty is the theory that in the Internet era any clue to the origin of information will lead to the information becoming available and easily accessed,” James Edelman, a media law expert at Oxford University, wrote in an e-mail message.

A desperate last stand for secrecy, surrounded by the groundswell!

Remember attending a ceremony in formal clothes you had outgrown by just a few pounds since the time before, and tugging at the seat of your pants every so often to hide the bad fit? That’s what everyone remembers of the ceremony in your honor: you tugging at the seat of your pants, forever tugging at the excess of weight trapped inside.

Secrecy sunk the way the Titanic did, with the waters topping one floodgate and then the next and the next:

An informer (whistleblower) gave the report to a venerable British newspaper, The Guardian, but the company raced to court to silence the Guardian.

[When] … a preliminary scientific analysis of what might have been dumped, ordered by Trafigura’s lawyers, … fell into the hands of a reporter for The Guardian, Trafigura asked a judge to protect it, saying it was a confidential communication with lawyers for the company. Furthermore, Trafigura argued, any statements the report contained had been superseded by later, more reliable testing.

Does this remind you of the movie Michael Clayton, as it does me? Where the consummate hush-up man, the fixer Michael Clayton, turns about-face…

Stymied at the Guardian, the informer gave the report to a website devoted to exposing official misconduct or incompetence, and uncovering cover-ups. A website based in America, beyond the reach of British courts.

Now the groundswell, the unstoppable groundswell!

A member of Parliament stood to ask a question about the report found at that website. May the Guardian then report those remarks made in Parliament? The Guardian scrupulously examined its conscience on that question. Perplexed, it asked readers just what duty the paper did or did not owe to them.

Readers raised a storm on Twitter, sending the web address of the report far and wide. They also

…used a new tool from Google, Sidewiki, to post comments alluding to the controversy on the Web sites of Trafigura and its law firm, Carter-Ruck.

Reporting this, The Guardian lamented that it could not safely RT or “retweet” (repeat) the web address of that report:

Oh Wikileaks, I would so love to RT you, and would get into so much trouble if I did.

Now even the most backward of readers could not fail to find the report for himself, given that clue.

The rest is history!

And, in the groundswell, for good or ill, secrecy itself is history.

===