Saturday December 3, 2022; 8:33 PM EST
- Launched in 2008, Posterous was a blogging platform that I remember best for its commitment to simple posting. As I recall, once you had an account, you could use their writing tool if you wished, or you could just send an email to a custom address linked to your account. Write what you want to write, post it in an email to your custom address, and it would in short order pop up as a blog post.#
- I remember talking about blogging late in that decade in a public forum where I was telling people about the Guardian's efforts to uncover the toxic waste dumping in the Ivory Coast by the Trafigura corporation. Trafigura was protected by British libel laws for quite a while, along with a gag order from their Supreme Court, until a member of Parliament quietly (implicitly, cleverly) asked about the case in an official question session in Parliament. This became part of the official public record.#
- The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, wrote a single tweet saying that the newspaper was being prevented from reporting on the work of Parliament, which is supposed to be a basic press duty and freedom in that country, protected by legal precedent. He had about 7,000 followers at the time, and at least one of them understood that there was a chance to figure out what thing the Guardian couldn't say by skimming through recent days in the Hansard, the equivalent of the U.S. Congressional Record. #
- Sure enough, in less than an hour after Rusbridger's tweet, using the online Hansard, the fellow spotted the likely topic, the thing the paper probably couldn't talk about. He had the knowledge and skills the locate this information. Then he tweeted a reply to Rusbridger's tweet saying, roughly, I bet he's talking about Trafigura.#
- The idea that the British press couldn't report on work being done in Parliament was an affront to lots of people, and some good number of them spent that evening and night digging up everything they could find about Trafigura, including portions of the toxic dumping story. They published what they found and figured out together right through the night. By morning the word Trafigura was trending on European Twitter, and a portion of the information the Guardian was prohibited from mentioning had been made public. In a couple more days, the paper persuaded the Supreme Court of England and Wales that the story was out--thanks in part to Wikileaks--and that the gag order was now meaningless as well as unconstitutional and must be rescinded. The Court agreed, and a few minutes later a confidential chemical analysis of the materials Trafigura had wanted to dump was available to be read on the Guardian's website.#
- So, the activism, the commitment, the knowledge of things like the Hansard, the affiliation of bloggers and researchers and the press, the knowledge of how to pass around information skillfully on social media, and how to post longer pieces online--skills and tools like this added up to a few days of political action and success. It also mattered that the Courts were not corrupt.#
- That was all much more elaborate than Posterous, but Posterous had a kindred spirit, to some degree. Everyone should have the tools to publish, their team suggested. If you could send an email, you could publish. A huge number of people could, potentially, join in the exchange of valuable information, starting with that.#
- They'd need to know more, but that sort of thing offered such a low price of entry. They'd need allies, and backbone, and skills, and knowledge of political action, and uncorrupted courts, and so forth. But lowering the barrier to entry was meaningful.#