The Information Genie NEVER Goes Back in the Bottle

Over just the last couple of months the world has seen two different groups of ideologues resort to criminal actions designed to punish and stifle those who tried to convey information or provide entertainment that they found objectionable. The North Koreans went to great lengths to hack into the computers at Sony Pictures and intimidate executives and employees there, in order to prevent the studio from releasing The Interview, a movie that pokes fun at North Korea’s “Glorious Leader” Kim Jong Un.

And a few weeks later, in a completely separate and unrelated incident, a small group of Islamic extremists staged a violent attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve people in its Paris office as a reprisal for the magazine’s having published cartoons of Muhammad, a religious sacrilege.

Both these groups – the North Koreans and the Islamic extremists – were trying to suppress the release of information. So, how did they do? How effective were their actions?

Well, the North Koreans can’t be too happy with the fact that Sony released The Interview to the world anyway, making it available for online streaming at a nominal price even before it showed in theaters (a first for Hollywood). While a few big theater chains in the US chose not to play the movie, at least not according to its original schedule, news reports about the North Koreans’ ham-fisted bullying actually had exactly the reverse effect from what the hackers intended, ramping up public demand for the movie. Because of the North Koreans' own actions, people who would otherwise have had little interest in the film suddenly had their attention drawn to it, so that within the first few days of its online release it generated millions of viewings and $15 million in revenue.

And Charlie Hebdo? Immediately following the killings, the magazine chose to thumb its nose at the attackers, publishing a special edition with even more Muhammad cartoons. In France, this special edition sold a million printed copies within the first few hours of its availability, and the magazine is now publishing at least another six million copies to satisfy worldwide demand from people who, before the horror of the extremists’ attacks, had never even heard of Charlie Hebdo. So now people all over the world are clicking on Charlie Hebdo’s website to view more Muhammad cartoons, triggering renewed disapproval and demonstrations from Muslims everywhere, including mainstream Muslims who are now more incensed than ever. So again, it appears that the extremists’ efforts to smother this information had the exact opposite effect. Instead of suppressing these sacrilegious cartoons, the attacks drew the entire world’s attention to them.

Before you condemn me for taking sides in either one of these disputes, let me say first that each of these media companies is guilty of extremely poor taste. Sony knew that it was producing a movie based on planning an assassination of a current, specifically named political leader, which would be vulgar and tacky for any established movie studio. And Charlie Hebdo’s editorial team certainly knew that cartoons poking fun at the Prophet were deeply offensive to Muslims all over the world. They had had intense debates about the propriety of this subject, well before the attacks.

But whether you favor the “freedom of speech” that allows such objectionable views to be aired or not – that is, regardless of whether you think Sony or Charlie Hebdo were right or wrong – it cannot be denied that both the North Koreans and the Islamic extremists failed, and they failed quite spectacularly. They tried to suppress information and what really happened was that the information they were trying to suppress was disseminated even further, as a result of their actions!

The lesson here is that our very connectivity makes it completely impossible to put the information genie back in its bottle once it gets out – not Islamic extremists, not the North Koreans, not the US in its efforts to stifle leaks by Edward Snowden, and not Madonna in her effort to contain the leak of her most recent album. In today’s hyper-connected world, information wants to be free. Once it gets free, it will always remain free, and every connected person in the entire world will be just a click away from it.

Perhaps Joe Rogan’s character on Newsradio, the NBC comedy from a few years ago, said it best. In what is perhaps one of my all-time favorite lines to quote, Rogan said: “Dude, you can’t take something off the Internet...that’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”

Indeed.