We live in a world where business ethics trump their moral counterparts with ease, so perhaps we shouldn’t get too upset about this. What is “this”? You may or may not be familair with the latest developments in the WikiLeaks story. If you aren’t, please feel free to browse to your heart’s content here, and come back when you’ve joined the land of the living.
Good. I’m glad to have seen so few of you leave.
Now, where was I. Ah yes. Apart from facing the condemnation of governments around the world whose normally private communications and activities have been exposed by the leaking of hundreds of thousands of previously confidential documents, WikiLeaks has been under sustained pressure from its corporate sponsors and partners, who have no doubt been put under the squeeze by the aforementioned governments.
This pressure has largely manifested itself in corporate partners abandoning WikiLeaks in the midst of this ever-intensifying fracas. Once such partner was Amazon. Amazon.com (the self-same e-retailer giant) previously hosted WikiLeaks.com, before dropping them on Wednesday, 1 December this year.
This is the spice:
Amazon.com are now selling a collated and published e-book of some 1500 files that had been leaked by WikiLeaks.
Let’s get this right. WikiLeaks are the devil, because they leak government files, and Amazon.com thinks it can get away with commercializing those same files after taking a contrary stance to WikiLeak’s actions?
Yes, that would indeed seem to be the case.
Mercifully, the web-wide outrage over this latest development seems to indicate that we haven’t sunk into the amoral mire of postmodernity just yet. The twittersphere is going ape.
But perhaps by next Christmas.
Enjoy this selection of commercial whorism and reflexive outrage on the Amazon.com WikiLeaks e-book page, below.
