Wikilinks
by zunguzungu
Zeynep Tufekci argues that “What the Wikileaks furor shows us is that a dissent tax is emerging on the Internet”:
…the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a “quasi-public sphere,” where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent…During these past weeks [we have seen] the crumbling of the facade of a flat, equal, open Internet and the revelation of an Internet which has corporate power occupying its key crossroads, ever-so-sensitive to any whiff of displeasure by the state. I saw an Internet in danger of becoming merely an interactive version of the television in terms of effective freedom of speech. Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech–it’s just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard. Until the Internet, the right to be heard was in most cases reserved to the governments, deep pockets, and corporate media. Before the Internet, trees fell in lonely forests.
The Wikileaks furor shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and surely taking control of the key junctures of the Internet. As a mere “quasi-public sphere,” the Internet is somewhat akin to shopping malls, which seem like public spaces but in which the rights of citizens are restricted, as they are in fact private. If you think the freedom of the Internet could never be taken back, I implore you to read the history of radio. Technologies that start out as peer-to-peer and citizen-driven can be and have been taken over by corporate and state power…
The real cause for concern is the emergence of an Internet in which arbitrary Terms-of-Service can be selectively employed by large corporations to boot content they dislike. What is worrisome is an Internet in which it is very easy to marginalize and choke information. The fact that information is “there” in a torrent, or openly on a website that is not easily accessible or has been vilified, is about as relevant as your right to shout at your TV.
It has become obvious that, increasingly, contentious content is going to require infrastructure far above and beyond what is necessary to support content that is mainstream, power-friendly, or irrelevant. And further, contentious content will likely be cut off from being funded through people-power, as was shown by the speed with which Paypal, Mastercard and Visa, representing almost all the conventional and easy ways to send money over the Internet, moved to cut off Wikileaks.
And Bruce Sterling, who knows from cyberpunkage, also just produced a wonderful precis for a novel about Wikileaks; it’s fun to read, and it even bears a distinct resemblance to reality (if reality were a Bruce Sterling novel):
Then there is Julian Assange, who is a pure-dye underground computer hacker. Julian doesn’t break into systems at the moment, but he’s not an “ex-hacker,” he’s the silver-plated real deal, the true avant-garde. Julian is a child of the underground hacker milieu, the digital-native as twenty-first century cypherpunk. As far as I can figure, Julian has never found any other line of work that bore any interest for him.
Through dint of years of cunning effort, Assange has worked himself into a position where his “computer crimes” are mainly political. They’re probably not even crimes. They are “leaks.” Leaks are nothing special. They are tidbits from the powerful that every journalist gets on occasion, like crumbs of fishfood on the top of the media tank.
Only, this time, thanks to Manning, Assange has brought in a massive truckload of media fishfood. It’s not just some titillating, scandalous, floating crumbs. There’s a quarter of a million of them. He’s become the one-man global McDonald’s of leaks.
Ever the detail-freak, Assange in fact hasn’t shipped all the cables he received from Manning. Instead, he cunningly encrypted the cables and distributed them worldwide to thousands of fellow-travellers. This stunt sounds technically impressive, although it isn’t. It’s pretty easy to do, and nobody but a cypherpunk would think that it made any big difference to anybody. It’s part and parcel of Assange’s other characteristic activities, such as his inability to pack books inside a box while leaving any empty space.
While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.
(Update, 12/23): This was more or less my response, both to the Bruce Sterling piece and, tangentially, to the Jaron Lanier piece that Zeynep Tufekci was responding to:
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised any more by the persistent misrepresentation of what Assange is after. No matter how many times you repeat “The goal is justice, transparency is just a means to an end”, people with a vested interest in the status quo will reframe you as a radical advocate for transparency. Here, Bruce Sterling claims to read the tea leaves to divine the deep mystery of Assange’s motivations based on Bruce’s familiarity with other people who he thinks resemble him. Maybe could we dispense with the crystal ball and actually read what Assange has written about what he is doing and listen to his public statements? 4chan and the hacker community could also learn something, since they’ve rallied around him as a symbol for an orthodox hacker ideology that he actually seems disagree with, and has ejected people from his organization for inflexibly adhering to. And for good reason, because the hacker philosophy was never genuinely radical or subversive, it never adopted any political position like justice, it stuck to the safe waters of meta-politics: information should be available, politics should be conducted transparently, all voices should be heard, etc.
Assange sticks his head above this bland crowd of empty slogan-chanters and dares to stand for something, and this cannot stand, liberals and progressives shout him down because they’ve accepted Hollywood’s ideological framing of evil as the sincere non-ironic attachment to a belief. Every movie villain believes in a cause, the good ordinary people ultimately defeat him, but not in the name some other true belief, but simply to preserve the status quo, so that the neoliberal capitalist system should continue unmolested. The failure of the Democratic party to offer any true alternative is therefore not the fault of craven centrists, blue dogs, etc., rather it is the left wing who is playing at radical politics while secretly depending on the fact that the “sensible” moderates will win out in the end. They’ll write a lengthy blog post complaining that Obama hasn’t done enough to free us from the corporate oligarchy, then we step out to catch a matinee and cheer the defeat of a fantasy villain by the forces of the status quo.
No wonder that every liberal Wikileaks opponent or advocate for the importance of discretion and secrecy eventually outs themselves as a believer that the US as a force for good in the world. One huge benefit is that the Wikileaks issue is a line in the sand for the left, we know where you stand.
(Update 12/23): Gabriella Coleman’s excellent response to Bruce Sterling should be read in its entirety.
Tufekci raises a pressing concern; Sterling may get a novel out of this, but to judge from the piece, his attempts at characterisation are terribly stereotyped. And it is irresponsible to sling such labels as ‘sociopath’ about publicly without a great deal more expertise, understanding, and close observation.
Continuing the conversation from Twitter …
As somebody who’s been in touch with the cypherpunk community since the 1990s, and more recently spent a lot of time hanging out with the computer security community, I thought Bruce Sterling’s essay added a lot to the discussion. As ladyada said in a comment
Points taken about ways it could have been better. But focusing too much on what’s not there, you can miss the importance of what is. The Julian Assange of today evolved as a black hat hacker in the cypherpunk/hacker culture that Bruce has chronicled for years. When you look at him from that lens, his stated goals only matter insofar as they give insight to his strategy, tactics, or temporary alliances. Why are you so sure Julian is honest and accurate about his intentions in his writing? Why are you so sure he fully understands his own motivations? In that aspect Bruce’s essay is a good counterbalance to yours.
Focusing on what’s not there: facts. A lens is precisely that, and a character assessment requires a bit more than mere conjecture based on a hodgepodge of media accounts, familiarity with a particular community (how many of us would like to be reduced merely to a group identity, and one moreover 20 years out-of-date?), and illogic (‘Assange was in prison for a while lately, and his best friend in the prison was his Mom. That seems rather typical of him.’). Take this last: First, on what is it based? His mum’s visits to prison? Or her rather understandable maternal pleas? A spouse or parent has an easier time getting permission to visit someone in prison. Second, why should this make her his best friend? Sterling seems to believe
that someone should have been beating his or her breast outside the prison gates. And even if it were true that Assange has no close personal freinds, what bearing does this have on the implications of Wikileaks? Aside, of course, for providing a nice touch for a novelist.
Focusing on what’s there: the hacker lens, which is an interesting perspective, no doubt, but terribly one-sided. Of course no one can assume Assange’s honesty and self-understanding as given, but the following misses the point:
‘Assange is no more a “journalist” than he is a crypto mathematician. He’s a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident.’
We are now in the process of redefining what journalism means in the 21st century, and dismissing Assange as a hacker sidesteps this very crucial debate.
I hear what you’re saying … to me it seems like you’re expecting The Blast Zone to be something it isn’t. It’s a Bruce Sterling rant, with a mix of stuff that rings true and stuff that falls flat. Facts? Fleshed-out arguments? Different genre.
To be clear I’m really not trying to defend the essay; I largely agree with Gabriella’s critique, the one in The Economist, and the commenters in Bruce’s thread who said the post made him seem old and bitter. And totally agreed that the 90s hacker culture isn’t the only relevant lens; I was talking about this with my SO who analogized it to one of her radical law school professors who was always going on about the 60s.
On the other hand, I do think that understanding about the security community and black hats is vital for understanding what’s going on. Bruce could have done a lot better job … but nobody else has even been discussing it as far as I know. Julian, Adrian Lamo (who turned Bradley Manning in) and Kevin Poulsen of Wired (who reported on the Lamo/Manning discussions and other aspects of Wikileaks) all have black hat backgrounds and almost everybody with security experience agrees that you have to filter all of their statements through this awareness.
And ditto for cypherpunks. Phil Ebersole does a good job at setting Wikileaks in context of the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, but once again I hadn’t seen any discusson of Tim May’s manifesto or the cypherpunk philosophy in much of the coverage. Again I agree that Bruce doesn’t do the discussion justice (ignoring Barlow and the EFF), but there’s some very useful in what he has written.
> We are now in the process of redefining what journalism means in the 21st century, and dismissing Assange as a hacker sidesteps this very crucial debate.
I agree that Sterling’s wrong to say Assange isn’t a journalist; but I think it’s equally wrong to say he’s not a hacker — or to thikn of seeing him that way as “dismissing” him.
Good discussion!
hacktivism is a New Paradigm.
hactivists > journalists
Hackers are showing how much power they wield in the Information Age. They know the ins and outs of cotepmur networks even better than the engineers who set them up. They are meting out the same unfair persecution they feel is being directed at Wikileaks. They don’t hate free speech and free association; they are sending a message about their superior power to disrupt free speech and free association on the internet. Just think of it as cyber shock and awe. -1Was this answer helpful?
jeezus h keeyrist inna handcart dont you read this site?
Assanges mission statement has garnered at least six posts by Aaron.
stupid cudlip.
i feel like a talking parrot at this point, but what we see happening is PART OF ASSANGES DESIGN.
Linear system failure can be choked off at fail points….non-linear system collapse cannot be stopped as easily. for example, bailing the banks didnt fix the economy. Systems that fail linearly have break points that maybe used to halt the failure, ex. clearing a fire break in front of a forest fire to keep it from jumping.
Systems that fail non-linearly can still fail even if you repair parts of the system. Say, propping up the banks, but consumer demand falls of anyways causing mass bankruptcies that lead to the banks failing anyways.
the same thing is happening with the American modern security state.
for example, closing gitmo is a single point in a non-linear system collapse.
it wont work.
we will still become a police state on our way to non-linear system collapse. at least that is what Assange believes.
Assange is doing to America in cyberspace EXACTLY what OBL did in meatspace– causing non-linear system collapse.
the systemkiller is WAI.
I do not see how the left, see it as an elusive channel information using the Internet as a means and not an end and I disagree when it comes to relationship status, the public and corporations, the things seen here in Brazil seem to have another view or another dimension of in fact everything seems so confusing. I hope to get in touch with colleagues.
You have to know about the secret Wikileaks diamons that are the original source of the Wikileaks content. These diamons are all owned by Jimmy Wales’ company.* WikiLeaks.com* WikiLeaks.net* WikiLeaks.biz* WikiLeaks.mobi* WikiLeaks.us -1Was this answer helpful?