The real point of wikileaks

At our Christmas party, a good friend pointed out that one of the most important things that establishment media has managed to do in the whole wikileaks story is to make Julian Assange the major character. In this way, we spend our time debating a) whether he is a vile rapist or an heroic destroyer of state and corporate hierarchies, or: b) whether he should have released all of the information that he did, only one some of it (ie., the stuff that we would want released.)

But arguing over what Assange should have done, versus what he did do, rather misses the bigger point, which is that whether we like this or not, the future that we see in terms of information is going to look a lot more like the wikileaks world than what preceeded it, absent some sort of radical (and frankly unlikely, because ultimately unworkable) regime of censorship. It doesn't depend on the moral code of a single computer hacker from Australia, no matter how brilliant he might be. To that point, the point needs to be emphasized that young Bradley Manning (An Oklahoma Boy! A gay, Oklahoma atheist who is now an international celebrity for attacking American global power! You would have to live here to know how weird it is to write those words) is at least as important to the story as Assange. Think about this: Manning was a Private. He told people he was downloading some Lady Gaga music. They patted him on the head and let him walk out the door. But then, what were they supposed to do? I'm guessing that he's not the only disaffected young person currently in the employ of the American government. They can't possibly keep tabs on all of them. They can reduce the ability of such people to access important information, and that in turn will also hamper their responsiveness and their ability to draw on the resources of everyone who is not planning to send classified information to international whistle-blowers.

In short, wikileaks needs to seen within a wider cultural moment, one that includes both a set of understandings about our relation to power and the current tools available to those who wish to challenge that power. A good place to start with this is Assange's own argument:

"Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes,
we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite not merely for prefer-
ment or favor within the regime but as the primary planning methodology be-
hind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power."

Let's drop the pejorative terms for a moment and recast this. Modern bureaucratic institutions operate under a certain degree of secrecy as a general operating procedure. Within an information economy, power will often accrue to those who are able to get information about other people or groups, while minimizing the amount of information that they allow others to gather about them. If I know something about you (for example, a "tell" that you give off when you are trying to lie), and you don't know that I know it, then that information may prove valuable to me at some point. So a premium is put upon gaining information, and keeping from others what information you have. This is true of individuals (as Erving Goffman long ago realized) and is it true of institutions: all institutions, note, and not simply authoritarian ones. All other things being equal, secrecy is a rational communicative strategy.

What complicates the picture is that in some cases openness is also a good strategy, both for individuals and for organizations. (To be sure, this is something that new media prophets have trumpeted since the early 1990s, but after all they can't be wrong about everything.) Openness allows information from the environment to enter into the organization, which can then respond to it. Completely closed systems are notoriously short-lived because they cannot adapt to inevitable changes in the environment which, unlike their internal workings, they cannot control.

This push and pull between secrecy and openness is part of the communication dynamics of any person or group. To the extent that the entity opts for greater secrecy, then it can increasingly be described by Assange's description of "authoritarian." This gives it certain strengths vis-a-vis competitors but also creates certain weaknesses (witness the fate of the old Soviet Union).

What wikileaks seems to portend is an information environment in which the secrecy option is impossible. If pressed to its logical limits, wikileaks presents two options for the state or corporation that wishes to keep secrets. One, clamp down on information flows so tightly that nothing gets out, which means clamping down on them so severely that the organization itself cannot operate. Two, give up the strategy of secrecy. Acknowledge that the war of information--in which you try to get information on others and keep them from getting anything from you--is simply impossible. You will lose that power, of course, but because everyone is playing by the same rules you also don't have to worry about the power of others. It is a frankly utopian scheme, of course, but utopias can be influential as ideals rather than actual destinations.

The October wikileaks releases were interesting primarily because so many of them had so little practical impact: they were essentially diplomatic gossip. They embarrassed the US government but little more than that. Compare this to the video released of the helicopter attack on civilians in April: documentary evidence of what seemed to be an actual war crime. Yet in the long run, the former will be more important than the latter. Governments can always deal with isolated scandals. First, so few of the population actually pays attention. Second, precisely because it is a localized incident, it can be declared an "issue," solutions can be created. But think about the position of an American diplomat now. Is anyone every going to write memos as frank and revealing as those? I think that this sort of communication will, at best, be severely curtailed. Defenders of the diplomatic core say this is precisely the problem, but again, I don't know that simply decrying the event will actually solve anything. Now everyone nows this is a possibility: that some pissed-off little weasel working in some low-level bureaucratic job will get her hands on the snarky note you wrote about David Cameron and then it's on the front page of the New York Times. And this will still be true even if the feds manage to shut down wikileaks. You can't shut down the whole web.

Assange clearly believes that this sort of world is, when all is said and down, going to be a better world than the one we live in now. He doesn't buy the idea that they are good secrets and bad ones, and that we only need to be about exposing the latter. Any time that you keep information hidden, you are in the end not doing it for anyone's benefit but your own, and even if you don't end up using it for nefarious ends, you could. The best thing is to shine a light on it all. That ideology, obviously, is not his alone. A variation of it comes through in almost every public announcement that Zuckerberg, or any of the Facebook people, make. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it is mirrored in many of my students' attitudes to privacy, which seem lackadasical at best. If they are not actually proponents of information sharing, they are remarkably unconcerned about businesses or states gathering information on them. They seem to think that it will be done anyhow, so why worry?

The question is whether the idea of identifying secrecy with power is correct. After all, power was able to use many of the techniques and ideologies of freedom in the early modern period to exercise new forms of control over populations. It is not clear at all that it cannot use the craze for openness to similar purposes. I am reminded of something from Eugene Zamyatin's dystopian novel We. In Zamyatin's new world, all of the houses in the city are built of glass, the better to allow the police to look in and check on what you are doing. But of course, we may not need the state, or even the corporation, to do that. We may end up policing ourselves.