On Wikileaks
“When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once, when I was six, I did.”
My view is that the arguments of Assange et al are really opportunistic disguises for the baser human pleasures of gossip, nosiness, curiosity and destruction. I think it’s a particularly modern, digital, post-everything mindset, and it’s no surprise that Wikileaks’ mission resonates so well with the geekier clans of the web. It’s a hack of the diplomatic system, poking it with a stick to see what happens.
“I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die.”
It’s this damn-the-consequences mischief-making that really drives Wikileaks. (Which has become quite the misnomer - the State Department surely wishes that, like Wikipedia, it was “the free database of leaks that anyone can edit.”) This makes it a perfect match for Anonymous, the internet’s most cause-deficient rebels. Their spirited counter-attack against those who would deprive Wikileaks of hosting, domains, and cash is far from an act of principled hacktivism, but rather a successor to their DDOS attacks against blogging platform Tumblr (“they steal our memes”) and harassment of 13 year old girls.
“Leak ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.”
Anonymous loves Wikileaks because, cloudy arguments invoking freedom and democracy aside, it embarassed the powerful and created chaos where before there was order. More significantly, it was a reckless demonstration of a novel form of power, amplified through technology. Here, Anonymous and Wikileaks find true common ground - Wikileaks has no clear political aims other than to create chaos by undermining secrecy, while Anonymous has literally no aims other than to create chaos through technological sabotage.
“What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”
But what of the consequences of all this? Are we to believe the White House, who condemned the leaks as “reckless and dangerous… putting at risk the cause of human rights” or the more measured take of Secretary Gates, who described their impact as “fairly modest?”
There is only one way to know for sure. This time next year, Wikileaks must leak the flurry of classified State Department memos tracking the fall-out from this year’s leaks.
FROM: LONDON, ENGLAND
TO: STATE DEPARTMENT
DATE: DECEMBER 12, 2010
CLASSIFICATION: UNCLASSIFIED, NOFORN
= = = = = = = = = = =
1. SHIT IS FUCKED UP
= = = = = = = = = = =
Following the recent release of all the shit I wrote to you for like two fucking years straight, I’m writing to tell you that nobody is fucking talking to me anymore. Well fucking done. Recent meetings with high-level Foreign Office officals have revealed concerns that our “ongoing pillockry in the field of secure communications” may jeopardise “fucking everything,” although some positions of the British govt. were not entirely disclosed thanks to my “half-wit, smart-alec commentary” on the “obviously fucking pointless discussions” that “completely missed the fucking point of what [they] were fucking getting at.”
It was suggested that, to improve the security of our discussions, we ought to consider “just fucking making policy by ‘tweeting’ each other” or, failing that, “leaning out the window with bloody megaphones and shouting negotiating positions at each other like a bunch of complete twats.”
Finally, hi to my mom, for when she reads this.
