From the Flip the Media Blog:
Writing in 2006 as the president of a then unnamed NGO and Australia’s “most infamous former hacker,” Julian Assange noted that “foresight requires trustworthy information about the current state of the world, cognitive ability to draw predictive inferences and economic stability to give them a meaningful home… secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten into the first requirement of foresight (‘truth and lots of it’).”
He then noted that “foresight can produce outcomes that leave all major interests groups better off. Likewise the lack of it, or doing the dumb thing, can harm almost everyone. Computer scientists have long had a great phrase for the dependency of foresight on trustworthy information; ‘garbage in, garbage out.”
That phrase would recur in Assange’s writings later that year. On December 6th, he published on his personal website an essay on state conspiracies in which he wrote “Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called ‘the Fox News effect.’”
Wherever on the political spectrum Assange situates his more anarchist tendencies, his reference to Fox News is confusing. On the one hand, he is obviously linking Fox News’ rather tendentious relationship to political reality to pejorative terms like distortion and disinformation.
On the other hand, there must be something about the functional consequences of this practice that appealed to Assange, because he goes on to adopt the same language to describe positively a potential set of responses to state conspiracy:
To deal with powerful conspiratorial actions we must think ahead and attack the process that leads to them since the actions themselves can not be dealt with. We can deceive or blind a conspiracy by distorting or restricting the information available to it. We can reduce total conspiratorial power via unstructured attacks on links or through throttling and separating. A conspiracy sufficiently engaged in this manner is no longer able to comprehend its environment and plan robust action.”
Wikileaks was launched in December of 2006 as well, and it is within this context that we should consider Assange’s concerns about state conspiracies. For Assange, conspiracies are terribly banal. In effect, any sufficiently developed governing agency conspires as part of its nature. Authority breeds authoritarian impulses which are necessarily predicated upon conspiracy, whether the conspiracy involves fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction or simple backroom dealing between politically connected agents. Wikileaks is, in effect, the actualization of the solution – distorting, throttling, separating – that Assange had previously hypothesized in the above essay.
Indeed, on December 31st, in his last personal post of 2006, Assange suggested that reading his essay on state conspiracy “while thinking about how different structures of power are differentially affected by leaks” will help its “motivations…become clearer.” The goal of his writing and ostensibly of Wikileaks is to crush conspiracy by making it paranoid of itself:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive ‘secrecy tax’) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power…
It is really only in this context that we can begin to understand the problems posed by the recent #wikileaks story. It is increasingly common to hear that #wikileaks is a watershed moment in Internet history, that it comprises the frontline battle in the first global information war, all because of the unparalleled response to WikiLeaks on the part of the world’s governments.
But this response, this overreaction, this sense of responding to a threat was, if we believe its founder, the core motivation for the site’s development in the first place. It was a site designed to provoke, to impose a “secrecy tax” and produce “system decline” in governments that were, by definition, conspiracies. As such, we might do better to be shocked not by the outrage expressed by various governments, politicians and pundits, but instead to be shocked by how long it took them to take the bait.
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