In less time than it took the Beatles to make it big, WikiLeaks has dropped us all, willing or unwilling, into a Bruce Sterling wet dream. The only question now is who gets to be Jonathan Gresham: Assange, or moot?
The media’s focus on the contents of specific leaked cables (and then, as attention waned, on Assange’s sex life) is understandable: specific revelations and the controversies they trigger are the bread and butter of pop journalism. To be fair, news that US mercenaries sold children as sex slaves and billed taxpayers for the time… well, that’s worth a little chatter. Everything was by the leaked-news numbers, though, until the bottom dropped out from under WikiLeaks. After a couple days of “Meh, nothing new here,” Switzerland froze bank accounts, Interpol issued a Red Notice, PayPal and VISA locked donations, columnists called for Assange’s execution, Senators twisted Amazon’s arm until they kicked WikiLeaks from their cloud servers, and 4chan launched a retaliatory assault on the Swiss banking infrastructure.
Yes, it’s a fine time to be a shit-thrower.
It’s no wonder, though: behind the embarrassing bits there’s a real war going on. Assange and the WikiLeaks posse don’t care about changing policy, about targeting corrupt officials, or even revealing specific abuses. Unlike traditionally motivated leakers, they’re taking the long view:
Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial….
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….
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 as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
Simply put? The details don’t matter, and the ripple effects of any specific revelation are unimportant. The current actions of a given state aren’t the problem to fight: it’s the future success of a potential conspiracy that must be stopped, by crippling its ability to communicate efficiently.
[This campaign] represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.
In that light, the speed and the ferocity of the government crackdown is no shock. Like all asymmetrical conflicts, though, the dangers of disproportionate response are significant. Can the powers that be put the genie back in the bottle before they annoy everyone else?