The Deleuzian Philosophy of Julian Assange « Fixing the Economists. Julian Assange: A Geometry of Politics Well, I don’t know about you – but I’m getting really sick of the circus that is taking place around Assange. Even the more serious publications are taking interest in what is clearly a farce. What’s more, I’m now seeing typically affected quotes from that washed-up old pseudo-intellectual fart Hitchens turning up in the various articles I read (“Assange has but yet to consider that he, as a member of our humble species and our august culture, should not but show deference at the altar of our expansive, regal and sustaining Civilisation” – okay, that’s not a direct quote, in fact it’s probably less pretentious and thesaurus-heavy than the original… but you get the idea). So, I’m done – wake me up when the outcome is announced. In the meantime, let’s look at something far more interesting: Assange’s general philosophy, as he himself has written it.
His overarching structure is interesting too. Or again: Like this: Like Loading... Wikileaks isn't the only internet threat to governments. As example after example yesterday showed, the response of politicians, media companies, lawyers and large corporations to the interconnectedness offered by the internet has been to reach for legal sanctions to preserve their pre-digital power. Western democracies and authoritarian regimes had in common a twentieth century habit of interposing themselves between their citizens, co-opting, regulating, repressing, monitoring interaction between people for their own (frequently legitimate) ends. Capitalist society based whole industries on corporations interposing themselves for commercial gain, particularly the old media, which eagerly established themselves as the authorised medium of community communication and shared experiences (a role institutional churches had previously sought).
Greater interconnectedness threatens all of this. It flattens information-based hierarchies. It also automatically devalues information, because it deprives it of the value of scarcity. The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks - Jaron Lanier - Technology. The degree of sympathy in tech circles for both Wikileaks and Anonymous has surprised me. The most common take seems to be that the world needs cyber-pranksters to keep old-school centers of power, like governments and big companies, in check.
Cyber-activists are perceived to be the underdogs, flawed and annoying, perhaps, but standing up to overbearing power. It doesn't seem so to me. I actually take seriously the idea that the Internet can make non-traditional techie actors powerful.1 Therefore, I am less sympathetic to hackers when they use their newfound power arrogantly and non-constructively. This is an interesting difference in perception. A version of this story first appeared in the German magazine Focus. Every revolutionary these days must post a video online. The ideology that drives a lot of the online world -- not just Wikileaks but also mainstream sites like Facebook -- is the idea that information in sufficiently large quantity automatically becomes Truth.
Wikileaks Exposes Internet's Dissent Tax, not Nerd Supremacy - Zeynep Tufekci - Technology. Jaron Lanier's recent lengthy essay about Wikileaks is not really about Wikileaks; thus, it is unsurprising that he misses the central lesson of this affair. From the beginning, he makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations; he then takes off on a dystopic vision of a world dominated by an imagined "nerd supremacist" ethic of complete transparency, collapse of private life, and unrestricted information flow, in which humanity is the slave of the machine. Horrifying as this vision is, it simply distracts from the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a "dissent tax" on content they find objectionable.
But how is this in any way but the most tangential connected to Wikileaks? Nerd Power vs. Bruce Sterling. Michael Bruce Sterling (born April 14, 1954) is an American science fiction author who is best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology. This work helped to define the cyberpunk genre.[2] Writings[edit] His first novel, Involution Ocean, published in 1977, features the world, Nullaqua where all the atmosphere is contained in a single, miles-deep crater. The story concerns a ship sailing on the ocean of dust at the bottom, which hunts creatures called dustwhales that live beneath the surface.
From the late 1970s onwards, Sterling wrote a series of stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe: the solar system is colonised, with two major warring factions. He recently contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. From April 2009 through May 2009, he was an editor at Cool Tools.[5] His most recent novel (as of 2013) is Love Is Strange (December 2012), a Paranormal Romance (40k). Projects[edit] Bert Olivier Panopticism, Facebook, the 'information bomb', and Wikileaks. In previous posts, I have argued that, at this stage, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Facebook has succeeded in exposing users to more (potential, if not probable) attention from companies marketing commodities or services than they probably anticipated, have no more than financial or economic objectives, but that the potential for extensive social control or psychological manipulation is vast.
Moreover, just as, in the panoptical prison, where inmates monitor their own behaviour (on the assumption of their constant surveillance by warders with full visual access to them), indications are that individuals are increasingly engaging in a form of “normalising” self-monitoring of behaviour via voluntary self-exposure on internet sites such as Facebook. The same is true, in a related manner, of “normalising judgement” and the “examination’. What led Virilio to this insight? Does this description not neatly fit Facebook and MySpace? Bert Olivier » What the WikiLeaks affair tells us about communication.
The world recently became even more complex. In days gone by, personal disgruntlement and consequent “disloyalty” on the part of diplomatic staff in possession of “sensitive” material (and therefore capable of, if not likely, to divulge this to adversaries), sometimes threatened relations between countries — that much has not changed. What has changed, however — and this has made governments vulnerable to citizens’ legitimate criticism as never before (which is a good thing) — is that the sheer extent of potentially embarrassing and even “endangering” information that can be divulged by anyone motivated to do so (for any of a number of reasons), as well as the public reach of any such exposé, has been shown to be vastly in excess of what was previously possible. And that, thanks to an invention that was initially developed by the US military: the internet.
Make no mistake, therefore. Many Europeans Find U.S. Attacks on WikiLeaks Puzzling. WikiLeaks, Ideological Legitimacy and the Crisis of Empire by Francis Shor. By Francis Shor TruthOut While empires try to maintain their hegemony through economic and military prowess, they must also rely on a form of ideological legitimacy to guarantee their rule. Such legitimacy is often embedded in the geopolitical reputation of the empire among its allies and reluctant admirers. Once that reputation begins to unravel, the empire appears illegitimate. The establishment of the US empire in the aftermath of World War II built upon its economic and military supremacy.
That empire created an architecture of financial and geopolitical institutions that served not only its own interests, but also those of global capital and international legal and democratic structures. There were, of course, myriad contradictions that materialized throughout the earliest cold war period, but much of the West accepted the general framework and ideological legitimacy of the empire.
Reprinted with permission from TruthOut. January 5, 2011 Francis Shor is the author of Dying Empire: U. How to Think About WikiLeaks - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. This is a regularly updated post. It was first published 12/8/2010 at 11:51am. Its time-stamp indicates when it was last changed. In the days since WikiLeaks began releasing a small percentage of its cache of 250,000 cables sent by State Department officials, many people have tried to think through the event's implications for politics, media, and national security.
Writers pulling at the knot of press freedom, liberty, nationalism, secrecy and security that sits at the center of the debate have produced dozens of fantastic pieces. Send suggestions to amadrigal[at]theatlantic.com. For clarity's sake, I'm sorting this archive into four sections. Kim Zetter on WikiLeaks' finances. WikiLeaks' expenditures have risen dramatically in the last five months, from a paltry $38,000 between October 2009 and July 2010 to more than $495,000 in the last five months, according to a foundation that manages most of the organization's donations. And this brings us back to the Nobel Peace Prize. C. LRB · Slavoj Žižek · Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks. In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin.
It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? In the film, the district attorney, Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante who is corrupted and himself commits murders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his friend police commissioner Gordon realise that the city’s morale would suffer if Dent’s murders were made public, so plot to preserve his image by holding Batman responsible for the killings. The film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder the only figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain. The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask, convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? WikiLeaks cannot be seen in the same way. Are we living in the end times? Zizek Al Jazeera English. Who is Behind Wikileaks? “World bankers, by pulling a few simple levers that control the flow of money, can make or break entire economies.
By controlling press releases of economic strategies that shape national trends, the power elite are able to not only tighten their stranglehold on this nation’s economic structure, but can extend that control world wide. Those possessing such power would logically want to remain in the background, invisible to the average citizen.” (Aldous Huxley) Wikleaks is upheld as a breakthrough in the battle against media disinformation and the lies of the US government. Unquestionably, the released documents constitute an important and valuable data bank. The documents have been used by critical researchers since the outset of the Wikileaks project. In October 2010, WikiLeaks was reported to have released some 400,000 classified Iraq war documents, covering events from 2004 to 2009 (Tom Burghardt, The WikiLeaks Release: U.S.
But there is more than meets the eye. David E. Wikileaks Beyond Wikileaks? | Mute magazine. Corporate media buys you off only if you pose a real danger – radical and subversive to ‘power’. While attacking Wikileaks for corporate collusion, therefore, its original radical potential cannot be overlooked. Wikileaks’ close collaboration with big corporate media and the ‘redactions’ raise serious doubts over whether information is actually flowing freely (Michel Chossudovsky, ‘Who is Behind Wikileaks?’ Dec 13, 2010, Global Research). And yet the Wikileaks’ intervention cannot be cast away in a cynical manner – the only way to welcome it however is by saving it from Wikileaks itself, in particular from its liberal slide. Let us problematise the kind of politics or the ‘attacks on power’ which Wikileaks represents, even as stories circulate about corporate-funding and CIA-backing. Power is identified only at the top, and it is as though it is in place only through hiding the truth, through manipulation, deceiving the public.
Radically subversive Elite radicalism saroj_giri AT yahoo.com. WikiLeaks en The Guardian: Verslag van een moeizame samenwerking. Julian Assange, oprichter en voorman van WikiLeaks De WikiLeaks-onthullingen van 2010 ontlenen hun kracht mede aan de samenwerking tussen rebellen van het web en journalisten van traditionele printmedia van internationale naam en faam. Maar die samenwerking was van meet af aan moeizaam, en eindigde in ruzies en verwijten over en weer – door de enorme mentaliteitsverschillen tussen de partners, en door de arrogante verdeel-en-heerspolitiek van Julian Assange.
Op zeker moment dreigde Assange zelfs met een rechtszaak tegen The Guardian, de Britse krant die het verstandshuwelijk tussen web en print wist te sluiten en tot het einde regisseerde. Dat blijkt uit een fascinerend verslag in het nieuwste nummer van het Amerikaanse maandblad Vanity Fair. Collateral Murder Ofschoon WikiLeaks al vier jaar bestaat, begon de opmars van de organisatie pas echt met de publicatie van Collateral Murder op 5 april 2010. “Holy moly!” Uiteindelijk kreeg Davies Assange in Brussel te pakken. (pdf)Benkler A Free Irresponsible Press via @CShirky.