Saturday, December 4, 2010

Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government” « zunguzungu


Via Alex Bain Favorites

There are some things that really concern me about wikileaks, mostly the military personnel safety issues, but below is what I like about wikileaks. Every corrupt politician and business person should have to worry whether the action they are contemplating will be the one that surfaces on Wikileaks. The beauty of the Internet is that once it's there, it's searchable. People become accountable whether they want to or not. That's good.

"This is however, not where Assange's reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make "leaks" a fundamental part of the conspiracy's  information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the "Collateral Murder" video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy's information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:"