Adam Morris on Cypherpunks
Fair Warning:
Julian Assange's "Cypherpunks"
April 28th,
2013
WIKILEAKS FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE’S newest book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is intended as an urgent warning, but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Despite boasting publicity blurbs from a curious medley of public intellectuals — Slavoj Žižek, Naomi Wolf, and Oliver Stone among them — Cypherpunks may just as well have sunk to the bottom of the sea. Although Assange is one of the most vital and polemical activists alive, nobody’s talking about Cypherpunks, and nobody seems to have read it. This is a pity, since the book rings a justifiably strident alarm bell over the erosion of individual privacy rights by an increasingly powerful global surveillance industry.
Though Cypherpunks raises
issues of pressing concern, its neglect is not all that mysterious. “This book
is not a manifesto,” Assange begins. If only it were! The pretense of writing
one — especially when widely rumored to be wanted by the US government and an
international cause célèbre — would probably have garnered Assange more
attention. A good old-fashioned manifesto would have been more readable,
too: Cypherpunks is irritatingly structured as a discussion between
Assange and three coauthors, the digital activists Jacob Appelbaum, Andy
Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. The intention may have been to emphasize
the sort of “messy” participatory democracy favored by Occupy, Anonymous, and
other emergent political forces loosely affiliated with WikiLeaks and
influenced by anarchist political theory. But the “discussion” occasionally
slides into pedantic softball-lobs, ego-stroking, and phony-sounding debate
that will leave the reader wishing for a more tightly edited and coherent
declaration of the trouble Assange thinks we’re in.
Aside from
the annoying format, the general disregard of Assange’s book is probably due in
no small part to its discomfiting thesis. Cypherpunks would have the
reader nakedly confront a truth that even a clear-eyed realist like Al Gore
would find inconvenient: the dark steed on which we are “galloping into a new
transnational dystopia” is nothing less than our favorite toy, tool, and
distraction. “The internet,” Assange states portentously in the introduction,
“is a threat to human civilization.” According to Assange, the “Information
Superhighway” that Gore championed throughout the 1980s and 1990s ought now be
renamed the Highway to Hell. Or at least — to borrow Assange’s terms — the
Highway to “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia.”
Assange’s
pessimistic outlook derives from his very personal confrontation with “the
enemy,” which is his unsubtle shorthand for the hybrid entity he sees taking
shape as the internet continues to “merge” with governments increasingly
controlled by multinational corporate interests. Assange describes the
emergence of this “invasive parasite” as one predicated on mutual interest in
surveillance and control. He believes that, if it remains unopposed, the
resulting supranational “surveillance state” will “merge global humanity into
one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.”
"We know
the new surveillance state,” Assange says of himself and his coauthors,
“because we have plumbed its depths.” They have also met its wrath. WikiLeaks
has been the subject of an ongoing Department of Justice investigation ever
since the organization rose to prominence in 2010 with the release of video
footage of an American helicopter attack on unarmed journalists, publication of
classified documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the leak
of hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables. High-ranking US officials
like California senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, have called for Assange’s prosecution. Assange, in
turn, has cited these American demands of vengeance as his reason for resisting
extradition to Sweden, where he faces arrest on charges of sexual misconduct.
Sweden, Assange believes, would be the first stop on a longer extradition
journey to the US.
Luddites and
conspiracy theorists will be as titillated by Assange’s opening salvos on the
surveillance state as anarchists and hardcore privacy activists. Indeed, it was
the “threat to human civilization” quote that surfaced and then circulated
listlessly around the blogosphere at the time of the book’s publication. The
bluntness with which Assange damns the current drift of internet-related
activity is probably the reason nobody wanted to read Cypherpunks: it’s
easier to write Assange off as having jumped the shark. For most Westerners,
the internet has made many aspects of daily life so easy and convenient that we
dare not imagine its sinister double-edge. We want to retain our endless
up-to-the-moment entertainment, on-the-fly driving directions, and breezy
one-click payments with home delivery. Internet use has developed in ways that
have normalized self-absorption and conspicuous consumption; our society’s
feel-good relationship with the internet has anaesthetized the gradual but near
total loss of privacy involved in the tradeoff. For most users, thought of the
internet as a technology of mass surveillance and control, then, is both
uncanny and unwelcome. And yet, Assange and company assure, that is exactly what
the internet has become.
But another
obvious reason for the book’s vanishing act is its surprisingly proprietary
method of distribution. A manifesto could have been Xeroxed and tossed daily
from the balcony of the bobby-besieged Ecuadorian embassy in London, where,
since August 2012, Assange has been granted asylum. Or it could even have been
disseminated on the internet, thus poisoning the bowels of the very beast
Assange believes threatens to destroy all our freedoms. Alas, Cypherpunks is
only available as a conventional copyrighted text (or e-book) distributed by an
independent publisher who has, with due respect for convention and copyright,
decreed that “no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means.” Despite actually discussing proprietary control as one of the
clear impediments to the liberating potential of new communication
technologies, Cypherpunks does not offer further comment on its own
self-imposed limitations beyond its martyr’s performance of self-banishment to
the province of the Unread.
Its internal
contradictions notwithstanding, Cypherpunks is a pertinent wake-up
call. While we’ve been busy chuckling at the subtitled antics of cats, the
internet has become increasingly monitored and militarized: all of our
web-based communications are now intercepted by military spy organs. The internet,
Assange claims, has become an occupied public space, and “we are all living
under martial law as far as our communications are concerned.” This observation
is in tune with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s nearly decade-old warning
about the encroachment of martial law in their 2004 book Multitude, in
which the authors claim that the military and the police are becoming
indistinguishable. With the military occupation of cyberspace, Assange argues,
control is being insinuated into the most quotidian of activities. Further
thickening the aura of shadows and cigar smoke, he asserts, in his
introduction, that this threat to our freedom has been cleverly concealed by
those in “national security circles” and “the global surveillance industry.”
Assange
understands the encroachments of the parasitical surveillance state into
private communications as state violence enabled by corporate collaboration. He
is not the first to read the writing on the wall. Beginning as early as 1946,
thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have warned of the imbrication
of entertainment with disciplinary social control in the form of the “culture
industry.” Since then a lineage of theorists influenced by Guy Debord’s Society
of the Spectacle (1967), Michel Foucault’s late lectures on biopolitics,
and Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 essay on the rise of the “control society” have
expanded on these ideas, cautioning against the advent of technocratic
governments that will crush opposition and difference through mass-surveillance
and data- and statistics-driven managerialism. More recent works bring these
theories to bear on the internet. Alexander Galloway’s book Protocol (2004)
made explicit the link between the material architecture of the internet and
the decentralized management style favored for the administration of such
biopolitical control societies.
Nor are the
stakes of these discussions purely theoretical. Today, domestic spying is
indeed undergoing massive expansion under the banner of “cyber security,” an
Orwellian euphemism that most Americans probably find more palatable than
“spying” or “data-mining.” “Cyber security” technologies are also now
classified as “weapons” in order to divert more defense spending into their
development, and the National Security Administration (NSA) has spent the last
10 years expanding its facilities far beyond its Fort Meade, Maryland, base.
The crown jewel of these facilities is the Utah Data Center, a sprawling
complex scheduled to be operational in September 2013. The $2 billion facility
is nestled in the mountain enclave of a polygamist Mormon sect, a valley
where Big Love and Big Brother, as NSA expert James Bamford reported
in Wired magazine last year, have unexpectedly become neighbors.
Facts about the facility are being kept under tight wraps by the NSA, which has
deflected FOIA requests by citing the classified status of National Security
Presidential Directive 54, the order George W. Bush issued in 2008 that authorized
the NSA’s new projects in so-called cyber security. According to Bamford, the
facility will contain thousands of servers that will archive and analyze “the
complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as
well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel
itineraries, bookstore purchases” and the rest of what he calls “digital pocket
litter.” Bamford also believes the data center will host a secret codebreaking
unit needed to decrypt all that “secure encrypted” data transmitted over the
internet: worldwide credit card transactions, stock and business deals,
diplomatic cables, and the like. The energy costs of the facility alone are
estimated at $40 million a year.
The Utah
center is the centerpiece of a broad expansion in NSA data-mining and storage
facilities across the country: bases for the interception of communications
from abroad are located in Hawaii, Texas, Colorado, and Georgia. Like Assange,
Bamford thinks that strong encryption is the only remaining strategy for
resisting the slide into a totalitarian surveillance state. But paired with the
NSA server farms is investment in supercomputing capabilities at Tennessee’s
Oak Ridge National Laboratory — the former site of top-secret atomic research and
reactors for the Manhattan Project — where the government is developing
juggernaut codebreaking machines to keep up with similar computers being
unveiled in China and Japan.
It is cold
comfort to know that, historically speaking, the NSA has been rather bad at
gathering and sorting intelligence. Writing for The New York Review
of Books, Bamford reminds us that the agency was caught off guard by the 1998
attacks on two east African embassies, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole,
and the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001. Whatever the
Agency’s inadequacies, it is regarded fondly by big business: neoliberal trends
of outsourcing government activities to the private sector have created a
booming surveillance industry in conjunction with domestic spying. By Assange’s
count, there are over 1,000 independent contractors working for the NSA,
“smearing out the border between what is government and what is the private
sector.”
This blurred
public–private divide is where privacy rights are being swiftly eroded.
Consider, for a moment, one of Google’s newest inventions: Google Glass, a pair
of dorky and nearly indestructible eyeglasses that can capture photograph and
video, access Google’s search engine and chat functions, and triangulate one’s
exact location at all times. For a company whose unofficial
“code of conduct” is “don’t be evil,” this is a dubious development:
Google Glass will effectively turn its users into a legion of Little Brother
informers, as government agencies routinely spy on Google users by gaining
access to their account information with secret subpoenas. As with other Google
features like Street View and Google Earth, it is impossible to opt out of this
surveillance technology. Now imagine Google Glass equipped with facial
recognition technology (FRT) — as Facebook already is — and you get a dizzying
glimpse into the postmodern dystopia that Assange foresees.
Biometric
data gathering, facial recognition technology, domestic drone surveillance, and
the strategic interception of all private communication: these are the four
horsemen of Assange’s apocalypse. He acknowledges that, even 10 years ago,
surveillance on this scale would have seemed like a delusional fantasy. But now
even a country like Libya can afford systems like Eagle, a product sold by the
French firm Amesys and used by the Gaddafi regime for mass interception of
communication. Even poor countries are setting up surveillance systems: as
Müller-Maguhn claims, African countries are getting entire spy network
infrastructure as a gift from the Chinese, who expect to be paid back “in data,
the new currency.”
It should
come as no surprise that intrusive and aggressive data collection methods have
been getting a test-drive in places under the sway — but not bound by the laws
— of American empire. The Afghan government, for instance, is collaborating
with US security firms and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to
produce a biometric registry for all passengers at Kabul airport and at major
border crossings. The FBI is
likewise honing its spycraft by assisting with the development of a
biometric database of the entire Afghan population, and the Department of
Defense has already created a Biometrics Identity Management Agency to
coordinate biometric data sharing among these government agencies. In addition
to fingerprint collection, already widely practiced, BIMA has been working to
expand its facial, iris, palm, and DNA registries.
City police
departments are not far behind: the LAPD has equipped officers with mobile
biometrics devices since 2005 as part of a crackdown on undocumented workers.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg recently called the use of domestic drones and
FRT in law enforcement “inevitable.” In fact, the
NYPD already deploys FRT in investigative police work, and licenses
for domestic drone operation have been issued with abandon, including to
city governments and police departments. The “inevitable” use of FRT in
domestic police work will probably broaden to include devices similar to what
the military currently uses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Crossmatch Technologies,
the Florida company that developed the
SEEK II device that was likely used to identify Osama bin Laden at his
Abbottabad compound, has
lobbied the government to “document the undocumented” by using biometric
technologies. In its efforts to foment wider use of biometric technologies,
Crossmatch has even donated some of its rapid mobile identification
technologies to the Palm Beach Gardens Police Foundation, a 501(c)(3)
organization whose “mission is to secure private funding to enhance the safety
of the community and the effectiveness of the Palm Beach Gardens Police
Department.”
Assange and
his colleagues are — tellingly — more concerned about the mass interception of
communications than they are about biometric registries. But the general
complaint applies to both contexts: there has been a shift from “tactical” data
gathering (the kind you associate with a search warrant) to the “strategic”
mass interception of all our calls, emails, and internet activity for storage
and analysis. The capture of so much private information represents the
extension of a
domestic spying program the NSA has been conducting since at least 2001.
The program began with extralegal wiretapping facilitated by the major
telecommunications corporations in direct violation of the Constitution. The
“antiterrorism” activities of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also
includes more conventional spying usually associated with the FBI: recently
obtained documents show the DNS engaging in routine
spying on peaceful protesters.
Combine
government snooping with another of Google’s new ambitions — to become the sole
internet service provider of large municipalities like Kansas City, Missouri —
and a very worrying picture emerges. Kansas City government was willing to
grant the company a nearly regulation-free contract to install citywide
fiber-optic service. Not only would this deal allow the internet access of hundreds
of thousands of users to be provided by a single company, it would also enable
that company to collect deep data — every search, every page visit, every
electronic payment — about the entire population of a major American city. The
Kansas City project requires Google to make huge investments in city
infrastructure, but the venture is not a charitable one. Google expects to reap
windfalls with the data. As the
scholar and activist Harry Halpin recently wrote in Radical Philosophy:
Massive web
platforms such as Apple, Google and Facebook are monopolies increasingly
reminiscent of the golden age of capitalism, in which the new form of commodity
is personal identity: every interaction with the Internet is recorded for
marketing purposes, ideally with a full name and billing address.
The recent
travails of Assange’s coauthor Jacob Appelbaum offer an object lesson in the
danger of these projects. Appelbaum is one of the central figures in an ongoing
legal dispute between Twitter and the Department of Justice, which subpoenaed
Twitter for the IP addresses and records of the accounts used by Appelbaum,
Dutch citizen Rop Gonggrijp, and Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta
Jónsdóttir as part of a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks. Twitter,
the ACLU, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have fought the order, but it
represents only a single high-profile case of far broader practice: Google
receives tens of thousands of similar requests each year — most of them
subpoenas sealed under court order, not search warrants — and complies with 90
percent of them. The interpretation of outdated legislation effectively allows
the US government to use Google and Facebook as extensions of its own
intelligence-gathering activities. In most cases, sealed subpoenas delivered to
Google and social media sites prevent those under investigation from ever
becoming aware that their accounts are being reviewed by the government. It is
for this reason, Assange and his coauthors argue, that cryptography has become
the most vital means of resisting the tightening control of surveillance
society.
Although
Assange disavows the intention of writing a manifesto on the lofty grounds that
“there is no time” for such histrionics, his introduction is nevertheless
subtitled “A Call to Cryptographic Arms,” and Cypherpunks is clearly
a summons to action. As he and his co-authors argue repeatedly throughout the
book, cryptography is our last hope to resist the otherwise inevitable slide
into a totalitarian regime of panoptic surveillance and control. As Assange
sees it, cryptography is “an embodiment of the laws of physics” that he
considers elegant and noble for providing “the ultimate form of non-violent
direct action.” Free source activists will already understand the relation
between cryptography and the title of Assange’s book, but the table of contents
is preceded by a useful definition that informs the lay audience that
“cypherpunk” is not only in broad usage in the digital activist community, but
was also added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. The term
dates to the “crypto-wars” of the early 1990s and was revived during the
so-called “internet spring” of 2011, by which the authors presumably mean the
simultaneous, and not unrelated, movements connected with the war waged on
WikiLeaks and the online activism that flared during the Arab Spring, in which
protesters pitted social media, freedom of information, and cryptography
against despotic regimes.
Assange’s
author bio lists him as a contributor to the original Cypherpunk mailing list,
and “one of the most prominent exponents of cypherpunk philosophy”; his
organization WikiLeaks is guided by the cypherpunk motto “privacy for the weak,
transparency for the powerful.” Assange is also credited as the “author of
numerous software projects in line with the cypherpunk philosophy”: computer
programs that facilitate privacy through encryption. His discussants are
likewise active in cryptographic resistance. Appelbaum is an advocate and
developer for the Tor Project, which provides freeware that uses “onion
routing,” or layered encryption, to strengthen anonymity for its users;
Müller-Maguhn is one of the creators of Cryptophone, a for-profit venture that
markets encrypted telephone calls; and Zimmermann is a European legal activist
for La Quadrature du Net, which defends online anonymity and campaigns against
regulations that limit online freedoms.
Cryptography
is also central to the tactics used by Anonymous, an international movement
that has acted in support of WikiLeaks by providing documents and declaring war
on opponents of transparency. The movement’s participants all remain anonymous,
in keeping with precedent established on 4chan and other online forums where
the movement originated. In the age of identity capitalism and surveillance
society, the determination to remain anonymous is an act of resistance against
the knowing gaze of both corporations and the police. The movement’s
decentralized and nonhierarchical affiliation of cyber activists is best known
for online forms of protest and activism in the form of information leaks,
hacking, and website vandalism. One of the group’s most widely used tactics is
DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, in which activists cause a surge
in traffic by simultaneously accessing a webpage in massive numbers, thus
causing it to crash and go offline. Actions undertaken by Anonymous often
employ their famous signoff: “Knowledge is free. We are Anonymous. We are
Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”
The link between
Assange and Anonymous began in 2008, when the latter supplied secret
Scientology handbooks to WikiLeaks for publication. The movement also acted to
defend Assange and WikiLeaks from their persecution by the US government. Joe
Biden has referred to Assange as a “high-tech terrorist,” and corporate
compliance with Joe Lieberman’s call for businesses to cut off transactions
with WikiLeaks in the wake of the War Logs and Cablegate prompted an
Anonymous-led DDoS attack on Paypal, Visa, and Amazon. Lieberman and others
have also called for Assange’s arrest and prosecution under the Espionage Act,
a demand that makes little sense given that unlike Private Bradley Manning, who
faces charges for allegedly leaking classified military information to
WikiLeaks, Assange is not an American citizen and therefore not capable of
treason against the United States. While Anonymous remained allied with
WikiLeaks throughout the Cablegate fallout, the movement has recently distanced
itself from Assange, criticizing his supposed egotism after a highly publicized
dinner with Lady Gaga.
Anonymous was
also active in the Occupy protests of 2011–12, and continues to take on a
diverse range of activism projects. These include continued support for Occupy,
defense of gay rights in Africa, attacks on the Motion Picture Association
of America (MPAA) and government copyright enforcement agencies, and
working to expose the identities of alleged rapists in high profile sexual
assault cases in Ohio and Nova Scotia. Anonymous also now appears to maintain a
consistent interest in responding to Israeli aggressions against Palestinians.
Israel airstrikes on Gaza this spring provoked Anonymous’s #OpIsrael
retaliation, a coordinated attack on Israeli government websites, bank
accounts, and social media accounts. The mass strike defaced or compromised
tens of thousands of websites and bank accounts.
Social media
and hacktivist groups like Anonymous represent obverse sides of the rise of
identity capitalism. The opposition was made strikingly clear in 2011, when
Anonymous threatened to “destroy” Facebook for violating user privacy and
collaborating with government intelligence agencies. That the US media rushed
to celebrate the use of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring uprisings but
has consistently maligned the activities of WikiLeaks and Anonymous is thus
unsurprising. Having exhausted resources for regime change, cheerleaders for
exporting “freedom” now uncritically regard digital communication technologies,
especially Twitter, as the bearers of democracy and freedom in the Middle East
and elsewhere. As Evgeny Morozov, an outspoken critic of such
“internet-centrism,” has sardonically observed, “The Freedom Agenda is out; the
Twitter Agenda is in.” Malcolm
Gladwell also expressed skepticism in The New Yorker, pointing
out that the perceived importance of Twitter and Facebook in the Iranian Green
Movement and the Moldovan uprising of 2009 derived less from facts than from
the desire to understand these technologies as inherently liberating. Assange
likewise notes that the Mubarak regime cut off internet access in Egypt early
on in the revolution, and admonishes uncritical celebration of social media for
disavowing the use of Facebook by repressive governments to monitor,
track, harass, and sometimes kill dissidents.
Acknowledging
this double-edge, Assange asserts that “the internet, our greatest tool of
emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of
totalitarianism we have ever seen.” But even here, he indulges in the
silicon-plated myth that propels, if not entirely underwrites, this process of
accelerating surveillance and control of our management society. Allow me to
cast some doubt on Assange’s confident assertion that the internet is “our
greatest tool of emancipation”: we did not need to await the arrival of the
internet in order to end slavery, grant women the vote, or struggle for civil
rights for oppressed racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.
Doubtless the
internet now plays an important role in strategies to influence social change.
But so did television in the 1950s and ’60s, and no one would have called TV a
great tool of emancipation. To do so is to express one’s ignorance regarding
corporate control of televised media. Like Galloway, who asserts that protocol
is not necessarily “bad,” but rather “dangerous,” Assange explains that
technologies are not politically neutral, but can be used for a variety of
ends. “Good” or “evil,” if you like. And the fact that the motto of a company
trained in his critical crosshairs (“don’t be evil”) could seem so mordantly
Orwellian from the perspective of privacy rights is evidence of a Silicon
Valley’s bad faith.
Assange gets
the last word in the “discussion” with his interlocutors in Cypherpunks.
In the final pages, he insists that complaining about the “burgeoning security
state” is not enough; we must instead “build the tools of a new democracy.”
This would be a vigilant democracy, one that is aware of the political
ambiguity of communications technologies and the complicity of big business and
corporate media in eliminating legal protections on privacy. Debate surrounding
the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) gives an idea of the
current situation in America. Although recently shelved by the Senate, which is
working out a version more concerned with protecting privacy, the House CISPA
would allow companies to share data with each other and with government
agencies like the NSA. The House CISPA would, in effect, legalize many of the
domestic spying activities that were or are conducted extralegally or in legal
gray areas. A
lobbying firm representing Google and Yahoo supports the bill, while the
ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation remain vehemently opposed. Although the
House bill has been sidelined in the upper chamber, Republicans on the Senate
Intelligence Committee have already expressed concern about perceived failures
in information sharing between agencies in the wake of the Boston marathon
bombing. Coupled with Americans’ show of eagerness to inform on their fellow
citizens by participating in the misguided and frenetic crowdsourcing of police
work, the senators’ opportunity to look tough on terror will likely weaken
privacy provisions.
With the
corporate hijacking of the government and the prioritizing of “security” above
all else, Assange and his Cypherpunks discussants seem to see
successful resistance to surveillance and control through legislation as
unlikely. This leaves privacy defense up to individuals themselves, who must
begin to understand the communications technologies they use. In Appelbaum’s
words, people need to get “socially used to” coding in order to modify their
own software.
This kind of
individual responsibility sounds like a good thing. But such a position usually
ignores structural inequalities that drastically alter one’s capability of
awareness, let alone resistance. Education is one such factor. This is exactly
where a class-based analysis of Assange’s ideology finds the impasse between
techno-libertarianism and traditional leftist politics. Assange ends his book
by fantasizing about the imminent dystopian future. His valedictory reverie
begins with a self-romanticizing anecdote about “smuggling” himself into the
Sydney Opera House to take in a performance of Faust (Assange’s
cultural allusions have never been subtle; his memoir Julian Assange: The
Unauthorized Autobiography is clumsily littered with them). The
heavy-handedness exposes a superiority complex that plays out in Assange’s
concluding morality tale: while our lone hero strolls the waterfront after the
opera, he spies through the glass panels a rat that has likewise smuggled
itself into the Opera House, where it is merrily “scurrying back and forth,
leaping on the fine linen-covered tables and eating the Opera House food,
jumping on to the counter with all the tickets and having a really great time.”
This droll
tableau becomes, in Assange’s hands, a metaphor for “the most probable scenario
for the future”:
an extremely
confining, homogenized, postmodern transnational totalitarian structure with
incredible complexity, absurdities and debasements, and within that incredible complexity
a space where only the smart rats can go […] All communications will be
surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each individual in all
their interactions permanently identified as that individual to this new
Establishment, from birth to death […] So I think the only people who will be
able to keep the freedom that we had, say, twenty years ago — because the
surveillance state has already eliminated quite a lot of that, we just don’t
realize it yet — are those who are highly educated in the internals of this
system. So it will only be a high-tech rebel elite that is free, these clever
rats running around the opera house.
This is
elitism plain and simple, and it ought to have been purged from the book. It
would have been more productive to conclude this non-manifesto with more
practical information about how everyday internet users can protect themselves,
a nuts-and-bolts tutorial like the one that can be found on the Electronic
Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance
Self-Defense site.
Moreover, the
notion of a “high-tech rebel elite” is embarrassingly redolent of the likes of
Ayn Rand, and a form of libertarian neoliberalism that has found so many
devotees in Silicon Valley. Assange himself dismissively refers to these
“California libertarians,” a strange and contradictory socio-political class
that has gained tremendous power and prestige in recent years. The hodgepodge
of free-marketeering and wannabe counterculture that characterizes the
California libertarians is worthy only of caricature, and the rise of this
ideology in the new powerhouse of the US economy was presciently characterized
by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in their 1996 essay “The Californian
Ideology” (a text that is available for free perusal online).
In Assange’s
rodent parable, the rat serves as a stand-in for Assange himself, who seems
bizarrely eager to reprise the role of John Galt in Rand’s plodding opus Atlas
Shrugged. In that novel, a visionary elite led by Galt abandons a welfare state
full of moochers and takes to the hills, leaving the freeloaders — we know them
today as the 99% — to go to hell in a handbasket, wondering “Who is John Galt?”
Down on the docks, another lone hero wanders. “Who is Julian Assange?” he
imagines the future masses wondering. If the effective media blackout
surrounding Assange and WikiLeaks continues, we’ll start to hear that question
sooner rather than later.
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