The panic and fury with which
those in power – those who control our digital commons – reacted
to Assange, is proof that such activity hits a nerve
4 days ago
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It finally happened – Julian Assange was
dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy and arrested. It was no surprise: many
signs pointed in this direction.
A week or two ago, Wikileaks predicted
the arrest, and the Ecuadorian foreign ministry responded with what we now know
were lies. The recent re-arrest of Chelsea Manning (largely
ignored by the media) was also an element in this game. Her confinement,
designed to force her to divulge information about links with Wikileaks, is
part of the prosecution that awaits Assange when (if) the US gets hold of him.
There were also clues
in the long, slow well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination
which reached the lowest level imaginable a couple of months ago with
unverified rumors that the Ecuadorians wanted to get rid of him because of his
bad smell and dirty clothes.
In the first stage of attacks
on Assange, his ex-friends and collaborators went public with claims that Wikileaks
began well but then it got bogged down with Assange’s political bias (his
anti-Hillary obsession, his suspicious ties with Russia…). This was followed by
more direct personal defamations: he is paranoiac and arrogant, obsessed by
power and control.
Assange a paranoiac? When you
live permanently in an apartment which is bugged from above and below, victim
of constant surveillance organised by secret services, who wouldn’t be that?
Megalomaniac? When the (now ex-) head of the CIA says your arrest is his
priority, does not this imply that you are a “big” threat to some, at least?
Behaving like the head of a spy organisation? But Wikileaks IS a spy
organisation, although one that serves the people, keeping them informed on
what goes on behind the scenes.
So let’s move to the big
question: why now? I think one name explains it all: Cambridge Analytica – a
name which stands for all Assange is about, for what he fights against, and
describes the link between great private corporations and government agencies.
Remember how big topic an
obsession Russian meddling in the US elections became – now we know it was not
Russian hackers (with Assange) who nudged the people towards Trump. Instead
they were pushed our own data-processing agencies who joined up with political
forces.
This doesn’t mean that Russia
and their allies are innocent: they probably did try influence the outcome in
the same way that the US does it in other countries (only in this case, it is
called helping democracy). But it means the big bad wolf who distorts our
democracy is here, not in the Kremlin – and this is what Assange was claiming
all the time.
But where, exactly, is this
big bad wolf? To grasp the whole scope of this control and manipulation, one
should move beyond the link between private corporations and political parties
(as is the case with Cambridge Analytica), to the interpenetration of data
processing companies like Google or Facebook
and state security agencies.
We shouldn't be shocked at
China but at ourselves who have accepted the same regulation while believing
that we retain out full freedom, and that our media just help us to realise our
goals. In China people are fully aware that they are regulated.
The overall image emerging
from it, combined with what we also know about the link between the latest
developments in biogenetics (the wiring of the human brain etc.), provides an
adequate and terrifying image of new forms of social control which make good
old 20th century “totalitarianism” a rather primitive and clumsy machine of
control.
The biggest achievement of the
new cognitive-military complex is that direct and obvious oppression is no
longer necessary: individuals are much better controlled and “nudged” in the
desired direction when they continue to experience themselves as free and
autonomous agents of their own life.
This is another key lesson of
Wikileaks: our unfreedom is most dangerous when it is experienced as the very
medium of our freedom – what can be more free that the incessant flow of
communications which allows every individual to popularise their opinions and
form virtual communities of their own free will?
In our societies,
permissiveness and free choice are elevated into a supreme value, and so social
control and domination can no longer appear to infringe on a subject’s freedom.
It has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of
individuals as free. What can be more free than our unconstrained surfing on
the web? This is how “fascism
which smells like democracy” really operates today.
This is why it is absolutely
imperative to keep the digital network out of the control of private capital
and state power, and render it totally accessible to public
debate. Assange was right in his strangely ignored book When Google
Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books 2014): to understand how our lives are
regulated today, and how this regulation is experienced as our freedom, we have
to focus on the shadowy relation between private corporations which control our
commons and secret state agencies.
Now we can see why Assange has
to be silenced: after the Cambridge Analytica scandal exploded, all the efforts
of those in power has gone into reducing it to a particular “misuse” by some
private corporations and political parties – but where is the state itself, the
half-invisible apparatuses of the so-called “deep state”?
Assange characterised himself
as the spy of and for the people: he is not spying on the people for those in
power, he is spying on those in power for the people. This is why his only
assistance will have to come from us, the people. Only our pressure and
mobilisation can alleviate his predicament. One often reads how the Soviet
secret service not only punished its traitors (even if it took decades to do
it), but also fought doggedly to free them when they were caught by the enemy.
Assange has no state behind him, just us – so let us do Soviet secret service
was doing, let’s fight for him no matter how long it will take!
Wikileaks is just the
beginning, and our motto should be a Maoist one: Let a hundred Wikileaks
blossom. The panic and fury with which those in power –those who control
our digital commons – reacted to Assange, is proof that such activity
hits a nerve.
There will be many blows below
the belt in this fight – our side will be accused of playing into the enemy’s
hands (like the campaign against Assange for being in the service of Putin),
but we should get used to it and learn to strike back with interest, ruthlessly
playing one side against each other in order to bring them all down.
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