Techno-Politics at WikiLeaks
“This is the first real info war, and you are the soldiers.” John Perry Barlow
The Power of Puny Players
WikiLeaks’ disclosures are the consequence of the dramatic spread of IT use due to plummeting costs, which can be broken down into three elements: chips and hardware, bandwidth, and, most striking of all, storage.*2 *( 2 ) We do not need to be members of the Ray Kurzweil (“singularity is near”) cult or buy into George Gilder’s conservative agenda to understand the importance of the ever-growing speed of semi-conductors, cheap bandwidth and stunning storage capacities of small hard drives and USB sticks that all the while keep dropping in price.*3 *( 3 )
Also contributing to Wikileaks’ activities is the reality that safekeeping state and corporate secrets—never mind private ones—has become difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. Not only are classified embassy documents proving hard to protect, but an overwhelming portion of leaked material is raw data, messy collections of folders with countless versions, missing emails, downloaded pdfs, excel sheets and power-pointless presentations. A new branch of science called e-discovery, or digital forensics, has developed expertise on retrieving, opening and classifying a growing variety of digital evidence (see Wikipedia a)
(* 6 ). WikiLeaks is symbolic of this transformation in the “information society” at large, a mirror of things to come. So while one can look at WikiLeaks as a (political) project and criticise it for its modus operandi, it can also be seen as the pilot phase in the evolution towards a far more generalised culture of anarchic exposure beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.
For better or worse, WikiLeaks skyrocketed into the realm of high-level international politics. Out of the blue it became a full-blown player both on the world scene as well as in the national spheres of certain countries. Small player as it is, by virtue of its disclosures WikiLeaks appears on a par at least in the domain of information gathering and publication with governments or big corporations. At the same time it’s unclear whether this is a permanent feature or a temporary, hype-induced phenomenon—WikiLeaks appears to believe the former, which more and more likely is the case. A puny non-state and non-corporate actor, WikiLeaks nonetheless does not believe it is punching above its weight in its fight against the US government and has started behaving accordingly. One might call this the “Talibanisation” stage of the postmodern “Flat World” theory, when scales, times and places are declared largely irrelevant.
What counts and disturbs to the point of boredom is the celebrity momentum and intense accumulation of media attention. WikiLeaks manages to capture that attention by way of spectacular information hacks, where other parties, especially civil society groups and human rights organisations, are desperately struggling to get their message across. Thanks to Cablegate documents, items that have simmered in the margins for years such as Shell’s role in Nigeria, the human rights situation and pollution there suddenly make front-page headlines. While civil society tends to play by the rules and seek legitimacy from dominant institutions, WikiLeaks’ strategy is populist insofar as it taps into public disaffection with mainstream politics. WikiLeaks bypasses this Old World structure of power and goes to the source of political legitimacy in today’s info-society instead: the rapturous banality of the spectacle. WikiLeaks brilliantly puts to use the “escape velocity” of IT, using IT to leave IT behind and rudely erupts the realm of real-world politics. Political legitimacy for WikiLeaks is not graciously bestowed by the powers that be.
In the ongoing saga called The Decline of the US Empire, WikiLeaks enters the stage as the slayer of a soft target. It would be difficult to imagine it inflicting quite the same damage to the Russian or Chinese governments, or even to the Singaporean—not to mention their “corporate” affiliates. In Russia or China, such disclosure would first need to surmount huge cultural and linguistic barriers, not to mention purely power-related ones. In that sense, WikiLeaks in its present manifestation remains a typically “western” product and cannot claim to be a truly universal or global undertaking.
Davies, Nick (2010): 10 days in Sweden: the full allegations against Julian Assange. In: The Guardian, Friday 17 December 2010, 21.30 GMT. Online unter: www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/17/julian-assange-sweden (12.03.2013).
Domscheit-Berg, Daniel (2011): Inside Wikileaks, Meine Zeit bei der gefährlichsten Webseite der Welt, Berlin: Econ Verlag.
Ellison, Sarah (2011): The Man Who Spilled the Secrets. In: Vanityfair. Online unter: www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102.print (12.03.2013).
Leigh, David /Harding, Luke (2011): Wikileaks, Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, New York: PublicAffairs.
Winer, Dave (2010): Apple is green. In: Scripting News, September 03, 2010. Online unter scripting.com/stories/2010/09/03/appleIsGreen.html (12.03.2013).
Wikipedia (a): Electronic discovery. Online unter en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_discovery (12.03.2013).
Wikipedia (b): Operations security. Online unter en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_security (12.03.2013).
Geert Lovink ( 2013): Techno-Politics at WikiLeaks. “This is the first real info war, and you are the soldiers.” John Perry Barlow. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 02 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/techno-politics-at-wikileaks/
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