Techno-Politics at WikiLeaks

“This is the first real info war, and you are the soldiers.” John Perry Barlow

Figurehead Politics

WikiLeaks is a typical SPO (Single Person Organisation) or UPO (Unique Personality Organisation). This means that the initiative taking, decision-making and execution is largely concentrated in the hands of a single individual. Like small and medium-sized businesses, the founder cannot be voted out, and, unlike many collectives, leadership does not rotate. This is not an uncommon feature within organisations, irrespective of whether they operate in the realm of politics, culture or the “civil society” sector. SPOs are recognisable, exciting, inspiring and easy to feature in the media. Their sustainability, however, is largely dependent on the actions of their charismatic leader, and their functioning is difficult to reconcile with democratic values. This is also why they are difficult to replicate and do not scale up easily. How independent media projects structure their internal decision-making procedures is a matter of style and personal choice. The problem starts if the hierarchies are not clearly communicated and agreed upon internally.

Sovereign hacker Julian Assange is the identifying figurehead of WikiLeaks, and the organisation’s notoriety and reputation merges with Assange’s own. What WikiLeaks does and stands for becomes difficult to distinguish from Assange’s rather agitated private life and his somewhat unpolished political opinions. The memoirs published in early 2011 by Wikileaks’ second man and spokesperson in the years 2008 to mid 2010, the German hacker Daniel Domscheit-Berg, are a painstakingly detailed account of how amateur-like the ‚office-free organisation’ was up to the moment in September 2010 when Assange “fired” Domscheit-Berg, even though he was not his boss, legally speaking. The collectives of self-managed projects in the 1980s which ran on the basis of consensus and equality might have been outdated and annoying back then, but the chaos inside WikiLeaks in terms of its own lack of transparency (mind you, even for its own members!), unclear financial situation and utter lack of internal democracy is yet another extreme. It was that  bad that Domscheid-Berg accused the paranoid, persecution-obsessed founder of running “his” WikiLeaks like a cult (“Do not challenge leadership in times of crisis.”)*4 *( 4 )star (* 2 ). Domscheit-Berg disliked being spoken of as an “asset”. When Assange fired Domscheit-Berg he accused him of disloyalty, insubordination and destabilization: military terms used when spoken about traitors. Assange, who threatened to publish compromising material about Domscheit-Berg, wrote in a chat: “If you threaten this organization again, you will be attended to. You are a criminal. […] Our duties are bigger than this idiocy.”(Domscheit-Berg 2011: 239)star (* 2 ). And, last but not least: “I’m running out of options that don’t destroy people.“ (Domscheit-Berg 2011: 239)star (* 2 ). Instead of setting up his organisation OpenLeaks, Domscheit-Berg should have discussed the proposal to “fork” WikiLeaks—meaning copy-pasting the entire project and going separate ways, as suggested by another WikiLeaks core member, named “the Architect”, in Domscheit-Berg’s book—as a serious option.

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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).

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Domscheit-Berg, Daniel (2011): Inside Wikileaks, Meine Zeit bei der gefährlichsten Webseite der Welt, Berlin: Econ Verlag.

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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).

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Leigh, David /Harding, Luke (2011): Wikileaks, Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, New York: PublicAffairs.

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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).

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Wikipedia (a): Electronic discovery. Online unter en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_discovery (12.03.2013).

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Wikipedia (b): Operations security. Online unter en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_security (12.03.2013).

* 1  

This is a rewritten and extended version of Ten Theses on Wikileaks, written with Patrice Riemens and originally published on the nettime mailing list and the INC blog on August 30, 2010, see: mail.kein.org/pipermail/nettime-l/2010-August/002337.html. The theses were updated in early December 2010 in the midst of Cablegate. The “twelve theses” got wide coverage and were translated in Dutch, German, French, Italian and Spanish.

* 2  

See ns1758.ca/winch/winchest.html for a historical overview of the cost of harddrive storage space (reference thanks to Henry Warwick).

* 3  

In the US 4GB USB sticks can be purchased from around 4.50 to 11 USD. 16 GB sticks cost around 20 USD, whereas 32 gigabytes USB sticks are priced between 40-50 USD (early 2011).

* 4  

Remark made in the context of the group Anonymous, their actions against the Church of Scientology and the material that Wikileaks published from this sect. See: Domscheit-Berg 2011: 49.

* 5  

Quoted from the opening video at the homepage of OpenLeaks, January 2010, www. OpenLeaks.org.

* 6  

In Leigh/ Harding (2011: 61) we find a not-necessarily-correct description of how Assange (in early 2010) must have changed his mind about the collaborative “wiki” aspect of the project. “Assange had by now discovered, to his chagrin, that simply posting long lists of raw and random documents on to a website failed to change the world. He brooded about the collapse of his original ‘crowd-sourcing‘ notion: “Our initial idea was, ‘Look at all these people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that they’re working on… […] surely those people will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something?‘ No, it’s bullshit. In fact, people write about things because they want to display their values to their peers. Actually, they don’t give a fuck about the material.”.

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/

Erstellt am 20.Mrz 2013
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Geert Lovink

Medientheoretiker, Netzkritiker und Aktivist; studierte Politikwissenschaft an der Universität von Amsterdam (MA) und promovierte an der University of Melbourne (AUS). Er war Redakteur des Medienkunst-Magazins Mediamatic (1989–94) und hat in Seminaren und Vorträge Medientheorie in Zentral- und Osteuropa gelehrt. Er war Mitgründer des freien Community-Netzwerks «Digital City» in Amsterdam und Mitglied von Adilkno, Agentur Bilwet auf Deutsch, der Stiftung zur Förderung illegalen Wissens, eine freie Assoziation von Intellektuellen aus der Medienszene seit 1983.