Techno-Politics at WikiLeaks
“This is the first real info war, and you are the soldiers.” John Perry Barlow
The Post-Representational Network
WikiLeaks raises the question of what hackers have in common with secret services, since an elective affinity between the two is unmistakable. The love-hate relationship goes back to the very beginning of computing. One does not need to be a fan of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s conspiracy theories to acknowledge that the computer was born out of the military-industrial complex. From Alan Turing’s deciphering of the Nazi Enigma code to the first computers’ relation with the atomic bomb, from the cybernetics movement to the Pentagon’s involvement in the creation of the Internet, the correlation between computational information and the military-industrial complex is well established. Computer scientists and programmers have shaped the information revolution and the culture of openness; but at the same time they have also developed encryption (“crypto”), closing access to data for the non-initiated. What some see as “citizen journalism” others call “info war”.
WikiLeaks is also an organisation deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism that emerged in the 1990s. The fact that WikiLeaks was founded—and to a large extent is still run—by hard-core geeks is essential to understanding its values and moves. Unfortunately, this comes together with a good dose of the less savoury aspects of hacker culture. Not that WikiLeaks lacks idealism or the desire to contribute to making the world a better place: on the contrary. But this brand of idealism (or, if you prefer, anarchism) is paired with a preference for conspiracies, an elitist attitude and a cult of secrecy (never mind condescension). This is not conducive to collaboration with like-minded people and groups who are relegated to the simple consumption of WikiLeaks’ output. The missionary zeal to enlighten the idiotic masses and “expose” the lies of government, the military and corporations is reminiscent of the well-known (or infamous) media-culture paradigm from the 1950s.
Lack of commonality with congenial “Another World is Possible” movements drives WikiLeaks to seek public attention by way of increasingly spectacular and risky disclosures, thereby gathering a constituency of often wildly enthusiastic but generally passive supporters. Assange himself stated that WikiLeaks deliberately moved away from the “egocentric” blogosphere and assorted social media and nowadays collaborates only with professional journalists and human rights activists. Yet following the nature and quantity of WikiLeaks’ exposures, from its inception up to the present day, is eerily reminiscent of watching a fireworks display, including a grand finale in the form of the so-called doomsday-machine: the yet-to-be-unleashed “insurance” document (known as “.aes256”). This raises serious doubts about the long-term sustainability of WikiLeaks itself, and possibly also of its model. WikiLeaks operates with a ridiculously small staff—probably no more than a dozen people form the core of its operation. While it proves the extent and savvyness of WikiLeaks’ tech support by its very existence, WikiLeaks’ claim to several hundred volunteer analysts and experts is unverifiable and, to be frank, barely credible. This is clearly WikiLeaks’ Achilles’ heel, not only from a risk and/or sustainability standpoint, but politically as well – which is what matters to us here.
WikiLeaks has displayed a stunning lack of transparency in its internal organisation. It is not enough to say something along the lines of “WikiLeaks needs to be completely opaque in order to force others to be totally transparent”. Do that and you beat the opposition, but in a way that makes you indistinguishable from it. Claiming the moral high ground after the job is done is not helpful—Tony Blair, too, excelled in that exercise. As WikiLeaks is neither a political collective nor an NGO in the legal sense, and nor, for that matter, a company or part of a social movement, we need to discuss what type of organisation we are dealing with. Is WikiLeaks a virtual project? After all, it does exist as a (hosted) website with a domain name, which is the bottom line. Does it have a goal beyond the personal ambition of its founder(s)? Is WikiLeaks reproducible? Will we see the rise of national or local chapters that keep the name? What rules of the game will they observe? Should we see it as a concept that travels from context to context and that, like a meme, transforms itself in time and space?
Maybe WikiLeaks will organise itself around its own version of the Internet Engineering Task Force’s slogan “rough consensus and running code”? Projects like Wikipedia and Indymedia both resolved this issue in their own ways, but not without crises, conflicts and splits. Global NGOs like Greenpeace, Amnesty and Soros’ Open Society foundations all have their experiences with less successful national chapters. Even bottom-up organizations without a central global brand collaborate internationally. This critique is not intended to force WikiLeaks into a traditional format; on the contrary, it is to explore whether WikiLeaks (and its future clones, associates, avatars and congenial family members) might act as a model for new forms of organisation and collaboration. As we speak WikiLeaks is anything but an “organized network”. Perhaps WikiLeaks has its own ideas about the direction it wants to take. But where to? Up to now, however, we have seen very little by way of an answer, leaving others to raise questions, for example, about the legality of WikiLeaks’ financial arrangements (such as The Wall Street Journal’s front page headline of August 23, 2010: “WikiLeaks keep funding secret”).
We cannot flee the challenge of experimenting with post-representational networks. As ur-blogger Dave Winer wrote about the Apple developers “it’s not that they’re ill-intentioned, they’re just ill-prepared. More than their users, they live in a Reality Distortion Field, and the people who make The Computer for the Rest of Us have no clue who the rest of us are and what we are doing. But that’s okay, there’s a solution. Do some research, ask some questions, and listen.” (Winer 2011)
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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).
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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