Re: <nettime> Assange: two years trapped in embassy

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Assange is endlessly inventive, combative and uncompromising.
If not holed up in an embassy and creatively adapting to and
maximizing that circumstance he would have devised another,
another and another out in the wild, in the salons, in bookstores,
on the speaker trail, feeding media, governments, citizens, outlaws
what they yearn for, relief of wealth, poverty, boredom, artificial
stimulation, pride, conceit, narcissism, self-loathing, sadism,
at being trapped at home, work, school, temple, marriage,
parentage, adultery, petty and great crime, righteousness
and shame, pathology and cowardice -- the human condition.

There are consequences for his powerful and empowering
egotism, audacity and bravery. "Couragous is contagious," the
WikiLeaks motto, borrowed from a dedicated business
salesperson, is also used to inspire the military and spies to
engage in horrendous harm to humanity in service of national
security, the current worldwide go to for concentrating power
and lethality against the dwellers, environment, economy,
education, morality and ever-central-power accommodating
law of all lands.

Assange's implacable insurgency may be fearless, may have
led to sexual assault, may have pissed away UK money better
wasted on adoration and celebration of royal imbecility, may
have helped increase profits for spies, contractors, informants,
scholars, journalists, crypto and cybersec criminals. Nothing
new perhaps.

What he is, has done, will do, is exemplary if it makes the slightest
dent in our indifference to our irresponsiblity for each other and
girds us to go against those who benefit from centralized
manipulation of our blase, our boredom, our suspicion, our
paranoia, our fear and hatred of those unlike us, our maniacal
defense of those like us, the human condition profiteers,
demagogues, tyrants and genociders thrive on.

Saluations, Julian, keep up the fight we fear to fight.



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