Re: <nettime> Guardian Live on Assange's arrest

Dear ted, Morlock, nettimers on Julian Assange,

I'm weighing in - after yesterday - a very cold/chilling day on our Internet.

What power wants is the Internet itself. Duh! And western industrialized UK/USA

are working together to secure the First World...a world of make-believe "dreams" that ought to come true as long as there is no critical outside which is what Wikileaks and Julian Assange have provided as journalists, other journalists with! Neo-liberal paradigms have longed taught that all we need to keep the peace are some candy-coated reform jobs and slicked up "events' where everything is cool and politely handled.

What the arrest of Julian Assange is, is yet another event in a long line of arrests of journalists and dissenters in the last decade as this new era of billionaire power and social control (of the Internet?) sets in. One of the biggest effects has been the effort to censor the Internet! What was it before...baby of the DOD? Well, it is still baby of the DOD and don't anyone forget it. PRISM. If only the power to communicate from our laptops could be stopped, or at least threatened or controlled or commodified or market driven or interrupted or overpriced. If only the FCC and Congress and the EU could secure all that mental labor out there and all the dissent and all the potential data; could read and secure it all. What Julian Assange represents, and what power and control would go so far as to concoct and "conjure" about this mysterious hair-dying feral otherness brain-child of computing he is, is that Assange is someone who has had the guts to live in the space of a person who is not under "social" control. Yes, in an embassy with a little balcony. Juliet Assange, effeminate, and soft spoken. (Ecuadorian pres, art of deal, Julian token of exchange in right-wing deal)

WTF has Assange done, anyway? I asked myself this question about 50 million times yesterday. Just what is it that Julian Assange has actually done? Had the dross as a foreign subject to reject US war crimes? To publish the truth.

LIFE magazine, amidst of the Vietnam War published color photos of the repulsive MyLai incident, slaughter of women and children civilians by US marines for those of you too young to remember. As history would have it, those full color photographs sparked disgust and dissent among the American people about their own army and government involvement in Vietnam and CO Lieutenant Calley became a court-marshalled household name. I draw this parallel to remind myself of how times have changed because either I'm imagining things or release of the video of the creepy first-person shooter type marines talking shop from their helicopter as they draw bede on and blow away the van and kill civilians, children, and Reuters personnel isn't a whole lot different from that war crime and yet. No military tribunal. No Congressional investigation. Nothing.

Who is Assange anyway, some journalist/hacker from Melbourne, Australia? Who would think he and his merry pranksters could have anything to do or say about US involvement in Iraq?

Who is Assange anyway, when Hillary Clinton, ex-Secretary of State, first female Dem presidential candidate, wants him dead?

Who is he daring to be? The guy whose outfit leaked the emails that helped get Trump elected? OMG. One can get myopic living inside the prism of mainstream media with the "one-guy" theory of power and control as an only source of information. It would be more convenient if we could just jail "one-guy".

But it must have been Julian Assange.

This made only that much worse by the primitivist theory of SHRUNKEN talking heads on tiny little screens and the little pictures being innocently exchanged on Facebook. Users are, after all, once the analytics are out, are simply looking for someone to blame as well as someone to answer their often desperate lemming prayers for salvation from social ills. The are looking for someone to impeach Trump, they are looking for someone to free Julian. They are looking to fix everything that's been broken and disturbed.

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 10:38 AM tbyfield <[email protected]> wrote:

On 11 Apr 2019, at 14:18, Morlock Elloi wrote:

> OK, let's look at it from another angle: who did, in the last 10
> years, change public discourse in the desirable (to me at least) way
> more than Wikileaks and its staff? Suntanned POTUS? Pope? Habermas?
> Mother Theresa? Dalai Lama? Zizek? Beyonce? nettime?

I agree Assange's impact has been immense, but that kind of heroic model
is a counterproductive way of thinking about Assange and his
contributions. If anything, the distinctive (maybe even decisive)
feature of the last decade was its lack of heroes and the growing sense
that we're enmeshed in tangled and collapsing systems.

In effect, you're asking the kind of question that the editors of Time
magazine would pose in naming a Person of the Year. That annual ritual
was a central feature of Henry Luce's efforts to project an American
Century: in the face of the growing challenge posed by socialism and all
its messy masses, he drew on a nostalgic model of history ('great men,
battles, and speeches,' as they say) to propose a sort of
philosopher-scientist-king to tickle the fancy of the Washington–New
York consensus. But Wikileaks's most significant actions — Cablegate,
Collateral Murder, etc — were aimed precisely *at* the military and
diplomatic aspects of that US hegemony. And that was and remains
Assange's plight: on the one hand, he wanted to bring down the world
modeled on US hegemony, on the other, he wanted to be the kind of
anti/hero it relied on.

Note, FWIW, the cover story of _The Atlantic_, to the extent that that
former monthly has a cover anymore (YA network effect): 'The End of the
American Century.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/end-of-the-american-century/514526/

And note as well Forensic Architecture's statement, which sounds a lot
like something Time magazine would write: Wikileaks 'shattered every
established paradigm of public interest journalism, and ushered in a new
era of investigative reporting.'

https://www.forensic-architecture.org/statement-from-forensic-architecture-on-the-arrest-of-julian-assange/

Like I said, we can think critically about Assange — and acknowledge
his formidable contributions — without lapsing into that kind of
rhetoric. He didn't shatter any paradigms of public-interest
journalism: he bundled together a lot of conventional networky ideas —
about leaky secrets, about enabling direct access to primary sources,
about the expansive capacity of hard drives rather than the limited
space of print news, about the role of security in protecting sources
— and wrapped them in an effective (ugh) 'brand.' That was really
important, and project like ProPublica and the sprawling collaborations
surrounding the Panama Papers etc owe him a big debt.

> The important thing to understand why is Wikileaks considered such
> danger: unlike impotent philosophiles, left, right and progressives,
> Wikileaks uses effective technological tools. Which is why it is
> universally hated. You are supposed to only pretend to be effecting
> change.

That's the dream of Wikileaks. The reality is that the 'organization'
spent much of the last several years squandering its credibility and
becoming an increasingly threadbare cover for Assange's cryptic designs.
Again, that's not intended as a criticism of *him*. The fact that he
remained at liberty, or at least not imprisoned forever, and more sane
than not through all this is a testament to some sort of strength. It'd
be easy to see what I say as the usual 'moderate' bending with the wind,
but it isn't: I was clear-eyed about him ~25 years ago when he was
<[email protected]> banging on about 'rubber hose' cryptography, and I'm
clear-eyed about him now. And YMMV, but I think it's also clear-eyed to
recognize that overly effusive statements now will fall prey to the same
old cycle of coverage that will make him yesterday's news when, as his
many trials drag on, he'll need a more sustained kind of respect. So:

> Make no mistake - it's not about Assange or anyone else - it's about
> two simple technical facts:
>
> 1. Wikileaks servers could not be suppressed neither by rubberhosing
> service providers, registrars, nor telecoms. They did try, for a long
> time. If they could, none of this would happen.
>
> 2. Wikileaks sources were far better protected than anyone else's (and
> still are) by using custom submission technology.
>
> #1 and #2 is what put rope around Assange's neck. Use of tools.
> Wikileaks works. Effective use of technology cannot be allowed, and an
> example needs to be set. Tweeting and blogging on corporate servers is
> OK.

I agree, but as long as he's alive it does need to remain, in part,
about Assange. Do I really need to argue why?

Cheers,
Ted

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