Building on Aaron Bady's analysis of some 2006 essays by Assange, Robert P Baird at 3quarksdaily has an excellent post on Assange's "third-order" strategy.
The first-order strategy in making transparent is the Zuckerbergian "information wants to free" mantra.
The second-order strategy is muck-raking: exposure of secrets leads to moral outrage which puts pressure on political systems.
Assange's third-order strategy is to impede goverment function by provoking a paralyzing reaction of increased securitization of information that itself gums up the works.
After laying all this out, Baird concludes with some superb reflections on language, secrecy, and the "financialization" of power:
There's a deeper sense, however, in which Assange’s 2006 third-order strategy for Wikileaks has to count as naive. His belief that secrecy is the fundamental source of power is a version of the classic category mistake of the internet age: to imagine that the "world" of information simply is the world, that there is no remainder, nothing left to of the latter to overflow or exceed or resist the former. (The Language poets made a similar mistake in suggesting that a stylistic innovation in poetry was predictably convertible into real-world effects.)
In a recent interview at the Guardian, Assange seems aware of this problem, all but admitting that his earlier emphasis on secrecy doesn’t fit the reigning power structures of the West:
The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be ‘free’ because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free.
This diagnosis strikes me as much closer to the mark than Assange's earlier identification of government as fundamentally conspiratorial. But his earlier account at least had the virtue of justifying the leak of 250,000 secret diplomatic cables. Now the release seems freshly unexplained. After all, how, exactly, are publicized diplomatic cables supposed to affect the “web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on”? I don't know, and I'm beginning to wonder if Julian Assange does either.
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