Psychoanalysis against WikiLeaks: resisting the demand for transparency (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Bullets of Truth”: Julian Assange and the Politics of Transparency
This essay updates (to early 2019) earlier work on the WikiLeaks story in order to consider what more recent developments reveal about the theoretical promise that Assange articulated at the time of the website’s emergence. Assange has characterized secrecy as both a form and symptom of corruption, and ultimately as the foundation of a “conspiracy” of governance that states like the U.S. inflict on their subjects and the world. He advocates a non-political, vigilante form of transparency in which WikiLeaks serves as a neutral entity that will save the public and free the world with information. He predicted that corrupt political orders would fall as the threat of exposure forces the collapse of their conspiratorial communication networks. But WikiLeaks has failed not only to save the world but to save itself from politics—and in the process has itself become a bit player in the larger geo-political drama that it had hoped to disrupt. Assange’s theory of information disclosure, as well as his assumptions about the state and governing institutions, have proven far too descriptively and normatively simple. More prominent, less radical theories of transparency should take note of these failures to the extent that they share many of his assumptions.
WikiLeaks| True Confessions: WikiLeaks, Contested Truths, and Narrative Containment
International Journal of Communication, 2014
In the dog days of summer 2012, the British newspaper The Guardian published a collection of statements entitled "Who Is Julian Assange? By the People Who Know Him Best." And, indeed, people ranging from his mother and school chums to editors and activist-colleagues weighed in, recalling their interactions with him and providing anecdotes and insights. The Guardian's editors, like the reporters in Citizen Kane, presumably hoped that the parts would add up to a whole. Interest in Assange has been unrelenting and has largely overshadowed the documents that WikiLeaks released. In a spiral of synechdocal reference, WikiLeaks had become Assange, and Assange had become the story. Although one might chalk this up to the mass news organizations' predilection for personality, or to the tabloidization of culture, or to Assange's own attempts at self-promotion, the question of "Who is Julian Assange?" in light of WikiLeaks' controversial work and, in particular, its 2010 and 2011 release of confidential U.S. military and diplomatic documents, seems a very odd one. The shocking nature of some of the released documents together with the systematic transgressions and duplicity they revealed on the part of the U.S. government seemed to offer far more compelling stories-and for a while, they competed with Assange's narrative for media attention. Indisputable evidence documented the sordid side of ongoing affairs of state, from diplomacy to espionage to war. Whether inscribed as realpolitik, incompetence, or malfeasance, the leaks offered a historically unparalleled look at (among other things) the behind-thescenes operations of the U.S. government. But somehow, through it all, Assange's name kept reemerging in the headlines. I open with this observation because the unfolding of the larger WikiLeaks discussion-the revelations, their ethical framing as transgressive or as a much-needed tonic, the people and ideas behind the leaks, and the parsing out of the leaks across time and across national borders-offers an opportunity to reflect on the construction of public narratives, complete with notions of agency, motive, and the selective inclusion (and exclusion) of data. In the WikiLeaks case, it is more accurate to speak of a web of sometimes-conflicting narratives, with various parties attempting to shape and control the dominant narrative. I use the term narrative in both a loose way, to refer to the unfolding of a serialized drama that various parties attempted to frame, and in a narrow sense, drawing on some concepts from literary theory to help illuminate the dynamics of the WikiLeaks drama as it unfolded in the public arena. This endeavor requires two provisos. First, my interest in the narrative form and dynamics of the WikiLeaks saga is driven by an interest in why the substance of the leaks, both the transgressions and the inconsistencies
Wikileaks can safely be considered a revealing experience in testing the limits of power. Julian Assange’s intent is to uncover the roots of power abuse, publicly exposing what is supposed to be the fabric of a hidden authoritarian regime underlying formal democracies. Despite the many—though generally unsurprising—Wikileaks revelations, the whole operation did not have the enormous effects Assange and his supporters anticipated, suggesting that perhaps something was wrong with Assange’s prediction, and the theory underlying it. To be sure, the opposition secrecy vs. transparency was presented in Wikileaks’ founding texts as a contradiction. Wikileaks assumes, first, that one could reach transparency, and second, that transparency, by the mere fact of existing, will be the best guarantee for a democratic power and a free society. This article argues that the main assumption underlying Wikileaks is wrong, since in modern power, transparency and secrecy are much more complementary than contradictory, all the more so when power is conceived of—as Assange himself does—as a reticular structure, a network, or a web. When transparency is not opposed to secrecy anymore, it can become the most refined form of secrecy. In such a regime of truth, whoever tries to get rid of secrecy and promotes transparency, instead of being freed of a “totalitarian regime,” gets entirely entangled in the dialectics of modern power.
True Confessions: WikiLeaks, Contested Truths, and Narrative Containment
2014
In the dog days of summer 2012, the British newspaper The Guardian published a collection of statements entitled "Who Is Julian Assange? By the People Who Know Him Best." And, indeed, people ranging from his mother and school chums to editors and activist-colleagues weighed in, recalling their interactions with him and providing anecdotes and insights. The Guardian's editors, like the reporters in Citizen Kane, presumably hoped that the parts would add up to a whole. Interest in Assange has been unrelenting and has largely overshadowed the documents that WikiLeaks released. In a spiral of synechdocal reference, WikiLeaks had become Assange, and Assange had become the story. Although one might chalk this up to the mass news organizations' predilection for personality, or to the tabloidization of culture, or to Assange's own attempts at self-promotion, the question of "Who is Julian Assange?" in light of WikiLeaks' controversial work and, in particular, its 2010 and 2011 release of confidential U.S. military and diplomatic documents, seems a very odd one. The shocking nature of some of the released documents together with the systematic transgressions and duplicity they revealed on the part of the U.S. government seemed to offer far more compelling stories-and for a while, they competed with Assange's narrative for media attention. Indisputable evidence documented the sordid side of ongoing affairs of state, from diplomacy to espionage to war. Whether inscribed as realpolitik, incompetence, or malfeasance, the leaks offered a historically unparalleled look at (among other things) the behind-thescenes operations of the U.S. government. But somehow, through it all, Assange's name kept reemerging in the headlines. I open with this observation because the unfolding of the larger WikiLeaks discussion-the revelations, their ethical framing as transgressive or as a much-needed tonic, the people and ideas behind the leaks, and the parsing out of the leaks across time and across national borders-offers an opportunity to reflect on the construction of public narratives, complete with notions of agency, motive, and the selective inclusion (and exclusion) of data. In the WikiLeaks case, it is more accurate to speak of a web of sometimes-conflicting narratives, with various parties attempting to shape and control the dominant narrative. I use the term narrative in both a loose way, to refer to the unfolding of a serialized drama that various parties attempted to frame, and in a narrow sense, drawing on some concepts from literary theory to help illuminate the dynamics of the WikiLeaks drama as it unfolded in the public arena. This endeavor requires two provisos. First, my interest in the narrative form and dynamics of the WikiLeaks saga is driven by an interest in why the substance of the leaks, both the transgressions and the inconsistencies
WikiLeaks: Vigilance to vigilantes and back again, or designing hues of transparency and democracy
This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typology and offering a theoretical explanation towards how political affordances are formed in digital democracy. Specifically, the article relates theories of affordance to an informing/deforming design process to explain how political positions are created in new media apparatus. The article traces iterations of WikiLeaks from 2006 to 2011, as well as derivative projects of radical transparency that existed in 2012 and 2013.
Disclosure’s Effects: WikiLeaks and Transparency
Constitutional, criminal, and administrative laws regulating government transparency, and the theories that support them, rest on the assumption that the disclosure of information has transformative effects: disclosure can inform, enlighten, and energize the public, or it can create great harm and stymie government operations. To resolve disputes over difficult cases, transparency laws and theories typically balance disclosure's beneficial effects against its harmful ones—what I have described as transparency's balance. WikiLeaks and its vigilante approach to massive document leaks challenge the underlying assumption about disclosure's effects in two ways. First, WikiLeaks' ability to receive and distribute leaked information cheaply, quickly, and seemingly unstoppably enables it to bypass the legal framework that would otherwise allow courts and officials to consider and balance disclosure's effects. For this reason, WikiLeaks threatens to make transparency's balance irrelevant. Second, its recent massive disclosures of U.S. military and diplomatic documents allow us to reconsider and test the assumption that disclosure produces certain effects that can serve as the basis for judicial and administrative prediction, calculation, and balancing. For this reason, WikiLeaks threatens transparency's balance by disproving its assumption that disclosure necessarily has predictable, identifiable consequences that can be estimated ex ante or even ex post. This Article studies WikiLeaks in order to test prevailing laws and theories of transparency that build on the assumption that disclosure's effects are predictable, calculable, and capable of serving as the basis for adjudicating difficult cases. Tracing WikiLeaks' development, operations, theories, and effects, it demonstrates the incoherence and conceptual poverty of an effects model for evaluating and understanding transparency.
WikiLeaks and the Changing Forms of Information Politics in the “Network Society”
Future Trends in Social Media, 2012
This chapter offers an analysis of one instance of "mass self-communication" namely the website WikiLeaks. Founded in 2006 by Australian internet activist Julian Paul Assange, WikiLeaks aimed to facilitate an anonymous electronic drop box for whistleblowers. WikiLeaks has promoted the cause of investigative journalism, organising citizens into a powerful force of news-gatherers, and laying bare a wealth of privileged information. By first disrupting and then decentralising relations of power, WikiLeaks encourages new ways of thinking. At the heart of this process is a radical recasting of what counts as a public service ethos, one which promises to reinvigorate traditional conceptions of journalism's role and responsibilities in a democratic culture.