Insurgent Technology: In WikiLeak's Wake

by Piyter Hurd

The project of WikiLeaks, despite defensively fielded public relations pleas to the contrary, is at root the dismantling of power.

Julian Assange himself made the recognition of this plain in his cypherpunk-era text Irrationality in Argument, published August 2007, that prominently cites the words of (((Gustav Landauer))), an anarchist theorist:

"The State is a condition, a certain relation­ship between human beings, a mode of behavior.  We destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another...  We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men."

"Information should be free" is not a sustainable tenet of parliamentary democracy.  Complete transparency represents, in Landauer's language, a relationship that forms the noose of all governance.  This Frankenstein, State power, must have its own internal life to survive, wherein deliberations and a critical eye allow its machinations to develop for ultimate deployment.  To reveal its every utterance is to do nothing more than to try to cut out its tongue.

WikiLeaks', secreted communiqués lay bare this hive mind of Power, summing the inhuman behaviors they reveal in the open air to oxidize, become brittle, rust, and fall away.  Framing such activity as anything but an assault on this Power is a poor lie, and a counter-intuitive castration.  This poor lie having been engendered by both WikiLeaks', own public relations to prevent their absolute demonization, the allowed recuperation of leaked material by elite mainstream media (in deals with major newspapers pipelining and limiting releases), and the manipulative readings of activists and liberal elements that felt this was a tool they could wield to their own political advantage (that is, other aspirants to power in the opposition).

The tactical failure of WikiLeaks, is the failure to act on the consciousness of the Control it exposes.  If it seeks to undermine the shield of ink and opacity that veils all governance, it must not play a passive role.  The graves are dug, but left empty and hallow.  Without this critical step, the ousters it has fueled are easily exploited by all except the citizen prisoners it attempts to empower.  The resulting power gap is filled by those in closest proximity to the void with the greatest will for politicking.  Leeches ready to be sucked into the vacuum: most frequently fellow opportunists in the cadres of Control.

The project lays out two competing visions: One hopeful projection upon the mind's eye: embassies overfull with technocrats swallowed into the ground; The other a grim scene playing out beyond the screen: a new gray suit unpacking his suitcase and resting his swollen ass on a still warm seat.

Unfortunately, Assange has said time and time again, "We are a specialist publisher" steering us towards the second scenario.

The cybernetic tabloid sheet will not and cannot be a revolution.  In attempting to fulfill the role of "specialist publisher," WikiLeaks, dominates and glorifies their position as owners of a new infrastructure, rather than seeking to multiply and encourage the diffusion of such a tool.  Their posture claims no vision beyond the old paradigm, rather they claim a mastery and a special place within it.

The bitter, legalistic, and territorial way in which OpenLeaks was attacked and subverted adds to WikiLeaks', position the air of a capitalist rolling out a new product, a new boss making a claim to dominance in information capital.  Celebrity jockeying, media power, and public relations manipulations helped to stymie the testing of a new model, no different than any company protecting trade secrets.

In this climate, WikiLeaks', weaponized information becomes blunted, limited, and open to recuperation.  The space that was opened for unrestrained activity, the police powers that were temporarily paralyzed, are prevented from being cemented and finalized when WikiLeaks, assimilates these innovations, rather than distributing them for multiplied action.

What is essential is not the propagandist, whose methods are temporal and pedagogical, but the researcher(s) that can give and not author lasting arms fit for retooling in varied and dynamic contexts.

We can look to William S. Burroughs, an inexhaustible researcher himself in his endless quest to map and cut the lines of power, and his analysis of the Bolivarian revolution in Latin America for more concrete understandings of this concept of fundamental technologies and lasting arms:

[Simón] Bolívar liberated a large section of South America from Spain.  He left intact the Christian calendar, the Spanish language, the Catholic Church, the Spanish bureaucracy.  He left Spanish families holding the wealth and the land...  To achieve independence from alien domination and to consolidate revolutionary gains, five steps are necessary:

1.)  Proclaim a new era and set up a new calendar.
2.)  Replace alien language.
3.)  Destroy or neutralize alien gods.
4.)  Destroy alien machinery of government and control.
5.)  Take wealth and land from individual aliens.

Burroughs' thesis is plain and widely applicable - fundamental social technologies, the most essential infrastructures, were left untouched upon Bolívar's military victory.

The result: a succession of corrupt and brutal regimes in Latin America that have effortlessly mimicked their colonial forbearers.  New and effective assaults on the nodes of power will require the development of technologies that seek such intrinsic oppositional qualities.  In contemporary times, we must seek to understand which innovations retain or have touched upon this essential quality maintaining its visceral totality while avoiding its seemingly nihilistic self-destructiveness.

One seemingly more innocuous, but powerful technological configuration and unwitting iconoclasm in Burroughs' line was performed to serve "cyber pirates" and lawful computer users during the 'Net's proliferation.

Increasingly omnipresent apparatuses of digital communication (and in the Western information economy digital commodity distribution) were re-purposed and organized outside of institutions.  Peer-to-peer networks, for example, were developed and have proven to be subversive for their structure alone, without neces­sitating a precise current of content to be carried.  These virtual pathways have proven to be an irresistible and massive criminal vortex, thanks to a few simple features.

Identity (and thus "theft") was marginally anonymized, necessary security circumventions were minimal and distribution of illicit material became a source of community for capable operators.  The purported sanctity of private property, supposedly so ingrained in the American (and Western) consciousness, dissolved into the cybernetic pathways without so much as a nudge.

A more profound entitlement to luxury, to celebration, revealed itself in the same manner as orgies of looting blooming at the moment of a blackout.  With the same fundamental clarity of the pirate, the looter's very viscera, their gut, questions the limits of their daily lives, the invisible lines that chalk out our every action, the lines that make us skittish around powerful objects, the lots that were drawn that define our daily commute, our exhaustive lurching forward for the next acquisition.

At the moment a hand reaches into the storefront no thesis needs to be written, the religiosity of property is destroyed, "we demand nothing from you and everything for ourselves."

Now, in the technological moment, the creation of these cybernetic pathways alone has facilitated massive and likely irreparable damage to the structure and conception of the intellectual property commodity (including a slew of media and entertainment).

A commodity pathway that is one small pillar of Power, yes, but a pillar that represented 33.1 percent of the United States Gross Domestic Product in 2008 and around 60 percent of exports in 2007.  These cheap, distributed, decentralized software technologies have served as the executioner of this property's inviolability, more decisively so than any theoretical text or polemic.

Make it simple to seize, to take, and the constraints of property dissolve rapidly.

Make it simple to cross borders and nation states will disappear in a flood of migrants.

These are the end games of freedom of information in contemporary economies.

This understanding is paired with a unique historical moment.   We have witnessed the surprising explosion of the Occupation movement in the United States, following in the wake of "Take The Squares" revolts that moved from the (((Arab Spring))) to Spain, to Greece, all of which had a mediatized but genuine key participation of Anonymous, HackBlocs, and other technologists in their struggles.

In the midst of crisis, with the proliferation of mass assemblies and generalized resistance, alienation is breaking down and sectors that would not have intermingled are enjoying the opportunity to collaborate, to discuss, and to build a greater imaginary.

Hackers have the potential to contribute profoundly to this creative assemblage, this "image of the future," as every notion of resistance and control is being redefined.  A glaring opportunity: On May 1st of 2012 a call has resonated and been endorsed around the globe for a general strike, preceded by a five day weekend:

Strike Everywhere: strikeeverywhere.net/call

Occupy May 1st General Strike: occupymay1st.org

Inter-Occupy May 1st: interoccupy.org/occupy-may-1st-action

In the United States, where factories and farms are no longer the primary realms of production, where every worker is precarious, and where information/media is the primary commodity form, striking will not mean to simply stop the conveyors, but to re-imagine our very social relationships and modes of interaction.  The creative and aforementioned "fundamental" interventions, constructions, and disruptions of hackers have incredible potential in this space of absence, acting on the blank canvas of a general strike in an information landscape.

While a grand gesture, this May can be seen as one of many gestures running in parallel, tearing at the seams of all limitation and authoritarian forms.

It would be a mistake to serve a temporal limit, to ever be at the service of the clock.  These ruptures extend past and resist time.

The instance of WikiLeaks, to serve an example, may be sputtering and laid to rest, but it is undeniable that it was an unexpected burst that has left a tear in the pathways of control.  This was an early volley of many.

With the absolute refusal of so many to go on as they had before, and with so many asserting their hunger and desires anew, a wealth of ruptures now exists.  The potentiality is everywhere for using this knowledge and wielding new technological foundations to dismantle old limits and to make, for ourselves, new environments that resist control and reinforce the ethos of play and possibility.

With every step the vortex expands, the excitement grows, and the game mutates.

Return to $2600 Index