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Nov. 30th, 2010 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsZunguzungu has a fascinating article in which he dismantles one of Julian Assange's essays from five years ago. Assange views himself as an anti-conspiracist, and the United States as the nation-state most likely to engage in authoritarian conspiracies.
This isn't the traditional "conspiracy theory" stuff; instead, it's more what we really are seeing today: the conspiracy exists mostly as a collection of impulses shared among individuals who are not always consciously colluding: instead, the collective outcome of their acting on those impulses is the rising of one class of people over the interest of others. ("Class" here is in the legal sense: a group distinguishable by a shared characteristic, although given the state of the US, it could well imply the cultural-economic sense as well.)
The essay is probably entirely self-serving and self-justifying, but Assange's vision is similar to my own perception of modern conspiracy culture: they exist not like some criminal enterprise or self-assigned heroes in a tennis court, but as a collection of cells, most of which are not only completely opaque to one another, but most of which share overlapping and congruent ideologies, rather than a complete buy-in to one central tenant. (Think of the Tea Partiers, who are driven mostly by a free-floating resentment that they're getting screwed, but who are led by an administration that is shipping American jobs to North Korea!.) The conspiracy is the outcome of lots of small groups acting in their own interests, forming and breaking relationships as needed; in this view, "the conspiracy" exists in the same way that "evolution" exists: as an exaptive explanation for what's going on in government.
Assange views himself as forcing the conspiracy, the "secret operations of government," the people who doing what Matt Taibbi documents every week, to become even more obscure, more furtive and secretive. By doing so, he hopes to make the conspiracy so inefficient that the disinfectant of sunlight will have a chance of working.
The diplomatic cables aren't meant to be embarrassing: they're meant to make diplomats be so careful about "secure" channels that they become useless, and most transactions are pushed out into the open. He uses titillation to fuel attention, but his goal is bigger.
Assange wants to do this to governments and private institutions. We'll see if it works. I wish him well.
This isn't the traditional "conspiracy theory" stuff; instead, it's more what we really are seeing today: the conspiracy exists mostly as a collection of impulses shared among individuals who are not always consciously colluding: instead, the collective outcome of their acting on those impulses is the rising of one class of people over the interest of others. ("Class" here is in the legal sense: a group distinguishable by a shared characteristic, although given the state of the US, it could well imply the cultural-economic sense as well.)
The essay is probably entirely self-serving and self-justifying, but Assange's vision is similar to my own perception of modern conspiracy culture: they exist not like some criminal enterprise or self-assigned heroes in a tennis court, but as a collection of cells, most of which are not only completely opaque to one another, but most of which share overlapping and congruent ideologies, rather than a complete buy-in to one central tenant. (Think of the Tea Partiers, who are driven mostly by a free-floating resentment that they're getting screwed, but who are led by an administration that is shipping American jobs to North Korea!.) The conspiracy is the outcome of lots of small groups acting in their own interests, forming and breaking relationships as needed; in this view, "the conspiracy" exists in the same way that "evolution" exists: as an exaptive explanation for what's going on in government.
Assange views himself as forcing the conspiracy, the "secret operations of government," the people who doing what Matt Taibbi documents every week, to become even more obscure, more furtive and secretive. By doing so, he hopes to make the conspiracy so inefficient that the disinfectant of sunlight will have a chance of working.
The diplomatic cables aren't meant to be embarrassing: they're meant to make diplomats be so careful about "secure" channels that they become useless, and most transactions are pushed out into the open. He uses titillation to fuel attention, but his goal is bigger.
Assange wants to do this to governments and private institutions. We'll see if it works. I wish him well.
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Date: 2010-11-30 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-30 10:25 pm (UTC)Number 127
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Date: 2010-11-30 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-30 11:44 pm (UTC)I suppose seeing more warfare between countries as a good thing is a logical anarchistic view if one's aim is trying to bring down the whole international system, but there's a lot of innocent blood which will be spilled along the way. No doubt, they'll be seen as a necessary sacrifice to achieve the desired utopian outcome.
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Date: 2010-12-01 02:48 am (UTC)I do have to take issue with one of your points, though--Tea Partiers only *think* they're a grassroots movement. The propaganda driving it is very much NOT grassroots, and it's being funded by the Koch brothers, who want nothing more than for government to keep its nose out of their business, 'cause all those regulations keep driving profits down, y'know? And of course, Aussie-born dual citizen Rupert Murdoch and his business partner Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of the Kingdom Holding Company have been doing their part to pour gasoline on the fire as well, trying to convince US citizens to overthrow their legally and legitimately elected government so they can make an even bigger buck.