<story><title>Excellent analysis of Assange&apos;s Wikileaks motivations (from the horse&apos;s mouth)</title><url>http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-“to-destroy-this-invisible-government”</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lmkg</author><text>It&apos;s a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought into it. However, he&apos;s making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which is treating the concentration of political power as monolithic. If you assume that an organization is concerned about the power of the organization, then I think he&apos;s correct in his logic that authoritarianism leads to conspiracy and communication is important to having power. However, if you assume that most members of an organization are concerned with personal power rather than the power of the organization, then the importance of communication goes down sharply, as the only coordination is opportunistic. A bureaucracy, as opposed to a dictatorship, is quite content without having goals, coordination, or communication[1], and can expand its authority based entirely on the mission creep of lower-level individuals within it.&lt;p&gt;How valuable the disruption of communication is in fighting a &quot;regime&quot; depends on how you model that regime. And, of course, in practice you will find that reality is some bizarre chimera of any group of models. My intuition is that Congress (plus lobbyists) act more like a decentralized bureaucracy, executive administrations act more like dictatorships that fight against each other for territory, and that the closest things we find to Assange&apos;s &quot;banal conspiracies&quot; are small, ad-hoc, opportunistic alignment of objectives, much smaller, less powerful, and less stable than the government as a whole.&lt;p&gt;[1] In fact, lack of coordination could help a bureaucracy grow by fostering redundancy.</text></comment>
<story><title>Excellent analysis of Assange&apos;s Wikileaks motivations (from the horse&apos;s mouth)</title><url>http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-“to-destroy-this-invisible-government”</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CWuestefeld</author><text>tl;dr version (and it is quite long). I&apos;ve copied out what I think are the key bits, the following is all quoted:&lt;p&gt;He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself -- to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known -- it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy ...&lt;p&gt;the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make &quot;leaks&quot; a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s  information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the &lt;i&gt;Collateral Murder&lt;/i&gt; video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire ...&lt;p&gt;The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone.&lt;p&gt;... he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that &quot;Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people,&quot; and it was true, then too, that &quot;To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.&quot;</text></comment>