This Opinion Will Change Once Assange Finds My Porn

No post Wednesday? No problem, bitches. No problem at all. I just update extremely late Thursday instead, and I'll get you another tomorrow. I AM A KIND AND MERCIFUL BLOGGOD.

So I want to talk about Wikileaks, because hey, I have a website, they've got a website. In general, I support Wikileaks. Their main mission is to promote truth and openness in government, which I respect. If, as our democratic philosophies hold, every country is ultimately ruled by its own people, then openness is simply delivering information to those who actually own it. I see Wikileaks's acts as fundamentally democratic.

It would be outrageously idealistic to accept the release of the diplomatic cables that started the latest and largest Wikileaks shitstorm without question. Sometimes, governments do need to keep secrets. Ideally, though, this should be for as short a time as possible, and it shouldn't be a big secret. Sure, publicizing your Kuwait liberation plans before you've even gotten your Gulf War on is a bad idea--but that was a while ago, and if you have files on (say) Gulf War Syndrome? We deserve to know that stuff. Wikileaks, however, hasn't revealed all their cables. They're doing it slowly, in batches, and only releasing the cables that they feel don't threaten security. I've yet to hear of an actual specific case someone can point to and say "Wikileaks caused this operational issue"--only generalities, which I distrust.

That said, they are admittedly somewhat radical. We don't usually expect this sort of truth-telling. Somewhat radical isn't necessarily a bad thing. The American (and French, and more recently Egyptian) revolutions were radical. The nature of society is change as new paradigms arrive, battle it out in the marketplace of ideas, and ultimately fall again. A radical idea is, in general, simply new. That's no reason to shun it.

In the past, ultimate and total access to government information simply wasn't possible. Now, with digital technology, it could be. The massive, truly unbelievable amount of information generated by a government could be available to nearly all of its citizens. Is that a right way to run a government? Fuck if I know. I suspect not, just like it's not a good idea to run a government on (total) majority rule, (total) individual liberties, or (total) centralized authority. At some point, realism starts to cancel out ideological advantages, but the key, the tricky part of governance, is finding a proper balance, finding how far you can push your ideology without being unable to run a country. But I contend that we ought to try. Where does the line between openness and practicality lie? I don't know, and nobody will ever know until we try.

Insisting on secrecy and freezing information in an age where information is the most fluid asset in the world is foolishness, as Wikileaks' continual ability to get its hands on lots and lots of data shows. Instead, we're going to have to adapt to a world where more information is available to everyone. This applies to politics, but it applies to a lot else--consider the practice of data mining. The old expectations of secrecy don't apply, and arguably they shouldn't. One interesting thing about the Internet and the hacker culture that underlies it is the success of open standards. We've seen projects like Wikipedia and Linux survive by a system of radical openness and a (dare I say) humanist trust in the ability of groups of people to leverage information when it's available to them. What stops a government from learning from that example?


(A side note about Julian Assange: If he is, in fact, guilty of sexual assault, he does deserve whatever penalties are mandated by law. That said, I find the charges against him pretty sketchy, especially their timing. He certainly doesn't deserved to be charged with a crime under American law.)