Julian Assange is probably the world's biggest ass, an anarchist of the first order who is convinced that everyone and everything is corrupt but him and his supporters. He aggregates nothing but publicity and takes responsibility for nothing but kicks in the teeth of authority. He can only be right one way; in theory.
Assange has fallen for the idea that 'information wants to be free'. He has run afoul of what I call information thermodynamics. He thinks that transparency is good enough, but it is not. Free information, even if consistent and understandable requires the context of organization. If you took Bibles and distributed them around the planet for free, you wouldn't be building a church. If you put public libraries with books that explain the stock market in poor neighborhoods, you wouldn't be building an investment house. And so if you take diplomatic cables and put them out in public, you wouldn't be building an embassy. In all those cases, you are just spitting on the mojo by believing there's some reductionist formula at work, that all anybody needs is the secret sauce and they'll be putting McDonalds out of business. Information thermodynamics says that it takes a great deal of energy to keep people on the same page. Even if you have one version of the truth, say the closing numbers of the Dow and it's perfectly transparent, it doesn't mean you can coordinate behavior. Wikileaks can leak from now until doomsday, but it won't make any impact until it can establish coordinated action in response to the content.
A lot of people are gritting their teeth about what's going on in international diplomacy in the wake of the Wikileaks vomitus. But I have ever confidence that diplomacy is not what diplomats write, diplomacy is what diplomats do. You cannot reduce diplomacy to the content of its communications. The pros are the pros, and they have a deeper understanding, in the proper context, of all the information Assange could possibly get his hands on and disseminate.
There's an assumption at work which the Wikileakers make which is parallel to the reality of open source. The idea is that if the facts were truly revealed and distributed the millions who pay attention can do a better job than the elite few who are presumably screwing things up today. But in a certain way, all of this information already *is* open source. There already is an army of people second-guessing international diplomacy. The benefit to those people of these leaks is marginal. But like any other domain where the rules and the actions are known, there's a world of difference between understanding & critiquing and making it happen. It's like publishing the lyrics and music to a hit song. Just because you know it, doesn't mean you can do it.
In the end, Wikileaks will just be history. Which is to say just like we all say we know who won WW2 and why, only people who make it their calling will have any real mastery of the subject. The public will not benefit any more from Wikileaks than it does from reading history - which is to say only the experts will be expert. The rest of us will have access, and then so what?
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