radicalphilosophy.com the assange papers--finn brunton
"We have an opportunity to be ‘true to the visible and the invisible’, as Assange has said of his own work on the history of hacking, examining both present forms and the underlying fields of force that shaped them."
...Given this breadth, and the sheer diversity of possible conspiracies in scale, means, goals and contexts, is it possible to generalize and abstract an anti-conspiratorial strategy? Assange turns to graph theory, a branch of mathematics devoted to the analysis of networks. Graph theory began with the superlative mathematician Leonhard Euler, who perceived within a party game about the bridges of Königsberg (can you cross each bridge once and return to your starting point?) a number of points and lines, nodes and paths. It provides a way to extract abstract diagrams from the messy specificities of real-world networks. Imagine, Assange asks, that we can describe a conspiracy in this abstract fashion: all the participants are nodes, points on the network, with lines of communication between them along which information flows. The edges of the conspiracy are defined by all those from whom these secrets must be kept. The lines of communication within the conspiracy can be of varying ‘weight’, describing the amount of important information being passed along, and nodes can be of higher or lower value depending on the weight and number of their connections to other nodes. This model allows Assange to bracket out the complexities of specific conspiracies, and produce an evaluative metric of ‘total conspiratorial power’ – the power of the group to communicate and plan internally, that is, rather than its capacity to effect change in the world: ‘the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt’.17 (If any curators want to produce a highly relevant retrospective in 2011, Marc Lombardi’s ‘Narrative Structure’ diagrams – intricate hand-drawn maps of conspiratorial projects, in the Assange sense – are crying out for a show.)
Assange takes this model further: the conspiracy is a type of device for taking an input, like reports, cables and intelligence, acting on it, and producing an output. A conspiracy ‘computes the next action of the conspiracy’, in his words, and the total conspiratorial power is the clock rate of this device, how fast it can advance to the next step and react to new states of affairs.18 The traditional approach to dealing with conspiracies has been a patient and particular one: documenting their workings, finding the most significant nodes, and removing them from the graph – that is, imprisoning or assassinating people. Ideally, analysing the graph would allow you to target nodes whose removal might break a conspiracy into two separate and weaker units, for example, or abruptly isolate many other nodes. Assange wants an abstract and general strategy suited to his black box input–output model. What is the best way to lower the total conspiratorial power of any conspiracy, whether it’s a political party, a group of insider traders, a terrorist cell, a multinational corporation or a small gang of bureaucrats?
You do this by leveraging the Internet’s capacity for anonymity of users and distribution of information. If anyone in the conspiracy leaks, and the information is disclosed anonymously, everyone in the graph becomes suspect, if not for leaking then for negligent security. You don’t need to neutralize key nodes if they stop talking to each other, or if their conversations are so restricted by the possibility of disclosure that their links become far less important. You ‘throttle’ it, which Assange means in the mechanical sense: the fuel decreases, the speed slows.19 The total conspiratorial power is turned down towards zero, the state where no one is talking to anyone else. The ‘blood’ of the conspiracy as creature ‘may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied; unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment’.20 This is the esoteric strategy, and its goal is a power split into fragments and so locked in purges, silence, tactical internal denials and traceable lies that it is halt and lame, chewing on its own tail. This is a key reason why the WikiLeaks group are not ‘hackers’, in the crude but common sense of people penetrating secure systems to acquire information. To break into a system and steal a document merely provokes an organization to improve its security, and releasing the document is no guarantee of a positive social result. It is vital that the materials are leaks because that will foment suspicion and paranoia among the conspirators. The ideal application of the Assange model is a kind of panopticon turned inside out, where the main guard tower is gone because any given prisoner might be an informer.
from "wikileaks and the assange papers"http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=29463
oh the many reasons to drop out of the philosophy program
perhaps it was not radical enough
or philosophy takes time
and revolutions
and life (even when hanging by a thread)
food and fossil fuels
it is my belief that wikileaks will situate itself as a blip on the surrealist radar
punctuated by humanitarian crises
in the internationalization of everything
and the end of the nation state in its absurdity
the collapse of our monetary systems
and the future of our overinformation
as ellsberg is arrested might we joyfully go further
transcend
to the highest point
human dignity
safety
joy
the emotion which gives rise to flights of fancy
such as the thought of "god" or "human rights"
and for an end to torture of humans
and for short meaningful lives versus long complacent subservient peasant fealty
and man's search for meaning
(unfound)
the musicality of the cables as the librettos for the new cyborg operas
history of the decline and fall of american empire
revise: india, turkey, columbia
excerpts:
This problem of logical speech and rational action runs through much of Assange’s non-cryptographic writing. He has described the goal of WikiLeaks as ‘scientific journalism’ – ‘read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on’9 – with the evidence ever-present. He returns again and again in his writings to problems of argument, evincing the disappointment of the ‘logical reductionist’, as he characterized himself: ‘I once thought that the Truth was a set comprised of all the things that were true, and the big truth could be obtained by taking all its component propositions and evaluating them until nothing remained.’10 Argument is unavailing when it displeases the listener, the axiom of transitivity is revoked, and illogic wins the day. Why do people fail to act in their best interest? How can they condone the crooked, the venal, the obviously false and the wrong-headed? Assange takes notes throughout his blog on problems in cognition, psychology and epistemology: ‘learned idiocy’, measurement problems in physics, emotional manipulation by advertising, the social experience of gifted children, perceptual calibration. ‘How to hack reality? How to pierce the skin? How to find the spot on the wall where the illusion flickers and rip it open?’11 His anger at wilful misperception is intense:
Assange has a very different public in mind as the esoteric audience for the disclosures of WikiLeaks, or any WikiLeaks-like organization: those who already know the secrets, those who created them. Over the course of two drafts (with different titles) of a document published in the last months of 2006, ‘State and Terrorist Conspiracies’ and ‘Conspiracy as Governance’, Assange outlined what is arguably the primary purpose of a leaks-driven project, with ‘scientific journalism’ being a positive second-order effect.16 It builds on a mathematical discipline called graph theory and a conspiratorial view of politics to produce a computational model of the capture of state power. To be clear, Assange defines ‘conspiracy’ quite broadly – the actions and plans of a political elite which are kept secret to avoid inducing resistance on the part of a public: ‘individual and collective will’ in one draft, ‘the people’s will’ in another. These conspiracies constitute the active political form, the ‘primary planning methodology’ of ‘authoritarian regimes’ – though an example of ‘two closely balanced and broadly conspiratorial power groupings’, the Republican and Democratic parties of the United States, suggests, again, that for Assange’s purpose an ‘authoritarian conspiracy’ is a spacious category.oh the many reasons to drop out of the philosophy program
perhaps it was not radical enough
or philosophy takes time
and revolutions
and life (even when hanging by a thread)
food and fossil fuels
it is my belief that wikileaks will situate itself as a blip on the surrealist radar
punctuated by humanitarian crises
in the internationalization of everything
and the end of the nation state in its absurdity
the collapse of our monetary systems
and the future of our overinformation
as ellsberg is arrested might we joyfully go further
transcend
to the highest point
human dignity
safety
joy
the emotion which gives rise to flights of fancy
such as the thought of "god" or "human rights"
and for an end to torture of humans
and for short meaningful lives versus long complacent subservient peasant fealty
and man's search for meaning
(unfound)
the musicality of the cables as the librettos for the new cyborg operas
history of the decline and fall of american empire
revise: india, turkey, columbia
excerpts:
This problem of logical speech and rational action runs through much of Assange’s non-cryptographic writing. He has described the goal of WikiLeaks as ‘scientific journalism’ – ‘read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on’9 – with the evidence ever-present. He returns again and again in his writings to problems of argument, evincing the disappointment of the ‘logical reductionist’, as he characterized himself: ‘I once thought that the Truth was a set comprised of all the things that were true, and the big truth could be obtained by taking all its component propositions and evaluating them until nothing remained.’10 Argument is unavailing when it displeases the listener, the axiom of transitivity is revoked, and illogic wins the day. Why do people fail to act in their best interest? How can they condone the crooked, the venal, the obviously false and the wrong-headed? Assange takes notes throughout his blog on problems in cognition, psychology and epistemology: ‘learned idiocy’, measurement problems in physics, emotional manipulation by advertising, the social experience of gifted children, perceptual calibration. ‘How to hack reality? How to pierce the skin? How to find the spot on the wall where the illusion flickers and rip it open?’11 His anger at wilful misperception is intense:
And before this [desire for truth] to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, on the liberators and martyrs of truth, on the Voltaires, Galileos, and Principias of truth, on the Gutenburgs [sic], Marconis and Internets of truth, on those serial killers of delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new.’
...
Assange takes this model further: the conspiracy is a type of device for taking an input, like reports, cables and intelligence, acting on it, and producing an output. A conspiracy ‘computes the next action of the conspiracy’, in his words, and the total conspiratorial power is the clock rate of this device, how fast it can advance to the next step and react to new states of affairs.18 The traditional approach to dealing with conspiracies has been a patient and particular one: documenting their workings, finding the most significant nodes, and removing them from the graph – that is, imprisoning or assassinating people. Ideally, analysing the graph would allow you to target nodes whose removal might break a conspiracy into two separate and weaker units, for example, or abruptly isolate many other nodes. Assange wants an abstract and general strategy suited to his black box input–output model. What is the best way to lower the total conspiratorial power of any conspiracy, whether it’s a political party, a group of insider traders, a terrorist cell, a multinational corporation or a small gang of bureaucrats?
You do this by leveraging the Internet’s capacity for anonymity of users and distribution of information. If anyone in the conspiracy leaks, and the information is disclosed anonymously, everyone in the graph becomes suspect, if not for leaking then for negligent security. You don’t need to neutralize key nodes if they stop talking to each other, or if their conversations are so restricted by the possibility of disclosure that their links become far less important. You ‘throttle’ it, which Assange means in the mechanical sense: the fuel decreases, the speed slows.19 The total conspiratorial power is turned down towards zero, the state where no one is talking to anyone else. The ‘blood’ of the conspiracy as creature ‘may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied; unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment’.20 This is the esoteric strategy, and its goal is a power split into fragments and so locked in purges, silence, tactical internal denials and traceable lies that it is halt and lame, chewing on its own tail. This is a key reason why the WikiLeaks group are not ‘hackers’, in the crude but common sense of people penetrating secure systems to acquire information. To break into a system and steal a document merely provokes an organization to improve its security, and releasing the document is no guarantee of a positive social result. It is vital that the materials are leaks because that will foment suspicion and paranoia among the conspirators. The ideal application of the Assange model is a kind of panopticon turned inside out, where the main guard tower is gone because any given prisoner might be an informer.
finn brunton
radicalphilosophy.com
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