Ideas & Society: Does Wikileaks matter?

The 251, 287 semi secret cables published by Wikileaks and their supposed impact on US foreign policy and national security has been the focal point of many debates around the world since December 2010.

Transcript

Peter Beilharz:

Good afternoon and welcome to this event, Does WikiLeaks Matter?  This event is co-sponsored by Robert Manne’s Ideas and Society program and the Thesis Eleven Centre Festival of Ideas which is currently running at La Trobe University.  La Trobe, as I’m sure you know, has a strong tradition of commitment to the discussion of these kinds of matters to public life, to public conversation.  I need to begin by thanking the Wheeler Centre folks for making all this possible.

There are two further events, just very quickly, in the Festival of Ideas, that you should know about.  The first is tonight.  It’s a public lecture at the University of Melbourne, 221 Bouverie Street, by Professor Ron Jacobs from the State University of New York, Albany on the global financial crisis and its media narratives.  The second, which is held here tomorrow, in the Experimedia Centre here at the State Library is a four-hour event on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, the first two hours of which will be dedicated to academic content and presentation, the second two hours of which will be dedicated to the viewing of film, the first cut of the first documentary movie about the work and life of Zygmunt Bauman will be aired then.

WikiLeaks.  Just a couple of random themes, observations, from me.  As Zygmunt Bauman, to whom I just referred somewhere writes that one of the moral crises of the 19th century was that in the 19th century we believed that we could solve the problems of the world, if only we had the information to tell us how to do this.  In the 21st century, he suggests the crisis has somehow been reversed.  We now have such an abundance of information that it’s actually paralysing, what is it?  257,000 etc Wikileak releases.

There’s perhaps a cult of transparency or the enthusiasm for transparency which goes together with this.  There may be too much intelligence, just as Marx once said that there was too much civilisation.  There are various other issues that arise.  The question of the image of the charismatic leader in the figure of Julian Assange, not least for example when you happen to watch him as I did, together with John Pilger on television:  antipodeans making trouble on the world stage, which might be a bit of a conceit.

Now, Rob Manne and Guy Rundle, as I’m sure you both know, have been digging deep into these archives, into this information, and in Rob’s case, trying to find his way through the labyrinth, the proverbial riddle wrapped in an enigma.  Guy has been digging in the same place and has a book to come, which will result from these excavations.  We’ve decided today that they’ll bookend this event.  Rob will begin and Guy will close.  I’m presuming that you know them by their works.  Robert Manne of course is Professor of Politics at La Trobe University, consistent contributor to the press, to the daily press, perhaps especially to The Monthly and most recently author of that splendidly titled book, Making Trouble indeed.  Guy Rundle has taken the long march from Arena to Crikey.  He’s an acute, as you know, an acute synoptic journalist who’s written about extraordinary matters, whether in one register, in the realm of comedy, or through to Frankston from Frankston to Detroit, he’s still sufficiently old-fashioned with us to yesterday have quoted William Morris in The Age, for which I think we should thank him, but not now.

These bookends, appropriately at the Wheeler Centre at the State Library, will be intermediated by two of our visitors for the Thesis Eleven Festival of Ideas.  So Rob will begin.  Rob will be followed by Eleanor Townsley, who’s Professor at the Mount Holyoke College in Western Massachusetts, who’s kindly agreed to be with us today.  She’ll be followed by Professor Peter Vale who until recently was a Nelson Mandela Professor at Rhodes University and is now the Professor at Large at the University of Johannesburg.  Then Guy will take his turn and there will be some sufficient good time for discussion.  But we begin with Robert Manne.  Thank you.  Thanks Rob.

[applause]

Robert Manne:

Well, if I can thank Peter for the introduction.  We’re very old friends at La Trobe and it’s great to do something with him and his Thesis Eleven.  I also thank you all for coming.  I’m astonished at the size of the audience and particularly because the football match you’ve torn yourself away from.

As is my wont when I don’t want to get things slightly wrong, I’m going to talk from something I’ve written and as I say, there’ll be plenty of time for questions.

WikiLeaks was founded on the basis of two fundamental intellectual discoveries.

The first arose from Julian Assange’s long membership of the email listing known as the cypherpunks. The cypherpunks were concerned about the battle between the individual and the state in the age of the internet. They believed that because of two developments—public key cryptography and a software program known as PGP, pretty good privacy—individuals could now communicate with each other in cyberspace free from the possibility of state surveillance. Julian Assange was the inheritor of this idea not its source.

The second discovery was Assange’s alone. From the possibility of unbreakable communication between individuals, he devised a revolutionary strategy based on the relations that might be created between whistleblowers across the globe and WikiLeaks, an extraterritorial organisation he created. He regarded both states and business corporations as conspiracies maintained by their monopoly of communications in the relevant fields. They could be “throttled” if the conspirators lost confidence in their ability to communicate with each other in secrecy. In previous ages conspiracies had been challenged by kidnappings or assassinations. In the age of the internet they could be challenged by insider leaks. At the core of WikiLeaks, then, was this thought. If those privy to the work of the conspirators inside states or corporations were able to leak their documents without fear of discovery, and if these documents could then be published to the world in the clear light of day, the conspirators would lose their capacity to maintain their clandestine communications with each other. Their conspiracy would be crushed.

Assange clearly believed that some states and some corporations were more corrupt than others. Because of the existence of WikiLeaks, in the struggle between the more and the less corrupt states and corporations, the more worthy would triumph, the less worthy would be exposed. This thought amounted to what I call political and corporate Darwinism, the survival not so much of the fittest but the best. The kind of revolution Assange envisaged did not rest on new political or economic arrangements but on the emergence of a new moral order.

WikiLeaks is often misunderstood. At its origin, WikiLeaks was not primarily an anti-American organisation. Although it was strongly opposed to the authoritarian tendencies of the Bush administration, it was even more interested in the liberating potential of leaks originating in China, Russia and the corrupt regimes of Central Asia and Africa. Insofar as it has appeared to become an anti-American organisation it is because of the fact that by far the most important leaks it received came from the American state in 2010—the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the quarter of a million cables from the State Department. What WikiLeaks now discovered was the paradox that leaks are far more likely to emanate from the relatively speaking more open rather than less open states. It also discovered something that could not have been anticipated at its foundation, namely that it was precisely leaks from the United States that had the potential to galvanise opinion in more authoritarian states. The release of the State Department cables had minimal impact on the reputation of the United States. They played a significant part as a catalyst in the north African uprising of recent months by undermining the reputation of the ruling family in Tunisia.

Nor was WikiLeaks primarily a left wing organisation. Assange regarded it as vital to its mission that it published authentic documents including those emanating from conservative forces. He was privately contemptuous of the conventional Western left—in part because he did not accept its analysis of contemporary racism and imperialism; in part because he believed much of the Western left was narcissistic and self-serving; and in part because among his greatest heroes were anticommunists like Solzhenitsyn, who had challenged the Stalin state. WikiLeaks has now, however, assumed a position on the left—in part because of the enmity it has earned from the US state; in part because once that enmity was manifest, Assange’s staunchest supporters were to be found on the Pilger-Tariq Ali left; and in part because in publishing material on the corruption of corporations WikiLeaks work aligns with one of the central strands of conventional, contemporary left analysis. It is on this question that he split from the anarcho-capitalist libertarians of the right who formed the dominant strand among the cypherpunks.

The question is often asked: is WikiLeaks a media or a political organisation? Although Assange has recently begun to claim that it is a media organisation, this is purely tactical. If he is indicted by the US Grand Jury on the charge of conspiracy with Bradley Manning for breaches of the 1917 Espionage Act Assange’s primary line of defence will almost certainly be that WikiLeaks is a conventional publishing house with himself as its editor-in-chief. This is understandable but in essence false. Assange did not create and then devote his life to WikiLeaks to improve the quality of journalism. He gave his life to it, as his fascinating blog entries under IQ.ORG of 2006 make clear, in order to inspire revolution across the globe.

If Assange’s primary motivation is revolutionary and political, since the establishment of WikiLeaks in 2006 his steepest learning curve is connected with the question of the media. At the origin of WikiLeaks Assange hoped that, once their authenticity had been verified, mere publication of the documents sent to WikiLeaks was all that would be necessary for the cleansing capacity of the Truth to have its effect. The first document WikiLeaks published concerned Somalia. Assange believed that it would be seized upon and analysed by thousands of Somalis languishing in the refugee camps and have as a consequence an immediate and galvanising political impact. More generally, he had been inspired by the Wikipedia movement in which millions had contributed. He thought that the documents secretly delivered by whistleblowers to WikiLeaks would be subject to collective analysis in a similar way. At this time he hoped that the publication of leaked documents concerning state and corporate malfeasance and corruption would not require the participation of the mainstream media. Assange was quickly stripped of his illusions. Neither the interested oppressed populations nor independent analysts on the Wikipedia model offered the kind of penetrating analyses of the WikiLeaks documents he had anticipated. By 2010, when the massive US contemporary archive was posted to WikiLeaks, Assange understood that relations between WikiLeaks and the most important conventional mainstream media had become unavoidable if he was to fulfil the promise of maximum exposure to the whistleblowers who sent material to his site.

Ever since that decision was made, relations between WikiLeaks and the newspapers chosen—especially the Anglophone ones, The New York Times and The Guardian—have grown increasingly estranged. Superficially this is a matter of clashing egos. More deeply, it is a matter of incompatible ambitions. The mainstream press on which WikiLeaks has relied is driven by the liberal ambition to bring into the light secret information it believes the public has a right to know. WikiLeaks is driven not only by that but also by the revolutionary ambition to use leaks as a means of de-authorising and thus crushing illegitimate state and corporate power wherever it exists.

During the course of its brief history, WikiLeaks has, in my view, erred in one fundamental way. After convincing itself that the documents sent to it are authentic and not forged, the WikiLeaks’ commitment has been to publish without further thought. I will call this the WikiLeaks philosophy of publication automaticity. Almost all WikiLeaks’ ethical and political problems have arisen from this category mistake. Nothing has done the reputation of WikiLeaks more harm than the decision to publish unredacted the names of perhaps three hundred Afghans who supplied NATO forces with intelligence. Obviously this placed their lives at risk. The documentary CNN screened a day ago yet again proved this point. It remains the key charge brought against Assange in the court of Western public opinion. Although it is not easy for Assange to admit error, in this case he has. In a different and also, admittedly, a less self-evident way it also seems to me that Assange made a serious mistake when he published the Climategate emails of the University of East Anglia climate scientists hacked into by right wing denialists. This publication played a not insignificant part in the rise of climate change denialism throughout the English-speaking world and even some part in the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen conference, which future generations may come to see as the Munich moment of the contemporary era. With the publication of leaks, as with all aspects of political and ethical life, judgment is required.

This mistake is linked to another attributed to WikiLeaks—partly accurately, partly not—which has done its reputation harm, namely that human life should be conducted without secrets of any kind. This is not an argument Assange defends. He always acknowledges a certain rather limited right to privacy. In his own recent legal troubles Assange has rightly insisted on the need for some privacy. Yet because his defence of privacy has been so narrow, this has exposed him to the charge of hypocrisy. Even the he case which he truly argues, that collectivities—families, neighbourhoods, communities, corporations, states should ideally manage their affairs without secrets of any kind—is not, even remotely, sustainable. Assange was momentarily uncertain when he was asked by a journalist from The Economist whether he would publish details of the D Day landing if they had been received by WikiLeaks before it had occurred. He might more recently have been asked whether he would have published in advance details of the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s Pakistani residence. The idea with which WikiLeaks is popularly associated—total transparency—is in my view incoherent and ultimately undefendable. All that Assange really needs to defend is the ideal of greatest possible transparency. This idea has very great contemporary resonance. Almost everyone is aware that we live now in an age of unrelenting political spin and breathtaking mendacity.  In my view, the accent of WikiLeaks should fall not on total transparency but on the unremitting exposure of the practices of corruption and injustice that rely on secrecy and that seclude themselves in darkness.

The idea of automaticity of publication and the idea of total transparency are closely parallel utopian illusions. In human affairs the intervention of something best called judgment will always in my view remain indispensable.

To conclude.  Does WikiLeaks matter? In my view it does. It has already struck many keen blows again injustice and corruption. In his seminal essay, “The Power of the Powerless”, Vaclav Havel demonstrated how, under conditions of post-totalitarianism, individuals who straighten their backbones can undermine illegitimate authority. Julian Assange has already shown that this can also be achieved under conditions of democratic consumer capitalism. His example of intelligence and courage has acted as an inspiration to many, especially young, activists across the globe. Although it seems likely that the direct influence of WikiLeaks will decline for some considerable time perhaps for good, as Assange’s legal battles in Sweden and the United States overtake him, it also seems certain that other anonymous whistleblower sites fashioned on the model of WikiLeaks will emerge to takes its place. More important than those created by his more timid former colleagues, like Domscheit-Berg’s OpenLeaks, or those sponsored by newspapers—already God help us Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has threatened a site of its own—I am looking forward to the day when there exist whistleblower websites sponsored by human rights organisations or NGOs, for the day when for example a Bradley Manning in one of the fossil fuel corporations sends encrypted information about her company’s climate change disinformation campaign to a site specially created for such a purpose by, let us say, Greenpeace. When this day arrives it will be due to the astonishing creativity of fellow Melburnian, Julian Assange.  Thank you.

[applause]

Peter Beilharz:

Thanks Rob.  Eleanor Townsley grew up in Queensland, took her first degree from the University of Queensland, took a PhD from the University of California.  Her sphere of influence in most of her activity is felt in the United States where she’s a major representative of a cultural sociologist and a leading analyst of the media.  Eleanor.

[applause]

Eleanor Townsley:

Hi, thanks for that introduction Peter.  It’s lovely to be here today, to see so many people coming out of the holiday weekend.  Right.  So we were told that there was going to be a forum and that the question was, Does WikiLeaks Matter?  Or what is the value of WikiLeaks?  And there’s been a lot of fine things written on that topic, most strikingly Robert in The Monthly recently.  But I guess what’s most striking to me here about WikiLeaks is not really the story about our heroes and villains, and not really the story about individuals at all, but I think the institutional story.  And the first part of the institutional story that interests me is the way the WikiLeaks site was imagined, so not only the idea to build a way for sources like whistleblowers, like Bradley Manning, to securely funnel information to a central site, but also importantly, the way the site itself inevitably became imagined as part of a circuit of media institutions in a much larger institutional landscape.  And so we see WikiLeaks of course forwarding on information to the mainstream press so that it ends up being publicised through regular media channels.  And I think that’s fascinating because it shows, despite the anti-establishment culture and language of the WikiLeaks project, and despite its stated ambivalence about corporate media, WikiLeaks is nonetheless or perhaps inevitably, closely connected to the established media landscape.

The WikiLeaks project has always really relied on ideas that are central to professional journalism, including ideas about the role of political transparency and good information in democratic deliberation, so that’s the idea that people require good information to make good decisions, to know how to vote, or to know how to make good policy choices.

So it’s in this context I guess that I’d reflect on the surprise evinced by Julian Assange and others in the alternative press in the United States and elsewhere at the lack of response to some of the information that WikiLeaks has brought to light.  After a while there may have been some important effects, overall of course, governments have not tumbled, and it doesn’t feel like the world has been made anew, certainly not in the United States.  And I guess from an institutional perspective, I would argue that the lack of response to WikiLeaks, certainly prior to the Bradley Manning moment, is only surprising if a traditional model of the media as a somewhat neutral conduit for information is in fact a good description of the way mediated deliberation works in the very highly complex societies we inhabit, which it probably is not.  Information typically has effects in the process of analysis, of interpretation, of performance, and in the connection into ongoing narratives.

So the thing that I find interesting here is that despite the claims for innovation and newness for WikiLeaks, and it certainly is extremely innovative and new in important ways, it remains the case that the WikiLeaks project, in its conception, is closely tied to very traditional understandings of how journalism and media work, particularly in the western democracies.

So a second part of the institutional story that I would emphasise in this connection is how that very big cache of secure documents from Bradley Manning were slowly processed and publicised in an unprecedented institutional international co-operation or collaboration between five major newspapers, The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais.  As The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger writes in his account of WikiLeaks published earlier this year, and I quote, “one of the lessons from the WikiLeaks project is that it has shown the possibilities of collaboration, it’s difficult to think of any comparable example of news organisations working together in this way.  I think all five editors would like to imagine ways in which we could harness our resources again”.

So I think this part of the institutional story is also very important, because it shows not only that the functioning of the WikiLeaks site is dependent on quite traditional kinds of journalistic philosophy that information will in some ways make us free, truth with a capital “T”, but also importantly that the WikiLeaks project relied on, and also helped to produce, an unprecedented institutional collaboration of these international newspapers acting together on an international stage in a highly organised way.  And I don’t think it’s a big surprise that WikiLeaks chose to work through print outlets rather than, say, the internet alone, or radio or television.  These newspapers are the most elite and prestigious institutions in their respective journalistic fields with enormous international influence.  Several are also papers of record of powerful nations, so their collaborative involvement with WikiLeaks lent their authority to WikiLeaks as a source and to the facts that were published.  A major consequence of this was that WikiLeaks, and its information, could not be easily dismissed or sidelined by other powerful national or international actors.  And I think this speaks in an important way to emerging understandings of a global civil society and a global public sphere of political communication, political accountability and political legitimacy.  All this rests too on a growing sense of an international public, an idea that finds it counterpart in the imagined publics and markets and audiences and masses of an increasingly international social medium.  To be sure, an international public has long been imagined, but it is not always easy to summon or to mobilise.  In this case I think it was invoked in a particular robust and interesting way by the combined authority of these big five newspapers and the large transnational publics to which they addressed themselves.  I mean, at the same time I would point out that they were all European language newspapers and so although very influential, we’re talking about a far from perfect representation or institutional invocation of international publics.

So I think once the connections of the traditional project of professional journalism became apparent, and they certainly were underlined by the collaboration of these venerable news outlets in publishing the materials provided by WikiLeaks, then it’s not surprising that Julian Assange, and the WikiLeaks project, have become hero figures for western journalists, who remain committed to investigative journalism and the power of information.  It’s a project of course with which many intellectuals feel sympathy, I think.  At the same time I guess I’m concerned that the fascination with individuals like Assange do tend to direct our attention away from the very interesting institutional story and the very deep continuities that we see between the WikiLeaks imagined project and professional journalism, and traditional ideas about the role of information in democratic societies in this new stage.  So that’s really my two cents and I hope we get back to it in discussion.

[applause]

Peter Beilharz:

This is Peter Vale.  He’s lived a life around the world but mainly in South Africa.  I connect his life experience with at least three words, all of them start with “S” – struggle, security and the state.  Peter.

[applause]

Peter Vale:

Thank you very much.  On Saturday afternoon, the participants in the thinkfest were taken for a walk around Melbourne’s graffiti and wall art experience and in Hosier Lane, near the top, there is a four series of panels on Julian Assange and underneath there, someone has put a paste-over of the Madonna and a kind of whimsical, thoughtful man looking at it and the piece of graffiti reads “mmm, something about Mary”.  And I couldn’t help, when I saw this, think of this thought and thinking about WikiLeaks – there’s a sort of sense of – this is something miraculous that’s happening.  I want to agree with Robert that WikiLeaks matters.  But I really want to approach this from the point of view of what I would call academic disciplinary power and practice.  I learnt my politics and my academic life through the discipline of international relations.  And it seems to me that if you understand the discipline, you understand fundamentally that this is America’s world.  That the world that we have created is America’s world.  And so we believe that keeping America’s secrets is in our own interests to keep.  States encourage us in a sense to believe that America’s secrets are our own secrets.  And I think the one thing that WikiLeaks has done is really to undercut fundamentally that understanding, that America’s secrets are perhaps not our secrets, that America’s secrets are perhaps aimed at a particular kind of understanding and surveillance of the world.  And this is an understanding and surveillance which I believe is supported fundamentally by the disciplinary and institutional power of how we understand the world through the discipline of international relations.  So it seems to me there is a conflict here, a fundamental conflict between what WikiLeaks has done and what we’ve been encouraged to understand about the world.  And if you really want to understand that world, America’s world, and in a second I’m going to say it seems to me some of Australia’s world too, is try to get into an American Embassy.  In Cape Town, or in Johannesburg or in Pretoria.  Approach the building and see how difficult it is to get in.  Each of these looks like the Green Zone in Iraq.

And so what I think has happened here in WikiLeaks, is that we’ve been shown that this is a world of hollow feet.  I say Australia too, because it seems to me that, and there are many Australians in this room and I know there’s only one other South African in this room, so let me be careful how I say this – it seems to me too that you’re caught in the coat tails of this world that has been created in this way.  And what WikiLeaks has done and what Assange has done is essentially to de-couple you from that understanding.  Maybe America’s security isn’t our security.  Maybe America’s security isn’t Australia’s security.  I say Australia because it’s really difficult to get into this country, and it’s very difficult to get into this country even as a visitor, even as an academic visitor, and I think part of the reason for that is essentially in the aftermath of 9/11 you’ve taken on all of those understandings of America’s world view at this particular time.  What I think he’s done is that WikiLeaks and Assange himself have pulled away some of the threads that we understand that to be.

We in the south understand I think fundamentally that this is an American constructed world.   We understand fundamentally that perhaps our interests are not served by these secrets.  And we in South Africa understand this acutely, because in the aftermath of 9/11 when Bush went crazy and passed all of this legislation, we could see and indeed wrote about the fact that what he had created was a security system which, hey, surprise, surprise, looked like the final moments of apartheid.  As the apartheid government was struggling to keep itself together, to look after its own security, it went after the newspapers and anyone who was a free thinker.

So my point is this.  In my view, anything that undercuts this particular perspective, this particular understanding, that this form of modernity is important, that this form of modernity is emancipatory, is a good project. 

I just want to say one other thing if I can.  And that’s, why is it that the left always looks for men on white horses?  And always looks for white men on white horses.  And with respect to Robert and all the good citizens of Melbourne, let me say this.  It seems to me that there are many people out there struggling in the third world in Africa and in Asia who are tackling these big problems, these big issues, these overthrowing of the nature of the American world in which we live, who are equally as heroic as Julian Assange.  And here I think of Dr Binayak Sen the Indian dissident, who’s recently been convicted for twenty years in prison for purportedly furthering the aims of the Maoist insurrection.  Thank you.

[applause]

Peter Beilharz:

Thank you Peter.  The last word.  Guy Rundle.

Guy Rundle:

I have to remind myself when I’ve spent so much time thinking about WikiLeaks and talking about WikiLeaks over the past six months, that I have to remind myself not to take things for granted in talking about it.  On the one hand, I think unquestionably WikiLeaks matters, has changed the world, has created something fundamentally new and that it’s worth focussing on the single exemplary behaviour and project that Julian Assange has created.  I often forget to say I think, that a lot of this, a lot of what is attributed to a thing called WikiLeaks and to a person called Assange is a far more complex, chaotic and multiple process.  A lot of what in retrospect looks like some smooth high functioning operation has obviously been, when you look at it in any more depth, chaotic from the start, contingent in some ways, and dependent on its good and ill fortune for what is substantially originated.  So in speaking about WikiLeaks I think it’s important, and I’ll try and bring this out a bit later, to remember that we’re talking about a very complex process and we’re kind of using this as a shorthand.

I think there’s three ways in which WikiLeaks matters.  A particular way in the particular scandals, the particular issues it’s brought to the fore, the particular things it’s pushed on, a political way that is, that’s it shown a new process of political determination within a milieu that had suffered a series of tactical defeats and was to a degree confused about how to go forward.  And thirdly, as a more general process, a particular representative of a far more general process, which is the transformation of politics, the state, human society, by the online revolution that has occurred over the last two decades.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that a whole series of issues have been pushed to a state that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred if it hadn’t been for WikiLeaks, and one of the interesting processes that have occurred over the last few years since WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, you know, a beat of an eyelid ago, is that people forget what has actually been ceded by WikiLeaks.  One of the processes which occurs is that the particular intervention of WikiLeaks is subsumed into a more general situation, and an idea that that must always have happened, that was always going to happen.  One of the main examples of that, the principal examples, was the recent, recent, about two years ago now, release of a whole lot of Icelandic banking documents, the so-called Icesave documents.  Icesave was a specific fund that was started by the Icelandic banks in their most florid manic stage in which they thought that Iceland could be a world financial player.   It offered huge rates of interest for current account holders through British and French banks.  When the Icelandic economy collapsed, those collapsed too, the British and French put pressure on Iceland to guarantee all those accounts, and Iceland was looking to go into the same situation that Greece and Ireland did, in that its politicians would just meekly sell the family silver, sell up the assets of the state, in order to pay off for the actions of a few carpet-baggers.  At that point, WikiLeaks released a huge amount of documents that had been leaked to it concerning the Icesave accounts and what had really gone on, and in a politically conscious, highly aware country like Iceland, that seemed to prove the final catalyst, something that pushes you over the threshold, and there was basically a peaceful revolution in Iceland, if you like, there were mass demonstrations, the government fell, a new government was constituted, it made some sort of deals for repayments with the western powers, but crucially it didn’t do what Greece and Ireland did which was to take a massive haircut, and it has proved all the better for Iceland.  You know, Ireland has headed further into economic depression, Iceland is doing all right, and recently in a third referendum, the Icelandic people once again rejected a deal which would see them pay these things off.  Now whether or not they have a moral right to pay these things off is another question, but I  think it’s unquestionable that what happened there was a particular function or was contributed to massively by the WikiLeaks effect, and that is, that a huge number of documents made it unquestionable that something corrupt had occurred but equally importantly, made it visible for everybody, so there was no possibility of pretence on either side any more, that we didn’t know what was going on, we didn’t know what you guys were doing, and we didn’t really … we knew that you didn’t know, that sort of thing.  Everybody knew.  It’s like a scene in a farce where the screen comes down and everybody’s naked.  There is a point of recognition at which something must occur, for the sake of your own particular honour, for the sake of your own political being, you could no longer pretend that business as usual can occur.  That, it seems to me, in its first stage, its pre sort of war logs stage, was WikiLeaks at its best.  And there were half a dozen sort of scandals like that of varying magnitudes. 

What was important in this sort of way was, I think, an innovation in WikiLeaks’ approach, which Robert touched on to a degree, which initially is a failed approach, which was that they would release mass numbers of documents and they would then hope that people would Wiki-interpret them, spread them around and this would create a catalyst effect whereby people would rise up.  In the Icesave situation, they began to realise that working with more traditional media organisations and also sharpening, synthesising the material, would also help, so in fact Icelandic state TV did take up this material very substantially and broadcast a series of documentaries on this.

So, it is that quantitative innovation combined with the synthesising process of interpretive media that of itself creates something more than an old whistleblower.  It’s something more than the old idea of the smoking gun effect.  You know, the smoking gun, the one document that shows that something bad is going on.  I don’t know if people remember this, in the sort of … the era of Ralph Nader’s struggle against the car companies and they’re building unsafe cars – there was a document that Ford had circulating in its internal business which was about the Ford Pinto, and the Ford Pinto was a car that had one minor problem, which was that it’s petrol tank would sometimes explode, if another car hit it at very slow speeds.  There was a document in which someone had calculated how many of these could happen, how much they would have to pay out, Ford would have to pay out, in terms of wrongful death suits and that sort of thing, for it to be worthwhile for them to continue to produce the Ford Pinto with an exploding fuel tank.  Now that’s your archetypal smoking gun, because instantly someone’s really just set it out as a series of accounts.  The problem is multiple here however.  As you get more and more of these smoking guns, they start to lose their effect, that’s the first thing.  The second thing is, when you no longer have a more contestatory political culture that you had in three decades following the second world war, when people have become more resigned to large power structures, then people actually don’t want to hear about those smoking guns, because all it reminds you of is your powerlessness.  It reminds you that you can’t do anything.  So you don’t want those individual stories and crises, but when you have a large amount of material and it’s handled in the right way, something happens.  That seems to me why WikiLeaks matters in that respect, and that is not accidental in the sense that it’s related to Assange’s particular theorisation of how these things work, in a paper he wrote about conspiracy and governance, arguing that one way to look at governments was as types of conspiracies.  And that once you looked at them as conspiracies, you could think of contesting them as a way of breaking up the conspiracy.  And the leak then becomes the way of breaking up the conspiracy because it has several effects.  A leak, if you could encourage leaks by a safe site like WikiLeaks which allows people to leak information without it being a suicidal mission, then the leaks change the ratio of information between the inside of the conspiracy, the state, and the outside of the conspiracy, the rest of us – they introduce mistrust within the conspiracy because everybody’s looking around and saying, well, who’s leaking, are you leaking?  Are you leaking?  Sort of thing … the conspiracy must then spend energy on its own, on limiting the leak from within its own processes, so its own internal security rather than on what it’s doing to the outside of the conspiracy, which you know, oppression or wars or things like that … and ultimately and finally, the conspiracy has to break itself up, it has to split itself into different parts.  So in a dictatorship, or an oppressive regime, that becomes a process of playing people off against each other and that sort of thing, and you can see in history that is often the end game, the final stage of an oppressive regime.  In a more democratic, open, semi-open society, like a US government, it becomes a process of introducing classification systems, secret, top secret, that sort of thing and multiple spy agencies.  And the idea is then to force the conspiracy to be less effective by splitting itself up, than it otherwise would be if it was totally internally open.

So in that respect, there are many critiques that you can make of that in a longer session, but what is important to realise I think about WikiLeaks, is that this wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t stumbled upon, it was a process of one person thinking out a particular political dilemma in the 2000s, which was the rise and fall of the anti-capitalist globalisation movement and the particular limits that it had faced challenging repressive state powers in what we used to call the Third World.  Assange famously went to Kenya for the World Social Forum which was the sort of … the social movement’s opposite to the World Economic Conference, the Davos über-conspiracy if you like.  And his feeling there was, as Robert referred to, was it was a lot of people making videos of each other.  That it had collapsed into a form of ultra-openness, ultra-networking, that really became narcissistic and it was also, in relationship to concerted conspiracies, absolutely ineffective and counter-productive.  So what you then needed was a counter-conspiracy, and a counter-conspiracy that dealt not only in the quality of information it was releasing, but the quantity.  So all that was theorised.  All that was thought through.  And that was, if you like, Assange and a couple of other people, but I think it’s fair to say it was one person sitting down and trying to nut out what was going on, taking certain elements from the tradition he’d come up through, which was the cipher-punks, and the weird twilight hinterland of late 80s political hacking, teenage sort of political hacking, and that sort of world, which really didn’t have a lot of baggage of the old left, or the sort of debates that were going on as the old left became the new left, became the new-new left, became the capitalist anti-globalisation movement and so forth and so on.  However, in terms of the radical individualism, even the atomisation of that movement, I think Assange then took on something of what was coming through on the other side of these mass global social movements which were trying to look for ways to work collectively and to make an impact that was more than simply bearing witness, that was actually such a punch that it made a categorical shift in power.  I’ve always been interested in the fact that Assange has long said that one of his inspirations is Solzhenitsyn, and especially Cancer Ward, and Darkness at Noon by Koestler and he’s then wont to quote some reasonably obscure Germans, sort of anarcho-communists from the early 20th century.  I’ve been interested in the fact that Solzhenitsyn and Koestler and Miltonic works if you like, in that the devil sometimes has all the best lines.  They have a lot of power in them because they are not merely anti-Stalinist or that sort of thing, they’re also interested in the way that those works have an ambivalent attitude to the political will of Leninism, its transformational quality and that sort of thing, its fascination with that.  And I’ve always seen a loosely useful very limited analysis, comparison that WikiLeaks in that respect has a Leninist bit of oomph in it in its determination to make categorical change in the world, to make an expression of political will on behalf of an idea it believes to be right.  It’s that sort of summoning of political audacity in that respect that makes it different to a whole lot of the other sort of open leaks, crypto sort of websites who celebrate the idea of openness, and who celebrate the idea that openness of itself will occur.  And in fact, as we now know from books like Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s Inside WikiLeaks and that sort of thing, the crucial split, quite aside from any personality peccadilloes of Assange himself, the crucial split within WikiLeaks as it had come together over the years from 2007 and 2009, was Assange’s determination that they should focus everything on the three war logs – they had the Iraq, Afghan and Cablegate logs – to the expense of being a general sort of leaks clearing house with a whole lot of other information they had, that they should really make this a total focus, even though it would then inevitably have them labelled as simply traditional anti-Americans, focussing on America, you know, why didn’t you leak Chinese documents and so forth and so on.  I think Assange was willing to take that risk which obviously involved, you know, a risk of going up against the most powerful country in the world, with an enormous legal, political, military reach.  And other people in the organisation clearly weren’t.  Some of them have been honest enough to say so.  Some of them have said that there’s many reasons why a lot of us left WikiLeaks, but as ???, one of the Dutch people said, “I left because I was scared shitless of what Assange was doing and I didn’t want any part of it.”  Not that he thought it was wrong.  He just thought that it was so crazy brave that there was no … that he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

So, in that respect, one can agree, one shouldn’t focus on heroes if one is thinking about the idea of unquestionably more sort of moral people through and through in every aspect of their life, and one shouldn’t focus on unitary processes in a simple naïve sort of way.  Nevertheless, if one doesn’t see that some people do actually stand up and re-synthesise a whole process, create something out of nothing, and then act in an exemplary fashion that they hope will encourage courage in other people, then you don’t really have an understanding of how to make large scale political change.  And that’s one thing that Assange and WikiLeaks has re-supplied in the current era, and one reason why people find him so inspirational, because he’s not content to bear witness,  he’s not content to simply make his protest and let it be an expression of conscience.  He really wants to structurally change things.

Now in that respect I think that leads on to the final aspect of WikiLeaks, and I’ll try and be quick here, which is how it relates the more general process that we’re undergoing at the moment.  WikiLeaks in this respect I think is one political expression, one way of doing something in an era in which the whole constellation of power, information and the state is changing as epochally as it did in the 17th century when the modern state and political systems were born.  The modern state, the territorially limited nation state was born of the Westphalia Treaty in 1646.  The Westphalia Treaty came at the end of the Thirty Years War which had devastated Europe as a sort of knock down, drag out, fight between Protestantism and Catholicism and it became clear to people that this idea of interleaving powers, the power of the Church and the power of the State etc etc was a recipe for chaos and something else had to be created that made things possible, that made stable political action possible.  The idea that the modern state has territorial boundaries and has a right within itself to self-determination into its own processes, came out of that.  And that, with various sort of exceptions and that sort of thing, governs at least the idea of the modern state, if not the practicality.  That in itself is also based on the rise of print as opposed to the domination of manuscript writing and the power of the church as the holder of information.  Once you have a culture based on mass printing, you have whole new classes of people arising in relation to information, and you also have the possibility of people forming around different groups of shared ideas.  In other words, you have the origin of the modern political party initially out of the religious sect.  And the idea that like-minded groups of people come together with a sort of set of shared ideas about how things should proceed, but also that the state has a role in continuing its existence by controlling the circulation of print, you know, the literal idea of censorship as stopping people at the border and seeing what books they have in their suitcase.  That sort of thing.

Now, we’re in an era now where in one short two-decade period the material base of that has changed so utterly that the larger structures must change.  Once you have a structure in which the transfer of written information is essentially weightless, instantaneous and total, with all sorts of caveats and limitations to that in the current period but with that sort of categorical change, then everything else changes in terms of the legitimacy of the state, about what it can control, about what it can legitimately present itself as being able to control or having the right to control, who can know what, what can be prevented from being known, all those sorts of questions.  The point of that is that it’s no longer possible for us to not ask those questions.  If we all accept, as I think we all do, including Assange and WikiLeaks, that total complete transparency is neither possible nor desirable, that doesn’t mean at the same time that we can squeeze these new questions into old categories about who should know what, and who should control what.  I think one of the most important things that WikiLeaks has done, especially in a release like the Cablegate Release, which shows an enormous amount of documentation that is simply mundane, boring, fanciful and that sort of thing, is just to start to pose the question for many people – why shouldn’t we see this stuff?  Why is it so important that this stuff be secret?  Why should it be on a thirty year time rule?  Who decides what is secret, and how do we decide what is secret?  And I think that as things roll on, whether via WikiLeaks or other organisations, that will be the question that comes to the fore and in historical terms, that will ultimately be why WikiLeaks matters.  Thanks very much.

[applause]

Peter Beilharz:

The devil has the best lines but Guy Rundle’s hot on his heels.  This is a very long room with very long acoustics.  There’s a microphone down here and we’re going to have to ask you please to come down to this side of the room to ask questions so that everybody else in the room can hear.  The microphone is just here and we have an interlocutor.

Question:

I’ll do everyone a favour and I’ll ask the dumb question first, so all yours will feel better afterwards.  I’ve put it down so I don’t have a senior moment.  I’m deviating from what you were talking about.  I just want to get an opinion about Assange and the rape charge in Sweden and if he does go to Sweden to answer it, will the USA come in and grab him and will he be hung drawn and quartered when he gets to the USA?  Or because there’s a change of government there from Bush to Obama, will they go a bit easier on him?  What’s the current thinking on that?

Guy Rundle:

Assange’s Swedish troubles are my speciality because I spent six months in Sweden hanging around with the same type of women who are giving him a lot of trouble at the moment [laughter].  The current state of play is that he’s been put up for extradition, he’s appealing that in the Court of Appeal in July.  If there’s a point of law … he’ll probably lose that appeal.  If there’s a point of law it will then go to the Supreme Court in the UK as it is now, so that would delay it another few months.  If not, he goes to Sweden where Sweden has no bail system, you’re either released on your own recognisance or you’re in custody, so he’ll be in custody for some period.  I don’t know what would happen.  The odds are that he would be acquitted on those charges, sheerly on the conviction rate in Sweden on those sorts of charges, if indeed he’s charged – he hasn’t been charged yet, he’s still just merely accused. 

Whether he’s at more risk in Sweden or the UK concerning extradition to the US is another question.  The UK and the US have an ultra-fast sort of extradition process, fast track one, Sweden and the US have an extradition process too.  I don’t actually think in this respect, that there’s much conspiracy going on here.  I think it’s just more a whole series of autonomous legal processes, cultural conflicts and the age-old problems of hyper-active men of a certain type.  So the question is, one just doesn’t know.  There’s a Grand Jury empanelled at the moment in Maryland looking at whether Assange, as Rob said, Assange can be charged under the Espionage Act, and whether that can be created in some way.  Once again, nobody knows whether that can be done.  It’s always seemed unlikely, given the current purvey of the Espionage Act, but you never know.  And then you have the question of whether Sweden is … you know, it usually seems to be a fairly proper and open place, where people obeyed honest legal processes, or whether is as Stieg Larsson paints it in his novels, some sort of crazy, interconnecting conspiracies.  So I can’t tell you anything more useful than that.  And I think that’s probably the cutting edge state of play.  I’m definitely against … if I can say anything useful … I’m definitely against the more conspiratorial idea that this is all some plan to get him back to America.  I think it has nothing to do with that.  I think it’s just a series of interconnecting legal personal and political fuck-ups. [laughter]

Peter Beilharz:

Ron Jacobs.

Question:

I want to thank everybody for a fascinating set of presentations and I want to believe, particularly the first and the last speakers, that WikiLeaks does matter.  And I guess I’ve one slight concern that I wanted to ask you about.  I mean, if we think about leaks, we can imagine the leak as a whistle blower as has been referenced a lot in the talks.  But of course there are also people who leak as a form of strategic communication and I’m thinking of the Richard Nixon sort of political operative kind of thing, whereby people leak from the inside in order to damage others.  And it strikes me that this other type of leaking is so powerful and so pervasive that there’s a bit of … let’s say, a challenge of authenticity on the part of people who leak and so there’s always the possibility that they can be exposed as not sort of just seeking the truth.  At the same time also of course, there are these political operatives who are very skilled at this kind of politics of personal destruction.  And so I guess we can imagine the situation, let’s say, where something like WikiLeaks goes along just fine until one of two things happens.  Either they leak information which is interpreted as reinforcing American interests, right, in which case they’re seen as propagandists and they become de-legitimated from the left, or, on the other hand, which I think is closer to what has happened in this instance, they leak information which is damaging to the United States which unleashes this whole second kind of strategic political communication and they become perceived as anti-American and then all of these political consultants in the US start engaging in this kind of campaign against these activists.  So I guess the question is whether you see any kind of inherent vulnerability or instability in the WikiLeaks model.

Robert Manne:

I think that question goes to the heart of a problem I see with WikiLeaks and also sort of in a way to what I was trying to say.  It seems to me what Julian Assange I think has decided is that once the provenance of leaks is clear, that is to say it’s clear that they are not forgeries … I’ll just tell an amusing story.  One of the people that he got to register his organisation in the United States was someone that Guy has cryptically mentioned, not by name, the founder of Cryptome, a fellow called John Young, and John Young came to the view that WikiLeaks was going to the fount of CIA endless disinformation and cut all links with it within a few weeks.  Julian Assange’s view as I see it is that once it’s pretty certain that the links are authentic, not forgeries, they should be published no matter what.  Now, what I was trying to say in my talk was I think in the end that is an impossible position to take.  There is no reason why one couldn’t come to the view that authentic leaks are also very damaging, from one point of view or another.  I think it was wrong, and I think Assange now thinks it was wrong that the Afghan war logs which contained the names of various people who’d given information about the Taliban and so on to NATO, that their names were mentioned because I don’t think anyone thinks that Julian Assange or anyone else should become the judge and jury, making it possible that they will be killed.  And I tried to say also that I think a very big mistake was releasing the cables produced by the Climategate people, who are right wing denialists.  In other words, what I was trying to say was, and I think this is answering Ron’s point, that leaks of all sorts and kind will come to WikiLeaks and I can’t see how in the end judgments can be avoided as to what should be published and what shouldn’t.  For that reason … and I also think that it’s completely right that leaks are used by politicians all the time to do harm to each other and that there’s kinds of information that is strategically released for political reasons, and that kind of stuff I suppose in the end might come to WikiLeaks as well.

The only way around that I think, and I can only see two ways around the process.  One is that judgment has to be used by people in WikiLeaks or other sites as to what is in the human interest to release and what is wrong.  I just don’t think we can operate with the idea that every kind of information in the public realm deserves to be made public.  But more importantly I think there should be diversity of WikiLeaks, I was trying to say briefly at the end, there should be a variety of places that use encrypted cryptography and remailers to allow people to leak but people should leak to that site which they feel will be receptive to what they have to say.  In other words, I would hope Greenpeace would set up such a site, as I was trying to say, but there’s no reason why neo-Liberals shouldn’t set up a site to show the malfeasance of over-centralised economic states and pour doubt on Hugo Chavez or whatever.  In other words I think that we need more information in the public realm but it needs somehow to be sifted by human intelligence and that anything that can be seen to be damaging ought to be rejected by any of the sites.  In other words, I think Julian Assange is a fascinating person but I think there are many things that he didn’t really think through and is being forced to think through as the history of WikiLeaks continues.

Eleanor Townsley:

I guess the other thing that is important, right, is that leaking, either of the internal variety or of the external variety, presumes some moral order in which the leak matters.  And I think that’s something that the WikiLeaks project has revealed very clearly, which is there’s an unevenness of that moral presumption in several of the leak contexts.  So sometimes they leak, and everyone’s like, ah, I don’t really care that much. And other times there’s a leak and it’s an enormous matter.  And so that judgment happens inside of institutional spaces in which the moral premises are somewhat well understood.  And this goes to your point of course, that Assange finds that it’s the western more open contexts that in some ways are more open to the leaking strategy itself.  And so to the degree that WikiLeaks really is this new novel interesting transnational possibility and I think that it is, then it asks us a little bit to think what are the conditions for the moral context in which the leaks are going to matter.  Are they just simply going to be these interlocking, you know, judicial and press systems that happily make their way along, or is it going to be the five editors of these newspapers, or is it going to be some other agency, and I think those kinds of questions about accountability and political decision making haven’t yet been sharply formulated.

Question:

A question about the stranger aspects of all of this.  I’ve read an article from The Guardian and that’s the only reason I bring it up here, that one of the reasons that Assange is sort of being kept at bay is because he has, and this is the weird part, cables between the American military and UFOs.  It seems such a bizarre strange thing for anyone to say, if you have heard anything at all, fair enough.

Guy Rundle:

I think when the early Cablegate stuff was being released, Assange did an  interview in which he did mention – but he mentioned it merely as a fact of curiosity – that there were a couple of cables dealing with the inevitable enquiries that the US military has to deal with about Roswell, Area 51 in Mexico, and that sort of thing.  This was then constructed by some of Assange’s detractors, especially in Britain, as Assange talking about UFOs.  By my reading of it, he was never, he’s not from the twilight zone.  It just simply showed, you know, what happens when you remark on things not thinking about the weight of your words.  So that was that.  I think in general, just on what the last speaker was saying too, I keep forgetting to say that, yes, that in terms of judgment and those sorts of things, it seems to me obvious that you can’t have the sort of anarchist sort of formulation of near total transparency, that in the last analysis, politics is always a contingent question, and I think of the example of – if WikiLeaks had a whole lot of documents about the government of Bolivia, which I think is a pretty good government, doing its best for the people of Bolivia, and which is fighting a hard fought battle against mining owners who want to split the country in two, and create a civil war, then what is the morality of releasing that, even if some of the documents did point to corruption and so forth within the government of Bolivia?  It seems to me that my obvious moral point there is, no, you wouldn’t release those.  You would hold them back, and that there always is a surrounding morality within which the process of WikiLeaks or something like that is undertaken.  And from my perspective it’s a sort of internationalist left one in that way.  But others may have other ones.

One forgets that some people especially round the computer world do take that über-transparency totally seriously, that, yes inevitably there’s always a question of judgment that has to be made.  The main question though in relation to old media and to the current state of political affairs is, do we suffer more from excessive openness or do we suffer more from excessive secrecy? 

In the question of forgeries, fabrications and that sort of thing, leaked through WikiLeaks, well, we’ve seen a whole history in the 20th century and the 19th century, from the Zimmermann telegram, I think it was, which got the US into World War I, there’s the Zenoviev telegram which was used to defeat the Labor government in Britain, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the 60s, for so forth and so on, we’ve seen many cases where a strategically placed fabrication can actually tip a country into war or worse.  In that situation, that is, the press using the limited model of release, the sort of smoking gun model to actually have an effect, consciously corrupt or not, in that sort of situation it seems to me that we have a better chance with something like WikiLeaks or multiple sort of sites like that, of  instantly exposing a forgery, rather than allowing it to linger on and to have its effect, so in that respect I think we’re better off with more open processes like that than we were with the  old age of the press and you know, trusting William Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch to decide what we could and couldn’t hear.

Peter Beilharz:

There’s no one here but Rob has some questions.

Robert Manne:

I just wanted to ask a couple of things of Eleanor and Peter, but just – if I can just say on Guy’s thing.  If there was this Bolivian stuff that was leaked, and it can go to the Wall Street Journal.  It seems to me that it would be wrong to think, even if from one’s own political perspective it was damaging, it would seem to me wrong to think that true documents which don’t have obvious human disastrous consequences should not see the light of day.  But if there is a multiplicity of sites then people can make judgments.  I know what I’ll think about the likelihood of taking seriously something that Rupert Murdoch is leaking and so on.  In other words in the end judgment is important but it’s also intelligence – people had to in the end make judgments about even documents.  Even authentic documents.  If Climategate came out from the Wall Street Journal I would have not been surprised and I would have thought that other people could have the same judgments as me.

But just a couple of questions to finish up on what Eleanor and Peter said, because I’d like to draw them in a bit.  Eleanor, I was really interested in a comment and I hadn’t thought of it before as to why you think … it seems to me really interesting that newspapers with a place that Assange did select rather than the internet when he wanted to get the maximum impact for the leaks, and Peter, if I can say.  I wonder whether you think exemplary behaviour is unimportant, and I do remind myself that you once held the Nelson Mandela Chair.

Eleanor Townsley:

On the newspapers – and I mean clearly these are not the only outlets that have been connected with WikiLeaks – the Icelandic television interview was really famous for the legislation then that came from the suggestion of Assange, that Iceland could become a haven for freedom of the press and then that legislation moved very quickly through the new parliament.  But I think that the sort of venerable crusty old grey ladies of these major European, American powers, the New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais.  I mean these are very dominant in their respective national journalistic fields and bring a great deal of prestige and authority to anything that they are connected with.  So quite apart from the unprecedented international collaboration, and there’s probably been bits and pieces in the past, but this was a very dedicated long-term research process with the Bradley Manning case, in their respective journalistic fields, compared to all of the new breathtakingly partisan and narrow competitors that we’re increasingly seeing in other parts of the media space.  These sort of institutions, many of them papers of national record, really represent what it is that defines good journalism or good opinion or good analysis.  There’s a real weightiness to it.  So to the degree that people have choices, these are going to be outlets that they choose.  They are also important peak national outlets, that is, specialist publications in all other parts of the media field.  The public sphere more generally tend to feed into these more general spaces in really important ways.  So they have special access to national elite policy makers and decision makers.  So put that together with that collaboration and I think that’s really quite an important institutional moment.

Peter Vale:

I’m a bit worried because when we came and we were miked at the back here, these kind of mikes, I was just wondering where these mikes were going. 

Let me pick up on a few points that have come through.  The thing that worries me about multiple forms of leaking, which I’ve heard the advantages of here but none of the disadvantages of.  I mean, in a time when we know there’s a value and a commodification for everything, I guess the day is not too far away when there actually becomes a market for leaks.  And if there’s a market for leak, can a tax for leaks be far behind, given the carbon tax conversation in this country?  I mean, I think the other thing that’s not been in this conversation so far which is really important, is the question of leaks in the field of economics.   Now there has been some of this stuff, but I think the dominant power of neo-liberal economics, its pervasive way that it’s invaded our  lives, I would be much more, equally happy, let me say, equally comfortable, if many more issues were leaked about for example, the thoughts around BP as they were planning what happened in the Gulf of Mexico.  That’s linked of course to the climate change issue.

So I would like to see and I don’t know if this happens.  Maybe you could have a Wiki Economics Leak or something like that, because I think that’s where we should look to this.  And this really links up with Robert’s question.  Of course exemplary behaviour is important and necessary and heroes are necessary in the political process.  But I don’t think we of the broad left can hope that these individual actions alone will change the nature of our world.  What we need is a much more fundamental way of knitting together our energies, our ideas, and our inspiration, and it does seem to me that’s the really hard work that we’ve got to do.  That’s the hard work which was done in the 19th century which enabled the left to give vent to its anger and energy.  So, yes, exemplary behaviour is important but Mandela just didn’t arise out of prison, he was carried to that position and through that whole process by everything that had gone before, that extensive knitting the shoulders of other people who stood on and frankly I don’t see in this conversation about WikiLeaks any of that fundamental knitting which is needed for the left either to attack the state, the American state or the neo-liberal system.  And I think that’s where the hard philosophical work needs to be done.  That’s where the discovery of a language of what this all means for people is really important. 

[applause]

Peter Beilharz:

We have one last question from the floor – thank you.

Question:

I’ve been thinking about WikiLeaks from the perspective of business ethics and trying to think about what the impact might be on companies, so I’ve been doing a little bit of writing on this topic.  Business ethics might be a contradiction in terms but I’m  interested in it all the same.  And I’m interested in anyone who wants to comment on the following question.  It seems to me that there is potentially a first order effect on companies in the sense that if a company has corrupt activity, WikiLeaks or its successors might hopefully reveal this corruption.  So that in itself is important.  But there’s a second order effect I think that I’ve been thinking about, and that is that if companies realise that there are such things as WikiLeaks or other economic ones that might come up in its wake, that it’s the fact that the existence of it may help to prevent corruption from happening in the first place.  Now this might be quite a naïve idea, but I’m just interested to see if you think that it’s naïve in some of the ways that I think Julian Assange was naïve.  So is there such a thing as the second order effect?  Does it have any weight?  And might it make a difference?

Guy Rundle:

I think this relates to something Peter said I think about economic leaks and BP.  This is once again the effect that one forgets some of the things that WikiLeaks has done, the Trafigura scandal a few years ago was a WikiLeaks leak.  This was about toxic dumping in Africa and basically the use of Africa as a toxic dump relying on uneven economics of the world where actually it was, you know, in the interests, so called, of a poor country to take on lethal toxic dumping effects.  So I think there has been where it’s been possible the leaking of economic stuff and the showing up that neo-liberalism is in many ways a racket rather than a legitimate economic process.  As regards the corruption effect, I don’t think Assange has been naïve in this second order effect – I think he would agree with you that one of the things about making it possible for people to expose corruption safely is that there will always be someone in an organisation at any given point is ready to crack, ie their conscience as an honest person can no longer stand the role they’ve been put in.  And that one of the roles for having a safe place for leaking is to encourage the best part of that human being rather than the worst part – their desire to be an honest and truthful person rather than their fear or their sense that they’ll be persecuted and isolated.  And that in turn you would hope would have an effect on people who would actually think more about their conduct in everyday life, and whether they were being corrupt as a matter of course or whether they were being honest.  So you would  hope that that would have an encouraging effect on that sort of thing.  And just to put that into Peter’s thing, I don’t think it’s about … I think it can be sort of useful to criticise the idea that individuals can be too focussed on that sort of thing, but it does get a bit disheartening if you take something that has actually happened and had a massive effect and had a punch-on effect which has involved a small number of people taking very substantial risks and then say, it should really have been something else.  It really should have been a more collective process, or that sort of thing.  I don’t think we have to look for heroes in terms of people to idolise, but I think we do need to, when people have actually grasped history by the neck a bit, and actually decide that they’re going to transform it, theorise a way to transform it, and then acted in an exemplary way to encourage other people to act on that, simply as a political point, I do think we need to recognise that that process occurs.  There are individuals who do that and grab that and we have to not let our focus on collectivity or process or even a form of envy sort of overcome that.  And I think we do need to recognise when that has occurred and act on it.

[applause]

Robert Manne:

Just very briefly, the point you raise is, I think, what Assange believes.  I mean, it’s what I take him to … you know, what I call Darwinism, the survival of the best.  He thinks if a company has corrupt behaviour it has something to fear and it will be therefore disabled as a result of fearing leaks.  If it has nothing that it’s ashamed of, it won’t fear the leaks and thus it will thrive – that’s in a way his theory.  If you’re a Marxist, you’d believe that is naïve, but if … he’s not, and nor am I … and believes that some companies can behave better than others, and so I think what you’re saying is absolutely what he’s trying to get at.

Peter Vale:

Let me first say to Guy, it’s not one or the other, it’s … we advance in different ways, but I think that what I would like to see is that … and you’re an example, and so is Robert in your presentations here, that people start theorising about the process that’s going on.  I think that’s the important work that needs to be done, and certainly we should celebrate these breakthroughs when they occur.

On your second order thing, I mean, I’m afraid very sceptical about business.  I started my life as a financial journalist and remember the quick little phone calls between the journalists who were writing up companies and the stock brokers – I mean, this is what I’m going to say, this is what’s going to happen, blah, blah, blah, blah.  So I think this sort of stuff goes on and this trial in New York of this extraordinary man from Sri Lanka who’s made all the money, you know, these were not the sort of best nature of people.  These were little tit bits that were leaked down the line and I think it seems to me that in the nature of, particularly the financial world, a world which is structured around finance, this is the central project.  And the central project is that the people who are involved in this don’t think that they are doing anything wrong.  The people who are getting these huge salary increases in the aftermath of nearly bringing the world economic system to an end, don’t see anything wrong in this.   I don’t think that they share a universe that the rest of us are in.  They don’t see that getting more money actually – there’s nothing wrong with this.  There’s no sort of moral universe that’s operating there.  So I’m very sceptical of this, the possibility of this.

[applause]

Peter Beilharz:

It’s time for me to close and I’ll like to close with thanks.  I want to thank you all for coming, very much.  I want to thank the good folks of the Wheeler Centre for their patience with us.  I want to remind you again please that for those of you whose stamina is not yet exhausted, there is a further event this evening – it’s at 6.30 at the University of Melbourne, 221 Bouverie Street, where Ron Jacobs will talk about media narratives on the GFC, and that tomorrow there’ll be a four hour event in Experimedia in the central part of this library – a two hour academic session on Zygmunt Bauman and his work and thought followed by a more public … though of course you’re welcome to the first as well, but in the second instance, from 6pm, we’ll be viewing the first cut of the first documentary about Zygmunt Bauman and some other footage, an interview with him about this documentary.  So we want to welcome you enthusiastically to those if you should be able to join us.

So, thanks to you, thanks to the Wheeler Centre, and thanks especially, and I ask you to join me in thanking them, to our speakers.

[applause]

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