Julian Assange: Wikileaks heralded a wave of conspiracy not truth-telling
The arrest of Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London will be seen by many as a dark day in the ongoing fight for truth but perhaps it merely marks the end of our innocence around that particular battle.
The primary problem is that we are still not entirely sure what Julian Assange represents, either as a cultural force or as the alleged instigator of numerous crimes. Was he ever (and does he remain) an advocate of freedom or has he always been an actor or “useful idiot” in a grander drama? Was he the perpetrator of sexual assaults or the victim of a honey trap? Is he a journalist or a crazy libertarian? Is he naïve or worldly, benign or hostile? Is he the villain who inspired the character of Raoul Silva in Skyfall or the liberal activist who counts Brian Eno and P.J. Harvey as friends?
A trial of some kind might at least go some way towards solving this riddle but it might not entirely explain why this strange white-haired Australian has been at the centre (or thereabouts) of much that has happened over the past decade: from the election of Donald Trump and the hacking of Democratic emails to the wider gaslighting of Western nations.
More than any other figure, Assange has come to symbolise a new kind of spiritualism that has grown up around the unknowable world of cyberspace. Gods above or below us seem quaint given that we now believe in gods among us, whether it is mysterious hacking groups, the Illuminati or the New World Order.
Emerging from the early generation of hackers and fascinated with cryptography and secrets, Assange became an advocate of alternative truths, the living embodiment of that postmodern paranoia that developed out of psychedelic science fiction. This is the stuff of the novels of Philip K. Dick, which fed into the cyberpunk world of William Gibson, which then influenced Hollywood in the form of The Matrix. In all those fictions and too many of our present days, “reality” as ordinarily known was described as a simulacrum of something greater and usually darker. Where Assange trod, there walked Alex Jones, Roger Stone, and a whole host of alternative truthers.
We now live in a world shaped by Assange and where conspiracy is a highly developed habit of mind. Assange is the grandfather of the “oh, they would say that” school of argument which really is no argument at all. Wikileaks still claims to reveal the “truths” behind the world’s big corporations and more powerful governments but they are just one of many websites now claiming to give the public a most honest view of reality, usually in the form of material more unsavoury than a few leaked emails. There are Ruptly (brought to you by the same people as Russia Today) and Liveleak, where there seems to be no limit to how graphic the video content. They follow the Assange methodology that confuses data for information, confusing the raw unedited footage of events with the all-important context.
None of this was, of course, new when Assange came along and formed Wikileaks in 2006 or in 2011 when he gained worldwide notoriety with the leak of information provided by Chelsea Manning. We already had our strange and largely discredited apostles of the “truth” but they usually existed in the fringes where the sensible press could keep them.
The historian David Irving was a conveyor of reputable history until that history tried to explain away the Holocaust. Then there was David Icke, TV sports journalist turned chronicler of our reptilian overlords.
The context for much of this is huge, as large as our culture under the influence of postmodernism and the expansion of the free market. News organisations found profit in giving people the news they wanted rather than the news they needed. Fox News in the US promised to be “fair and balanced” by delivering a partisan message to a partisan crowd. In the UK, meanwhile, phone hacking and worse undermined the public’s faith in the press. Yet it was the internet and, specifically, social media, that brought a new immediacy to acts of misinformation that seemed to provide answers to everyday lives that didn’t seem to make much sense compared to the fictions they were increasingly fed by movies and TV.
Julian Assange can seem a rather silly figure with the tales of his confinement inside the embassy. How could one man wreak such havoc?
Yet the story of Wikileaks has been the story of how free information for all turned into the business of making it even harder than ever to distinguish the truth. Gaslighting, the very act of destroying our rational grasp of the world and its meanings, has become our everyday reality. We face a fight every single day for the words we use. “Terrorist” has always been the applied to jihadists but postcolonialism has taught us that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. Even “man” in open to criticism. Just this week, Republicans described Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a “domestic terrorist”, which is troubling in a context where a president of the United States refuses to acknowledge the problem of white ethno-nationalist terrorism. If everybody is a terrorist, then nobody is a terrorist. We will need new language to describe our world.
Assange’s arrest should mark a new era but, perhaps, one with few answers. The US Department of Justice suggests that he faces just five years in an American prison if convicted. Whatever his eventual sentence, it’s to be assumed he will have every incentive to remain a martyr to whatever “truths” others wish to peddle in his name. Nothing we know of him suggests he would be willing to provide evidence of his past misdeeds and, perhaps, even if he did, what he created is has long since passed beyond his control. What he could provide would only be an alternative truth for those that still wish to believe that everything is a conspiracy and that our governments mean only to control us.
The most troubling part is that it’s now harder than ever to see what parts of that might be true. By attempting to cast light into shadowy places, Assange has only made the shadows more acute and a whole lot darker.