THERE ARE NO SECRETS ANYMORE!

THERE ARE NO SECRETS ANYMORE!




James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 7, 2010



* * *



Long before WikiLeaks exposed the supercilious rag tag chitchat of diplomats in the U.S. State Department with foreign leaders who are inclined to talk out of both sides of their mouths, leaks at every level in every institution were not only common but also pervasive.



There is almost a mania to disclose secrets. It starts when we are kids, using it as power over each other, only to have it reach a crescendo when we grow up and handle documents marked “top secret.” I experienced it in industry and as an educator, finding it amusing when my barber knew as much as I did about something. There are no secrets anymore. A society addicted to such weakness is likely to go a little haywire when the clandestine game is exposed. This has been confirmed with the media frenzy.



* * *



Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeak’s, a hunted man across the globe rivaling the search for Osama ben Laden, is called everything from an anarchist to an idealist to the most unconscionable criminal known to man, yet no one is certain if he has broken any law.



Seemingly everyone who is anyone in the ranks of media has weighed in on this young man: Rick Stengel, managing editor of the Time magazine, Fareed Zakaria of Time magazine, Admiral Dennis Blair, former Director of National Security, David Brooks of the New York Times, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, and a cabal of sinister talking heads on radio and television have pounced on this young hacker like a pack of jackals.



U. S. Army Private, Bradley Manning, 23, downloaded some 250,000 diplomatic cables on a CD-RW disc at an Army outpost in Iraq from November 2009 to April 2010 and passed them on to WikiLeaks, batches of which Assange has published and batches more that he threatens to publish.



The chatter of these top-secret cables is proving embarrassing, not so much for their strategic content but for the juvenile bickering and malicious gossip they contain that bounces across the electronic airwaves. This is what should be disturbing.



Julian Assange is now undergoing media psychoanalysis with the most common word associated with him that of being an anarchist. He is also called a pseudo-intellectual who believes all ruling institutions are corrupt and all public pronouncements are lies. Now, I wonder why he would think that.



A computer hacker is what he is with the provenance of Lizbeth Salander of the Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson’s trilogy. Larsson writes in the final volume of this trilogy, “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest” (2010):



“If fifty of the world’s foremost hackers decided to launch a coordinated attack against an entire country, the country might survive, but not without serious problems. The cost would certainly run into the billions.”



We now know that author Larsson, who died before his trilogy was published, seriously underestimated the power of the hacker.



* * *



THE ART OF NOT BEING GOVERNED



It would be easy to see Julian Assange as an anomaly, as a blip on the otherwise progressive screen of global development.



Like Lizbeth Salander in Larsson’s novels, a case is being developed against the man without a clear understanding or apparent interest in who he really is, or why he did what he did. Nor do we have insight into why the army private did what he did.



David Brooks waxes empathetic with his concern for “the fragile community.” He paints Assange simply as a rogue activist. Tom Friedman plays the novelist pondering what diplomatic cables out of China might reveal if they had a WikiLeaker. Admiral Blair predictably sees him as very dangerous man, while Fareed Zakaria assures us this too will pass.



Only Nick Stengel, who sees Assange as a “man of our times,” seems to get it. He sees this hacker as a man who distrusts institutions, banks, and the nation state while maintaining a moral calculus of believing he is doing good by undermining the power of countries and their emissaries. Of course, he is delusional, but saying so doesn’t change anything. Nor does it give us closure on how to deal with such people who have the wit and will to cut through societal hubris to expose it naked.



Why would someone embrace the art of not being governed making it necessary to be on the run, and court personal disaster? I don’t know the answer, but I think we are looking at the problem from the wrong end.



* * *



CUT AND CONTROL JOURNEY THROUGH TIME



John Lennon (1940 – 1980) wrote:

“He’s a real Nowhere Man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody, doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to, isn’t he a bit like you and me?”



I sense that Julian Assange sees himself as “Nowhere Man” in a nowhere land that has dissected the world into bits and pieces and reduced its inhabitants to unrealistic appetites.



People’s craving can be manipulated into societal dependencies. Everyone fits into a quantitative profile, reduced to numbers, and condensed to pie charts with individualism buried in algorithms. With the weapon of the Internet, a misfit and outsider can have the world for lunch.



* * *



James Burke and Robert Ornstein tell us in “The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture” (1995) that each time we cut existence away from the way it was into a new reality, we gain something desired at the expense of something lost forever. This makes us vulnerable to high crimes and misdemeanors as we transition from one phase to another, a situation that is unlikely to be anticipated.



The planet earth is a finite pie that no matter how infinitesimally small the slices taken eventually there is nothing left to cut. Lennon goes on:



“Nowhere Man, the world is at your command, he’s as blind as he can be, just sees what he want to see, Nowhere Man can you see me at all?”



Assange is invisible to us as we can only see his daring as pathological. We are blinded to the reality that he reveals.



It has been a long road from before to where we are now. We have been cutting and controlling indiscriminately for centuries, only to find us in the company of Nowhere Man in nowhere land. A brief glimpse of this progression may be helpful.



* * *



The fifteenth century explorers from Europe brought Western culture to the New World, but at the expense of the indigenous cultures, which were shattered.



Theologians dominated the sixteenth century giving rise to Protestantism, the decline of Rome, the disintegration of the feudal system, and the rise of nascent capitalism.



Pilgrims led the way in the seventeenth century immigrating to the New World in North America, while the Dutch and French Huguenots colonized the tip of Southern Africa, changing the societal configuration of both continents.



Lawyers took the ideas of philosophers and translated them into documents of independence in the American and French Revolution, signaling the end of the British Empire the French monarchy.



Engineers came into their own in the American Civil War launching the Industrial Revolution with agrarian and provincial society being displaced by a machine based culture.



Managers rose like a sphinx out of the ashes of two world wars in the twentieth century to dictate the temper of the times, and to change attitudes and aptitudes about values, beliefs, God, society, the nation state, and life itself.



* * *



The twenty-first century is a progression and regression of all these gains and loses, and seemingly the domain of Nowhere Man. Julian Assange is just an early iteration of this man from an Internet perspective. A double-edged blade can cut and clear, can be a tool of good or a tool of evil.



Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale offer a dark picture of the Internet in, “Funky Business” (2002).



They see the new cut and control world as ominous, a world that cannot exist without logos. They are suspect of capitalism seeing it attempting to silently take over democracy. It is easy to forget, they say, that capitalism is engaged in a class struggle with a new world not anticipated because of the Internet. They see evidence of this in the leadership of Venezuela, Iran and Brazil, and in the shadow jihads of terror about the globe. The demigods that have always been with us now have a new tool.



After capitalism comes attentionalism, that is, those who assume control understand the subtle change and open field provided to those of initiative to harness and control networks of information and master new forms of this tool to either promote or disrupt business, finance and legislation across the globe forming new elites or renegade governments.



* * *



My wonder is if Assange has read “Funky Business,” or, “Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism” (2002). Authors Alexander Bard and Jan Sodergvist anticipated his arrival, an idealist desiring to restore the balance by exposing “secrets” while neutralizing the power of those controlling the citadels of information.



They expected someone would see through the great myth of the Internet that claims it is transparent and non-hierarchical. The diligence, they say, will see through the rhetoric to understand society will not be divided along the lines of wealth and academic merit, but by netocratic divisions.



Power will no longer reside with those who own the means of production, but with those who control the information. They write:



“It is the people who can create and sustain attention that are the Netocrats, the new holders of power, not those who simply supply capital. People who can manipulate networks and the information that runs through them will inherit the future.”



* * *



NOT WHO JULIAN ASSANGE IS, BUT WHY



As I ponder the mind of this diligent hacker, feel I have some understanding of why he has surfaced now. We have created the perfect climate with our duplicity and chaos:



FREEDOM:



Before WWII, we were a regional society with distinct differences in customs and mores, dress and manners, speech and decorum, values and interests. We were a collective but selective society. We knew who we were, and delighted in that knowledge.



After WWII, this distinction faded into the past as we developed a commonality and conformity that made us indistinguishable from each other. This has only accelerated in the advent of television, the computer, and the Internet. We are now clones of each other and about as original as a borrowed thought.



We once took pride in our individualism, our uniqueness, our self-reliance, in our ability to handle adversity. We didn’t look to the government to provide a safety net, to nursemaids to explain away our failures, to apologists for our bad choices. We knew there was no escape from the consequences of our actions. We had a moral compass and knew our way. We were happy campers and enjoyed what is called “negative freedom.”



After WWII, we found it easy to get a good job with benefits. We came to expect job security by showing up for work. The job requirements were punctuality, obedience, loyalty, being polite, taking orders, and submitting to authority. To stay out of trouble, we left our minds at home.



Work was comfortable and predictable to the point of complacency. Workers behaved like twelve-year-old obedient children suspended in adolescence. The company became surrogate parent with bosses using the family metaphor to describe the orderliness of operations.



Work was management centered. The individual looked for guidance, direction, stimulation and motivation from outside himself. This was the prison of “positive freedom.” This has grown to the point that very little negative freedom now exists at all.



Fear and security are the motivators of positive freedom. We see this with surveillance cameras on nearly every commercial building and on traffic lights at intersections. We experience this in invasive body searchers at airports, railroad depots and sporting events.



We see this in electronic pick pocketing with Radio Frequency Identity (RFID) technology where a credit card reader and on line net book computer can brush against a person and read the credit cards in the person’s billfold or purse.



WikiLeaks is a logical reaction to positive freedom.



* * *



EDUCATION:



Knowledge has always been power. Literacy was provenance of scribes and clerics who could manipulate temporal lords and monarchs to their will, as most were illiterate. It is no accident the great universities of the West were once the domain of the religious.



Before WWII, few Americans were high school graduates and even fewer college graduates. Education was geared to the elite.



After WWII, this changed. Education became a major industry following the factory model of the workplace, an industry teacher centered (rather than manager centered) with students expected to be punctual, polite, obedient, passive, submissive and unchallenging to infallible authority.



Learning was programmed to a specific curriculum with the cognitive bias of the teachers and school board in an assembling line configuration of progressive graded skills with the eventual product a diploma.



Students were not trained to think, to challenge, to creative, or to problem solve, but to acquire the vocational skills required of an industrial society.



After WWII, land grant universities rose out of the hinterland followed by junior colleges across urban communities, but with the same programmatic curriculums.



MBA programs were surfacing everywhere as well with the vocational format of Ivy League schools dictated by the requirements General Motors, General Electric, Western Electric, et al. MBAs were the new soldiers of management.



After WWII, the end of school segregation saw a proliferation of private schools and, unhappily, a deterioration of public schools. This was demonstrated in social promotions and meaningless grading mirroring the inflation of promotions and entitlements in industry that had little to do with performance.



So, in 2010, compared to other advanced industrial nations, United States workers make more than foreign competitors while doing less, and American students performs less well in mathematics, science, reading and writing than students elsewhere while spending more per student than nearly everywhere else on the globe.



* * *



BUSINESS



In the wake of Enron, and now the real estate and Wall Street meltdown because of suspect practices, and with the call for more regulation, little attention is given as to what is the driver in this corruption. I don’t know Julian Assange’s thoughts on this charade of distrust, but dissembling has sometimes provoked irrational action.



* * *



The system is broken, and after a lot of gnashing of teeth and empty apologies, Wall Street is operating as business as usual, and brokers are again taking home $100 million paychecks. The worry on Wall Street is not whether it is ethical or not, but whether it is legal. The ethical and legal can sometimes be worlds apart.



Unfortunately, a world of fine homes, cars, boats, airplanes, wardrobes, and accessories fail to make for happy campers. Nor do these trappings compensate for the loss of moral fiber or provincial roots. The frenzy of millionaires straining to be billionaires proves the diminishing returns to this quest.



We have more billionaires today than we once had millionaires yet few have time to smell the flowers. Something is wrong with this picture. Why the surprise when a Julian Assange comes out of the woodwork full of rage when society goes off the rails?



* * *



THE FRAGILE COMMUNITY GOING FORWARD



Novelist Joseph Wambaugh once said a community gets the police it deserves, a corrupt community will have corrupt cops, an honest community will have dutiful public servants.



Julian Assange is not an aberration, but a personification of the boiling discord below the surface in hackerland.



Internet observers have expected his arrival. That said I sense they are surprised by the commotion he has caused. A touch of anarchy is in every thinking man’s heart when societal institutions operate with impunity, infallibility and unimpeachable authority.



When a representative democracy is frozen in gridlock and so polarized it cannot conduct the people’s business, when liberty has no room for negative freedom, when education is a mockery of knowers but few learners, when school is a dumbing down to a ridiculous denominator, when business is driven with profit at the expense of people, when people in public life cannot be trusted, when technology blindly creates new tools without weighing their unintended consequences, it is then that a Julian Assange materializes.



Before trying to prevent or redress this current obsession with the 250,000 cables on the Internet, it is time to look at where we are and what we have left behind.



“Nowhere,” incidentally, can be loosely defined as “utopia.” We have been living in this “Nowhere Land,” and if you think I exaggerate, here are the concluding lyrics of John Lennon:



“Nowhere Man don’t worry, take your time, don’t hurry, leave it all till somebody else, lends a hand.”



We always think somebody will, indeed, dig us out of our mess. What could be more delusional than that?



* * *