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To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we hav
e learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think
beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that em
bolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must und
erstand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change o
r remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is
strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and
into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us
and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.
Julian Assange,

State and Terrorist Conspiracies

The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is intellectually substan
tial, but not all that difficult to read, so you might as well take a look at it
yourself. Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over Wikileaks
without actually reading these essays, even though he describes the function and
aims of an organization like Wikileaks in pretty straightforward terms. But, to
summarize, he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an author
itarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating t
hat conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to th
ink as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly impli
cit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating
it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.
He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, argu
ing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself
to the extent that
its authoritarianism becomes generally known it can only continue to exist and
function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from be
ing generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy:
Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against t
he individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans
which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these
plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to defin
e their behavior as conspiratorial.
The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organiza
tional problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is
it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself
to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information flows. After
all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them op
enly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate tho
se goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advan
ce them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right
balance of authority and conspiracy.
His model for imagining the conspiracy, then, is not at all the clich that people
mean when they sneer at someone for being a conspiracy theorist. After all, most
the conspiracies we re familiar with are pure fantasies, and because the Elders of Zi
on or James Bond s SPECTRE have never existed, their nonexistence becomes a cudgel
for beating on people that would ever use the term or the concept. For Assange,
by contrast, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of assoc
iates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, a
n authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough
to provoke counter-reaction. It might be something as dramatic as a loose coali
tion of conspirators working to start a war with Iraq/n, or it might simply be t
he banal, everyday deceptions and conspiracies of normal diplomatic procedure.

He illustrates this theoretical model by the analogy of a board with nails hamme
red into it and then tied together with twine:
First take some nails ( conspirators ) and hammer them into a board at random. Then
take twine ( communication ) and loop it from nail to nail without breaking. Call th
e twine connecting two nails a link. Unbroken twine means it is possible to trav
el from any nail to any other nail via twine and intermediary nails Information fl
ows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator trusts or knows every
other conspirator even though all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the
conspiracy, others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others
still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between important sections
or groupings of the conspiracy
Conspirators are often discerning, for some trust and depend each other, while o
thers say little. Important information flows frequently through some links, tri
vial information through others. So we expand our simple connected graph model t
o include not only links, but their importance.
Return to our board-and-nails analogy. Imagine a thick heavy cord between some n
ails and fine light thread between others. Call the importance, thickness or hea
viness of a link its weight. Between conspirators that never communicate the wei
ght is zero. The importance of communication passing through a link is difficult t
o evaluate apriori, since its true value depends on the outcome of the conspirac
y. We simply say that the importance of communication contributes to the weight of
a link in the most obvious way; the weight of a link is proportional to the amo
unt of important communication flowing across it. Questions about conspiracies i
n general won t require us to know the weight of any link, since that changes from
conspiracy to conspiracy.
Such a network will not be organized by a flow chart, nor would it ever produce
a single coherent map of itself (without thereby hastening its own collapse). It
is probably fairly acephalous, as a matter of course: if it had a single head (
or a singular organizing mind which could survey and map the entirety), then eve
ry conspirator would be one step from the boss and a short two steps away from e
very other member of the conspiracy. A certain amount of centralization is neces
sary, in other words (otherwise there is no conspiracy), but too much centraliza
tion makes the system vulnerable.
To use The Wire as a ready-to-hand example, imagine if Avon Barksdale was commun
icating directly with Bodie. All you would ever have to do is turn one person
an
y person and you would be one step away from the boss, whose direct connection t
o everyone else in the conspiracy would allow you to sweep them all up at once.
Obviously, no effective conspiracy would ever function this way. Remember Strin
ger Bell s is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy? To function effecti
vely, the primary authority has to be disassociated from all other members of th
e conspiracy, layers of mediation which have to be as opaque as possible to ever
yone concerned (which a paper trail unhelpfully clarifies). But while the comple
xity of these linkages shield the directing authority from exposure, they also l
imit Avon Barksdale s ability to control what s going on around him. Businesses run
on their paperwork! And the more walls you build around him, the less he might b
e able to trust his lieutenants, and the less they ll require (or tolerate) him.
This, Assange reasons, is a way to turn a feature into a bug. And his underlying
insight is simple and, I think, compelling: while an organization structured by
direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside
penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outs
ide gaze), the less able it will be to think as a system, to communicate with itse
lf. The more conspiratorial it becomes, in a certain sense, the less effective i
t will be as a conspiracy. The more closed the network is to outside intrusion,

the less able it is to engage with that which is outside itself (true hacker the
orizing).
His thinking is not quite as abstract as all that, of course; as he quite explic
itly notes, he is also understanding the functioning of the US state by analogy
with successful terrorist organizations. If you ve seen The Battle of Algiers, for
example, think of how the French counter-terrorist people work to produce an or
ganizational flow chart of the Algerian resistance movement: since they had over
whelming military superiority, their inability to crush the FLN resided in their
inability to find it, an inability which the FLN strategically works to impede
by decentralizing itself. Cutting off one leg of the octopus, the FLN realized,
wouldn t degrade the system as a whole if the legs all operated independently. The
links between the units were the vulnerable spots for the system as a whole, so
those were most closely and carefully guarded and most hotly pursued by the Fre
nch. And while the French won the battle of Algiers, they lost the war, because
they adopted the tactics Assange briefly mentions only to put aside:
How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act? We can split the conspiracy,
reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links o
r many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings,
such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackm
ailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they wer
e connected to.
This is the US s counterterrorism strategy find the men in charge and get em
but it s
not what Assange wants to do: such a program would isolate a specific version o
f the conspiracy and attempt to destroy the form of it that already exists, whic
h he argues will have two important limitations. For one thing, by the time such
a conspiracy has a form which can be targeted, its ability to function will be
quite advanced. As he notes:
A man in chains knows he should have acted sooner for his ability to influence th
e actions of the state is near its end. To deal with powerful conspiratorial act
ions we must think ahead and attack the process that leads to them since the act
ions themselves can not be dealt with.
By the time a cancer has metastasized, in other words, antioxidents are no longe
r effective, and even violent chemotherapy is difficult. It s better, then, to thi
nk about how conspiracies come into existence so as to prevent them from forming
in the first place (whereas if you isolate the carcinogen early enough, you don t
need to remove the tumor after the fact). Instead, he wants to address the aggr
egative process itself, by impeding the principle of its reproduction: rather th
an trying to expose and cut particular links between particular conspirators (wh
ich does little to prevent new links from forming and may not disturb the actual
functioning of the system as a whole), he wants to attack the total conspiratori
al power of the entire system by figuring out how to reduce its total ability to
share and exchange information among itself, in effect, to slow down its process
ing power. As he puts it:
Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to outthink the same group of
individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which
they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass through the conspirators and
then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has in
puts (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirat
ors and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or m
aintain the environment).
Because he thinks of the conspiracy as a computational network, he notes in an a
side that one way to weaken its cognitive ability would be to degrade the qualit
y of its information:

Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquir

ed from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based
on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, ga
rbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the a
gent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer s aphoris
m is sometimes called the Fox News effect .
I m not sure this is what he means, but it s worth reflecting that the conspiracy s ab
ility to deceive others through propaganda can also be the conspiracy s tendency t
o deceive itself by its own propaganda. So many people genuinely drink the KoolAid, after all. Would our super-spies in Afghanistan ever have been so taken in
by the imposter Taliban guy if they didn t, basically, believe their own line of p
ropaganda, if they didn t convince themselves
even provisionally that we actually
are winning the war against Talibothra? The same is true of WMD; while no one in
possession of the facts could rationally conclude that Saddam Hussein then (or
Iran now) are actually, positively in pursuit of WMD s, this doesn t mean that the p
eople talking about ticking time bombs don t actually believe that they are. It ju
st means they are operating with bad information about the environment. Sometime
s this works in their favor, but sometimes it does not: if Obama thinks Afghanis
tan is winnable, it may sink his presidency, for example, while the belief of hi
s advisors that the economy would recover if the government rescued only the ban
ks almost certainly lost the midterm elections for the Democrats (and was the de
ath-knell for so many of the Blue Dogs who were driving that particular policy c
hoice). Whether this actually hurts the conspiracy is unclear; those Blue Dogs m
ight have lost their seats, but most of them will retire from public service to
cushy jobs supported by the sectors they supported while they were in public ser
vice. And lots of successful politicians do nothing but fail.
This is however, not where Assange s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, tha
t the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make lea
ks a fundamental part of the conspiracy s information environment. Which is why th
e point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does
not leak something like the Collateral Murder video as a way of putting an end to
that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the h
ydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousn
ess of the conspiracy s information system will impede its functioning, that the c
onspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own inf
ormation flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You des
troy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it
can no longer conspire:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and
paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimizatio
n of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive secre
cy tax ) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased abili
ty to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world wher
e leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to o
pen, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and i
n many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely v
ulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreact
ion; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in
response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers,
he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against ea
ch other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if
all the elements of the conspiracy still exist, in this sense, depriving themsel
ves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together as a conspira
cy prevents them from acting as a conspiracy. As he puts it:

If total conspiratorial power is zero, then clearly there is no information flow

between the conspirators and hence no conspiracy. A substantial increase or dec
rease in total conspiratorial power almost always means what we expect it to mea
n; an increase or decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and ad
apt An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think is powerless to preserve itself
against the opponents it induces.
In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has tot
ally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These
leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a
broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all
but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearan
ce. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has cons
piratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage
of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information whi
ch is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their consti
tuency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who
was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous p
olitical work as a matter of course is nave. But Assange is not trying to produce
a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or
something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any m
ore. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possib
le, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state s conspiratorial netw
ork in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational n
etwork in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.
Early responses seem to indicate that Wikileaks is well on its way to accomplish
ing some of its goals. As Simon Jenkins put it (in a great piece in its own righ
t) The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secre
ts. And if the diplomats quoted by Le Monde are right that, we will never again be
able to practice diplomacy like before, this is exactly what Wikileaks was tryin
g to do. It s sort of pathetic hearing diplomats and government shills lament that
the normal work of diplomacy will now be impossible, like complaining that that t
he guy boxing you out is making it hard to get rebounds. Poor dears. If Assange
is right to point out that his organization has accomplished more state scrutiny
than the entire rest of the journalistic apparatus combined, he s right but he s al
so deflecting the issue: if Wikileaks does some of the things that journalists d
o, it also does some very different things. Assange, as his introductory remarks
indicate quite clearly, is in the business of radically shift[ing] regime behavi
or.
If Wikileaks is a different kind of organization than anything we ve ever seen bef
ore, it s interesting to see him put himself in line with more conventional progre
ssivism. Assange isn t off base, after all, when he quotes Theodore Roosevelt s word
s from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the f
irst essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that Behind the ostensible gov
ernment sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowled
ging no responsibility to the people, and it was true, then too, that To destroy t
his invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt busines
s and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship. Assange is trying to s
hit all over this unholy alliance in ways that the later and more radical Roosev
elt would likely have commended.
It s worth closing, then, by recalling that Roosevelt also coined the term muckrake
r, and that he did so as a term of disparagement. Quoting from Pilgrim s Progress,
he cited the example of the Muck-Raker who could only look down, whose perspective
was so totally limited to the muck that it was his job to rake, he had lost all a
bility to see anything higher. Roosevelt, as always, is worth quoting:

In Bunyan s Pilgrim s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Mu
ck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muckrake in his ha
nd; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither l
ook up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the
filth of the floor the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him
whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typi
fies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, a
nd fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing
. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is s vile
and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the m
uck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed o
f all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything el
se, who never thinks or speaks or writes save of his feats with the muck-rake, s
peedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of th
e most potent forces for evil. There are, in the body politic, economic, and soc
ial, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war up
on them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man,
whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in
business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, ev
ery man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless
severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that
the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful
Roosevelt was many things when he uttered those words, but he was not wrong. The
re is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that
all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it s utt
ered by the guy who s busily monetizing your radical transparency. And the way mos
t journalists expose secrets as a professional practice
to the extent that they do
is just as narrowly selfish: because they publicize privacy only when there is
profit to be made in doing so, they keep their eyes on the valuable muck they ar
e raking, and learn to pledge their future professional existence on a continuin
g and steady flow of it. In muck they trust.
According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because w
e all basically know that the US state
like all states
is basically doing a lot
of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific
ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessar
ily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the pro
visional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical hu
man being
and Assange always emphasizes his ethics has to be the question of wha
t exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better s
tate of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, As
sange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks activities will carry us
through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clari
ty, a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of
future secrets. The point of Wikileaks
as Assange argues
is simply to make Wikil
eaks unnecessary.