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Rethinking Conspiracy: The Political Philosophy of Julian Assange
by Peter Ludlow
Dept. of Philosophy
Northwestern University
_peterjlud...@gmail.com_ (mailto:peterjlud...@gmail.com)
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government
owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To
destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between
corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.
-- President Theodore Roosevelt (epigraph from an Assange paper)
There has been plenty of venom spewed about the recently arrested Julian
Assange, ranging from calls for his assassination to claims that he is an
anarchist and even (according to Newt Gingrich) that he runs a terrorist
organization. On the other side there have been those who view him positively
as a prophet of the “information wants to be free” hacker ethic. While I
used to agree with the latter group, but I now understand that this is a
gross oversimplification of his views.
I’ve been reading some of Assange’s more philosophical writings, ranging
from blog posts to position papers. While this work is scattered and at
times technical (and certainly enthymematic) I think I have the gist of his
position. My goal in this note is explain his philosophical position as
best as I can. Since my goal is pedagogical, I won’t weigh in pro or con, but
I will conclude with some questions for further discussion.
To keep things as tight as possible, I’ve organized my summary of his
position into three parts. First, I’ll look at his view of what conspiracies
are and how they are formed. Second, I’ll examine his views about why
conspiracies are necessarily harmful. Third, I’ll turn to his reason for t
hinking that leaks are optimal weapons for the dismantling of conspiracies.
1.0 What are Conspiracies?
One of the core goals of Assange’s project is to dismantle what he calls “
conspiracies.” I use scare quotes here because he doesn’t mean ‘
conspiracy’ in the usual sense of people sitting around in a room plotting some
crime or deception. As I understand Assange’s view it is entirely possible
that there could be a conspiracy in which no person in the conspiracy was
aware that they were part of the conspiracy. How is this possible?
I’ll get into details in a bit, but first I think the basic idea of a
conspiracy with unwitting agents can be illustrated in a simple way. Suppose
that you have some information that is valuable – say some inside
information about the financial state of a corporation. If you immediately
make that
information public without acting on it, it is worth nothing to you. On
the other hand, if you keep it to yourself you may not fully profit from the
information. Ideally, you would like to seek out someone that you could
trade the information with, and who you could be sure would keep the
information close so that it remained valuable. Let’s say that I have similar
information and that we trade it. You may trade with other friends and I may
do likewise. In each case we have simply traded information for our own
benefit, but we have also built a little network of information traders who,
hopefully, are keeping the information relatively close and are giving us
something equally valuable in kind. We may not know the scope of the
network and we may not even realize we are part of a network, but we are, and
this network constitutes a conspiracy as Assange understands it. No one sat
down and agreed to form a network of inside information traders – the
network has simply naturally emerged from our local individual bargains. We
can
say that the network is an emergent property of these bargains.
Emergent conspiracies like this needn’t be restricted to the business
world. Suppose that I am a reporter. I would like to have some hot news to
report. You agree to give me the inside information, but you do so with the
understanding that you and your network friends will act on your
information before you give it to me and it becomes worthless when published.
I get
my scoop, and you get to control the conditions under which the information
is made public. I, as reporter, am now unknowingly part of the
conspiracy. I am participating in the conspiracy by respecting the secrets
that the
network wishes to keep, and releasing the secrets (and sometimes
misinformation) only when it is in the interest of the network to do so. I
have
become a part of the network, and hence part of the conspiracy.
The network need not start out as a conspiracy. Suppose we have an
organization (say the US State Department) and some of o
