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“Bullets Of Truth”: Julian Assange And The Politics Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
“Bullets Of Truth”: Julian Assange And The Politics Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
This essay updates (to early 2019) earlier work on the WikiLeaks story in order to consider what more recent developments reveal about the theoretical promise that Assange articulated at the time of the website’s emergence. Assange has characterized secrecy as both a form and symptom of corruption, and ultimately as the foundation of a “conspiracy” of governance that states like the U.S. inflict on their subjects and the world. He advocates a non-political, vigilante form of transparency in which WikiLeaks serves as a neutral entity that will save the public and free the world with information. He predicted that corrupt …
Feed: State Transparency Amidst Informational Surplus, Mark Fenster
Feed: State Transparency Amidst Informational Surplus, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
An email arrives, promising inside information about the perfidious forces that secretly rule the nation. A Twitter feed from a prominent insider at an establishment think-tank announces the latest disclosure about the president’s secret role in the Russian conspiracy to manipulate the election that elevated him with the blast of toy cannon. Meanwhile, the President’s tweets serve to annoy, distract, humor, or comfort those who see them, and they above all announce some truth about his presidency.
Debates about government transparency presume that the state controls an informational spigot, which can be made to allow information to flow or to …