Wikileaks' Liquid Information Leaks for a Liquid Society

• Article: Liquid Information Leaks. By Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey.

URL = http://www.pjrey.net/documents/Liquid%20Information%20Leaks%2011.15.2011.pdf

Summary

"In this essay, (we will) argue that the so-called WikiLeaks global scandal can be understood through the framework developed by Zygmunt Bauman (2000) in Liquid Modernity, where he argues that Late Modernity is characterized by a trend of increasing liquidity. As an extension of this theory, we argue that as information becomes increasingly liquid, it leaks. For this reason, an environment of liquidity is hostile to entrenched, secretive institutions—the sort that WikiLeaks believes are inherently corrupt. To undermine these institutions, WikiLeaks engages in a tactic of enforced transparency, using its networks to gather up the increasing abundance of leaks and further harnessing the environment of liquidity to make these leaks highly visible. We will conclude that WikiLeak’s “cyber-anarchist” philosophy rests on a connected series of principles: increased liquidity leads to greater transparency, which, in turn, leads to better behavior by institutional actors. Both Bauman and WikiLeaks anticipate what the evidence now indicates: institutions attempting to solidify against the growing torrent of liquidity face the prospect of potentially being washed away." (http://www.pjrey.net/documents/Liquid%20Information%20Leaks%2011.15.2011.pdf)

Excerpts

The Liquefaction of Society

By Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey:

"While the contemporary information economy predates the public, commercial Internet, the Web has been a (if not the) primary factor in accelerating the trend toward Liquid Modernity. Bauman has written about the Web before, especially about how Internet dating furthers liquid relationships and love (2007); however, further reflection is in order because developments on and around the Web continually seem to reinforce his thesis. In fact, the Web seems to liquefy just about everything it touches; be it things, people, or, of course, information. The rise of the Web has created more liquid markets and products, concerns particularly important to Bauman (2000). With the Internet, there has been a rise of renting products that were once typically owned. The “transumer”1 is, in part, one who encounters “stuff” temporarily as opposed to accumulating it permanently. Zipcar, Netflix, Spotify and an increasing number of other examples where individuals rent rather than own demonstrate that, for many—especially the young and/or affluent—the physical amassing of “stuff” is undesirable; so, they have begun to rent items that previous generations tended to accumulate. “Stuff”, for many, is decreasingly allowed to solidify on our shelves and in our attics, instead flowing in a more liquid and nimble sense through consumers’ lives. Also, the rise of “virtual goods” (Lehdonvirta et al., 2009)—digital commodities such as gifts on Facebook or weapons on World of Warcraft—highlight the trend is towards “lighter” exchange as opposed to the solid and heavier exchange of physical goods. Just as things have grown more liquid, so too have people (Bauman 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007). Social media exemplifies this point: users of sites such as Facebook or Twitter can communicate with more people, more quickly and across more time and space. For example, a photograph of a friend can be taken and immediately posted to a site like Facebook, shared and commented on by “friends” around the globe. The social feedback loop has been intensified and made more rapid. This is in addition to other fairly recent technologies, like commercial flight, that allow us to physical transport our body around the globe, albeit at a pace slower than information can travel. When one of these flights crashed on the Hudson River in New York City, an individual snapped a photo on his mobile phone and posted it to Twitter. Within an hour, that image was disseminated across the globe and the photographer found himself being interviewed on cable television. By the morning, the photo ran on the front page of various print newspapers.2 The examples above demonstrate how the Internet—an informational sphere—has massive implications on the physical world of material products and flesh-and-blood bodies. Liquefaction is a major example of how the offline world is “augmented” by the online (Jurgenson and Rey, paper in progress). Products, markets, people and most everything else is growing more liquid online." (http://www.pjrey.net/documents/Liquid%20Information%20Leaks%2011.15.2011.pdf)

Moving from Spaces of Places to Spaces of Flows

By Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey:

"Manuel Castells (1996/2009), perhaps, best captured this shift when he said that computer networking technologies were transforming society from a “space of places” to a “space of flows.” The instantaneous nature of such communication technologies collapses or compresses time and space. The effect is to transform the world from a space where certain activities were segmented to certain places at certain times into a space where virtually any activity can be conducted any place at any time. Want to work, shop, chat, play, or pray? There’s an app for that. Of course, by its very nature, it is difficult to keep what goes on in a space of flows contained. Time and space—which once acted as natural barriers, limiting access to institutions, much like a moat—are now easily overcome. Perhaps no organization has more prominently exploited this trend than WikiLeaks." (http://www.pjrey.net/documents/Liquid%20Information%20Leaks%2011.15.2011.pdf)

Wikileaks as Liquid Politics

By Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey:

"WikiLeaks is more broadly engaged in what we might call liquid politics (i.e., the struggle to either erect or remove barriers to the flow of information). In fact, WikiLeaks has a twofold relationship with liquidity. By enabling leaks, liquidity facilitates the WikiLeaks agenda and the organization, in turn, undermines the solid institutions that act as barriers to greater liquidity. This relationship with liquidity is quite deliberate, and an examination of Assange’s rhetoric reveals a nuanced (and somewhat Utopian) ideology that liquidity is antithetical to corruption. This is because liquidity produces involuntary transparency, and transparency, Assange believes, causes actors to behave virtuously. Indeed, Assange has even been called “the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency” (Greenberg, Forbes, 29 November 2010). This broad political agenda is evident in the imagery of the Wikileaks logo, which is designed to valorize fluidity by drawing on the classic light/dark, good/bad trope. Perched atop the logo is a dark, dangerous, solid globe; it melts like a liquid away into a lighter, happier globe that remains partially unformed. At the bottom, the word “WikiLeaks” is written in the same color scheme as the lighter, liquid globe, as if to announce “we’re on the side of this new world order.” It is important to note, however, that liquid politics are not monolithic. Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka (2009) identify two distinct ideologies that emerge in contemporary political discourse surrounding freedom/control of information on the web: cyber-collectivism (which argues that the Internet should be regulated to best conform with our values) and cyber-libertarianism (which focuses on minimizing government regulation). In examining the WikiLeaks agenda, we believe it is pertinent to add a third category, cyber-anarchism (which views the Web as a tool to weaken or dissolve [unnecessary] institutions). Because Assange’s focus is on using the Internet as a mechanism to regulate institutions (through enforced transparency) and not on regulating the Internet, few would argue that Assange is a cyber-collectivist. Most often, Assange is described a cyber-libertarian, but The Wall Street Journal (Crovitz, 2010), for example, has labeled him an “information anarchist” (though this may only be because it sounds more sensational)." (http://www.pjrey.net/documents/Liquid%20Information%20Leaks%2011.15.2011.pdf)