Julian Assange por Hans Ulrich Obrist

Es altamente recomendable leer la primera parte de la amplia entrevista que Hans Ulrich Obrist ha realizado a Julian Assange.

Independientemente de la simpatía o rechazo que uno sienta por el fundador de Wikileaks y sus planteamientos, su alergia a lo políticamente correcto siempre es de agradecer.

A continuación, algunos fragmentos (las negritas son mías):

Cypherpunk is a wordplay on Cyberpunk, the latter was always viewed as nonsense by real computer hackers—we were the living Cyberpunks while others were just talking about it, making artistic pastiche on our reality. We viewed the better books as a nice showing of the flag to the general public, but like most causes that are elitist and small, we had contempt for bowdlerized popularizations. We saw that we could change the nature of the relationship between the individual and the state using cryptography. 

[...] Censorship is not only a helpful economic signal; it is always an opportunity, because it reveals a fear of reform. And if an organization is expressing a fear of reform, it is also expressing the fact that it can be reformed.

[...] there is an idea that these great American companies, Facebook and Twitter, gave the Egyptian people this revolution and liberated Egypt. But the most popular guide for the revolutionaries was a document that spread throughout the soccer clubs in Egypt, which themselves were the most significant revolutionary community groups. If you read this document, you see that on the first page it says to be careful not to use Twitter and Facebook as they are being monitored. On the last page: do not use Twitter or Facebook. That is the most popular guide for the Egyptian revolution. And then we see Hillary Clinton trying to say that this was a revolution by Twitter and Facebook.

[...] It was an extremely interesting document, and we sent it to 3,000 people. [...] Why didn’t anyone spend time on this extraordinary document? [...] I think the main factor, however, for those who are not professional writers, and perhaps many who are, is simply that they use their writing to advertise their values as conforming to those of their paper. The aim of most non-professional writers is to take the cheapest possible content that permits them to demonstrate their value of conformity to the widest possible selection of the group that they wish to gain the favor of.


[...] Nadhmi Auchi has interests all over the world. His Luxembourg holding company holds over 200 companies. [...] He was also the principle financier of a man called Tony Rezko, who was one of Obama’s most important fundraisers, for his various pre-presidential campaigns, such as for the Senate. Rezko was also a fundraiser for Rob Blagojevich, the now disgraced Governor of Illinois. Rezko ended up being convicted of corruption in 2008. But in 2008, Barack Obama was involved in a run against Hillary for the presidential nomination, so the media turned their attention to Barack Obama’s fundraisers. And so attention was turned to Tony Rezko, who had been involved in a house purchase for Barack Obama. And attention was then turned to where some of the money for this house purchase might have come from, and attention was then turned to Nadhmi Auchi, who at that time had given Tony Rezko $3.5 million in violation of court conditions. Auchi then instructed Carter-Ruck, a libel firm in the UK, to go after stories mentioning aspects of his 2003 corruption conviction in France. And those stories started to be removed, everywhere. [...] The Guardian pulled three of the stories. The Telegraph pulled one. And there are a number of others. If you go to the former URLs of those stories you get a “page not found.” It does not say that it was removed as the result of a legal threat. As far as we can tell, the story not only ceased to exist, but ceased to have ever have existed. Parts of our intellectual record are disappearing in such a way that we cannot even tell that they have ever existed. [...] This is just the tip of the iceberg. And there are other forms of removal that are less intentional but more pernicious, which can be a simple matter of companies going under along with the digital archives they possess. So we need a way of consistently and accurately naming every piece of human knowledge, in such a way that their name arises out of the knowledge itself, out of its textual, visual, or aural representation, where the name is inextricably coupled to what it actually is. If we have that name, and if we use that name to refer to some information, and someone tries to change the contents, then it is either impossible or completely detectable by anyone using the name. [...] We all now suffer from the privatization of words, a privatization of those fundamental abstractions human beings use to communicate. The way we refer to our common intellectual record is becoming privatized, with different parts of it being soaked up into domain names controlled by private companies, institutions or states.

A propósito de Wikileaks

Sin demasiadas pretensiones, aquí van algunas reflexiones acerca de lo que ha ocurrido durante los últimos días con el cablegate:

1. Resulta increíble que haya gente que cuestione la publicación de las filtraciones desde un punto de vista "ético". Estamos hablando de crímenes de guerra, prevaricación, vulneración de los derechos humanos... Lo inmoral sería ocultar y consentir tanta mezquindad.

2. Muchos han querido ver en los logros de Wikileaks la confirmación de la incapacidad de los "medios tradicionales" para publicar algo que no sea propaganda. Creo que es un error de perspectiva. El problema de los medios de comunicación no es su incapacidad, sino su voluntad. O te dedicas a informar o te decantas por hacer caja; por lo general, no es factible conciliar estos dos propósitos cuando hablamos de grandes corporaciones cuyo negocio depende, en cierto modo, de su habilidad a la hora de cobijar al poder político.

3. En relación con lo anterior, surge una pregunta que, en palabras de Javier Moreno, "roza la metafísica": ¿son periodismo las filtraciones de Wikileaks? Lo importante no es entender este proceso en función de una determinada -e interesada- noción del periodismo, sino comprender algo que barruntamos desde hace tiempo: que éste debe adaptarse a un nuevo escenario en el que el tratamiento de la información se descentraliza y permeabiliza. Hablamos de mainstream media y grassroots media como formas de comunicación complementarias, no excluyentes. Puede que los grandes medios sean reacios a sacar a la luz ciertas cuestiones pero, de momento, su poder de amplificación es indudable una vez que éstas se hacen públicas. Wikileaks, funcionando como plataforma, contribuye a fragmentar el proceso informativo; deberíamos aspirar a que la información se produjese y divulgase en redes distribuidas.

4. En cualquier caso, la gestión de los documentos filtrados revela una buena cantidad de viejos vicios massmediáticos. El orden de publicación de los cables es ciertamente cuestionable (a estas alturas, seguimos esperando por los referentes a la Ley Sinde con impaciencia), mientras que el tratamiento sensacionalista y circense de buena parte de los mismos produce vergüenza ajena. Algunas portadas han estado más cerca de Salsa Rosa que de cualquier otra cosa.

5. La ingenuidad que denotan ciertas reacciones ante las noticias reveladas es preocupante. Hay quien se escandaliza al conocer prácticas o conductas insultantemente habituales (¿se supone que deberían sorprendernos el espionaje internacional, la corrupción en las altas esferas del poder o la conexión entre la mafia y el gobierno rusos?) Sin embargo, Pepe Cervera tiene razón cuando afirma que no es lo mismo 'saber' que todos los políticos son corruptos o que todos los gobiernos mienten que tener la prueba fehaciente de ello. Lo preocupante, de nuevo, es el enfoque de los medios, que siguen publicando los diferentes "hallazgos" como si de casos aislados se tratase, cuando lo que ha quedado en evidencia es el funcionamiento del estado de derecho como tal. El que las pruebas de los delitos se estén recibiendo con cierta tranquilidad es un síntoma más de la maltrecha salud de las democracias occidentales y de la pasividad general de sus electores.

6. Parece obvio que esto es solo la punta del iceberg. Para la mayoría de gobiernos sería maravilloso que creyésemos que están siendo desvelados grandes secretos de estado cuando prácticamente no hemos visto nada... Lo importante ahora es luchar por preservar el escenario en que ha sido posible, al menos, abrir una fisura en los complejos mecanismos de control y manipulación de los aparatos gubernamentales. Creo que, en lo que a Wikileaks se refiere, la forma es incluso más importante que el fondo.