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It's a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought into it. However, he's making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which is trea
by lmkg 16y ago
It's a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought into it. However, he's making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which is treating the concentration of political power as monolithic. If you assume that an organization is concerned about the power of the organization, then I think he's correct in his logic that authoritarianism leads to conspiracy and communication is important to having power. However, if you assume that most members of an organization are concerned with personal power rather than the power of the organization, then the importance of communication goes down sharply, as the only coordination is opportunistic. A bureaucracy, as opposed to a dictatorship, is quite content without having goals, coordination, or communication[1], and can expand its authority based entirely on the mission creep of lower-level individuals within it.
How valuable the disruption of communication is in fighting a "regime" depends on how you model that regime. And, of course, in practice you will find that reality is some bizarre chimera of any group of models. My intuition is that Congress (plus lobbyists) act more like a decentralized bureaucracy, executive administrations act more like dictatorships that fight against each other for territory, and that the closest things we find to Assange's "banal conspiracies" are small, ad-hoc, opportunistic alignment of objectives, much smaller, less powerful, and less stable than the government as a whole.
[1] In fact, lack of coordination could help a bureaucracy grow by fostering redundancy.
- CWuestefeld 16y agoThat's a really interesting question. Can it be that the perceived "neo-con" or "Liberal" machines are really emergent behavior based solely (or predominantly) on independent, opportunistic agents? I don't know the answer to that, but it's interesting to ponder.
- _delirium 16y agoThat's one thing I think is worth rescuing from classical Marxism (ignoring the political prescriptions that the Marxists added on top). The "historical materialist" view that history is largely emergent behavior of structural elements like economic relations, not the result of either "great men" or conscious conspiracies, or some preordained macro-scale order, is still pretty relevant imo. (It's actually out of favor in contemporary Marxist thought, oddly enough, which has gone more in the direction of analyzing the role of culture, hegemony, etc., following Gramsci. Perhaps some non-Marxists will have to revive the historical-materialist approach. Jared Diamond's work is sort of in that direction.)
- eof 16y agoI really just disagree with all of that. Assange did not appear to me to be making any assumption about political power being monolithic. He is only talking about conspiracies as things in general having power, and notes that large parts of the US government act in conspirational ways.. Further, I don't think you can really have any model of current regime which absolutely could not function if it could not communicate secretly. The sum of every secret conversation that the conspirator would not want the world to know about because it would breed opposition is the net capacity of the organization to act in unjust ways. If it cannot communicate internally in secret, it simply cannot act in unjust ways for any length of time.