WikiLeaks

Abstract

Wikileaks can safely be considered a revealing experience in testing the limits of power. Julian Assange’s intent is to uncover the roots of power abuse, publicly exposing what is supposed to be the fabric of a hidden authoritarian regime underlying formal democracies. Despite the many—though generally unsurprising—Wikileaks revelations, the whole operation did not have the enormous effects Assange and his supporters anticipated, suggesting that perhaps something was wrong with Assange’s prediction, and the theory underlying it. To be sure, the opposition secrecy vs. transparency was presented in Wikileaks’ founding texts as a contradiction. Wikileaks assumes, first, that one could reach transparency, and second, that transparency, by the mere fact of existing, will be the best guarantee for a democratic power and a free society. This article argues that the main assumption underlying Wikileaks is wrong, since in modern power, transparency and secrecy are much more complementary than contradictory, all the more so when power is conceived of—as Assange himself does—as a reticular structure, a network, or a web. When transparency is not opposed to secrecy anymore, it can become the most refined form of secrecy. In such a regime of truth, whoever tries to get rid of secrecy and promotes transparency, instead of being freed of a “totalitarian regime,” gets entirely entangled in the dialectics of modern power.