More Creative Reactions to Wikileaks

I recently said we needed more creative ways to deal with Wikileaks and Cablegate: As a kind of cultural brainstorming, producing concepts and arguments before deciding which of them are keepers; but also as a re-assertion of creative voices in the face of a publication that threatens to overwhelm on many levels. Since I did so, several readers have pointed out some more creative responses (thank you!). 

So Why Is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again has been around for a while now. It confronts the idea that Wikileaks’ publications are either non-consequential or harmful by quoting instances in which they have apparently presented valuable information. The presentation combines a tweet-like format of very short messages, a link to a longer source, mostly from traditional news media, and an imagined response from an opponent. This response also functions as the ‘next’ button: Clicking it leads to another screen with a new instance of an apparent Wikileaks success. The text on the next button then changes to a different negative response, superficially mirroring an ongoing debate.

Three things are noteworthy here: One, the next button is recognizable by function purely because of the established design of the site. While some of the negative responses are formulated as questions or challenges to present further arguments, many others are not. A triumph of design.

Two, the shortened versions usually lead to sources that are still at least once removed from the leaked documents, reinforcing the impression that many people excited by Wikileaks aren’t quite excited enough to read Wikileaks themselves. They are happy that these things are now public, but they do not participate in that public discourse.

And three, the site imagines its opponent’s voice to be in a very specific political camp, beyond its antagonism towards Wikileaks: Slogans include “Four more years!” and “With us, or against us.” I’m afraid this caricature of the opponent makes it clear that the targeted readers are not actually rational opponents willing to listen to counter-arguments, but sympathizers searching for arguments to back up their position. Which somewhat ironically implies that the sympathizers have established their stance before they had all of this evidence. However, the whole staged conversation certainly serves as a functional vehicle to present the data in a certain manner: To the point, polemically, and in a shortened form that provides sources but suggests you needn’t really read them.

The image that this paints corresponds with the fact that while the leaks are all about publishing sensitive texts, the publicity has mainly been engaged with the fact of that publication and not with its contents: A kind of publicity of the second order, describing that some things are now publicly known which in fact hardly anybody has taken the time to learn. In this way, SWIWAGTA certainly represents a general tendency towards the leaks. Ex-UK-diplomat Carne Ross describes the dominant reactions on the left and the right and despairs that no-one, for instance, seems to care about the US ambassador’s cable on a talk with Saddam Hussein back in 1990, leading up to the first Iraq war. The EFF has seen a similar need to point out the cases in which leaks actually present actionable data. They provide much more detail and groundedness than SWIWAGTA, but similarly see a need to highlight these cases because they are all but ignored in the public discourse. And of course, the interest in Assange and his personal secrets as opposed to the secrets he reveals is another symptom of this, up to and including his recent turn to a PR firm for help, which is again reported not only in lieu of the leaked secrets, but even in lieu of any content produced by that firm.

Another, perhaps even more creative response illustrates some of the aesthetic effects of this distance between public discourse and published secrets: Joe Sabia’s vid WikiWecaps presents lots and lots of wiki-leaked stories in an entertaining, dynamic, and comical fashion. It employs a massively pleonastic series of deictic signifiers — this man has said that this country wants this – pointing to images rather than things to clearly separate the kinds of plots involved in revealed secrets (he says that they said that she said — !) from the information provided (what did they say again?).

(Semiotic aside: The repetitive structure achieves a separation of secondness, ‘this’, from firstness, ‘images’, suspending an integration into a thirdness that could connect to real-world references and further discussion. In doing so, it also points out that images, even of Gadaffi, are no more real-world references than demonstrative pronouns unless assembled into a rational argument.)

So what can be done to reconnect to the mass of information available by publication, but unavailable by its resistance to effective reading? Cablegate: The Game tries to turn the power of social media to the corpus of leaks by rewarding players with points won for their tags and summaries. It uses the method made famous by the ESP games that tried to ‘harvest human intelligence’, as they say, tagging pictures by several players but only accepting and rewarding tags in which at least two players agree. If this works — and it might, because the method has worked before, and it might not, because there seems to be a bit of a fatigue spreading among the users originally excited by such games –, it will create a new kind of public reader as an aggregate of amassed individual readers to challenge the new kind of public presentation of the amassed documents. The question then will be what to do with the results, and whether they can or even should lead back into a more traditional kind of public discourse.

Finally, the call for All the Citizen’s Men continues until January 15th. It will not solve any of the problems above specifically, but I hope it can produce the kind of production of ideas from which new ways to phrase problems and solutions might spring. I like it, and if you haven’t looked at it yet, you might want to do so and consider a submission of your own.