Julian Assange on Fake Activists in Silicon Valley
Last year Julian Assange was released from prison. His crime? Embarrassing powerful, rich people. Having just mentioned his sense of purpose, I've taken a moment to assess his thoughts on related matters. “Power is a thing of perception," he said. "They don't need to be able to kill you. They just need you to think they are able to kill you...”
“Courage is not the absence of fear," he said. "Only fools have no fear. Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those things in balance” (Julian Assange knew the risks).
“Reality is an aspect of property," he said. "It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.”
Remember how much character assassination he was subjected to. “The act of assassination - the targeting of visible individuals, is the result of mental inclinations honed for the pre-literate societies in which our species evolved,” he said. “One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice.”
He also took the time to blast hypocritical 'activists' who really just served GAFAM et al (people like EFF staff). To quote: “There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest. At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side—that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies. Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.”
Assange wrote this in When Google Met Wikileaks.
Society needs more people like Assange and fewer like the EFF. Like Wikipedia, the EFF is funded by powerful, rich people. █
Published last week: Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) Does Not Work for Freedom, It Works to Secure the Massive Salary of Its President And Executive Director