State Secrets: Ben Franklin and WikiLeaks

Abstract

North Carolina had been stolen, and its compromising contents soon turned up in colonial newspapers. As the confidential business of imperial administrators entered the public thoroughfares of print culture, the British Empire's control over communication seemed fragile and incomplete. More than two hundred years later, state secrets of the American empire have been exposed across digital superhighways, thanks to the insouciant journalism of WikiLeaks. It is perhaps more predictable than ironic that the twenty-first-century nation-state that emerged from those eighteenthcentury colonies now finds itself unable to regulate the dumping of confidential cables involving everything from military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to unguarded statements from Tony Blair and Hillary Rodham Clinton. To date, the most damaging material released by WikiLeaks has been decrypted video footage of a US Apache helicopter firing upon and killing a Reuters journalist and several others in a public square in Iraq. 1 The point of this historical collision is not to make WikiLeaks appear old-fashioned, nor is it to make eighteenth-century correspondents out to be precursors of digital activists. Rather, by drawing together the handwritten letters of mercantilist functionaries and electronic communiqués from what Manuel Castells calls "the network society," this essay seeks to Bob Levine and Mark McGurl provided generous feedback that greatly aided the development of this article. I would also like to thank the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for its recommendations and guidance. 1. The video is widely available on the web, most notably at collateralmurder.com.

Media Matter

“…In public discourse, both contenders and defenders of WikiLeaks have directed considerable attention to the person of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who has either been condemned as digital-era villain par excellence or hailed as tech-savvy champion of press and information freedom. Žižek (2011), Giri (2010), and Castronovo (2013 have challenged this embedding of the WikiLeaks disclosures in received narratives of liberal subjects confronting overarching structures of dominance. Žižek (2011, 9), for instance, states that in the conception of liberal defenders of WikiLeaks, "power is held by the bad guys at the top, and is not conceived as something that permeates the entire social body", while Giri (2010, n.p.…”

“…Recalibrating the debate from a materialist viewpoint, Castronovo (2013) has interrogated the dynamics of the socio-technical networks in which the WikiLeaks affair has played out. He argues that, in the case of WikiLeaks, "what matters are the pathways for getting at content and then spreading it".…”

“…Political subjectivity and activity changes in encounters with complex networks and their ambivalent affordances. Castronovo's (2013) perspective retains a certain autonomy of human actors, but limits it with respect to other forms of agency. As such, even though his approach challenges received notions of power and sovereignty at a fundamental level, a reductive technological determinism is avoided.…”