Disclosures and leaks have been a feature of all times, but never before has a non state- or non- corporate affiliated group done this at the scale Wikileaks managed to with first the ’collateral murder video’, then the ’Afghan War Logs’ and now ’Cablegate’. It looks like we have now reached the moment that the quantitative leap is morphing into a qualitative one. When Wikileaks hit the mainstream early in 2010, this was not yet the case. In a sense, the ’colossal’ Wikileaks disclosures can simply be explained as a consequence of the dramatic spread of IT usage, together with a dramatic drop in its costs, including those for the storage of millions of documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping state and corporate secrets - never mind private ones - has become rather difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. Wikileaks here becomes symbolic for a transformation in the ’information society’ at large, and holds up a mirror of future things to come. So while one can look at Wikileaks as a (political) project, and criticize it for its modus operandi, or for other reasons, it can also be seen as a ’pilot’ phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.
Read the 12 these's on Wikileaks by Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
