The story of WikiLeaks.org is the story of both the modern whistleblower and the structure of the modern media system. The site is now famous for embracing technology in order to protect sources behind material that might be damaging to institutions as varied as the Church of Scientology, Swiss banks and the US military. Yet despite shocking revelations and damaging material emerging from the site, very little has actually changed because of them. This ought to be troubling, but there is a way to explain it.
Julian Assange, the notoriously elusive Australian mastermind of WikiLeaks, has built the site like any good hacker would. WikiLeaks protects itself in a few cunningly simple ways. First, it receives information from sources via accredited journalists, thus protecting itself upfront behind various international press freedom laws. Then the information is routed through servers in Sweden, a nation with stringent whistleblower laws that assure the anonymity of sources in digital media. Finally, the information is also encrypted, and requires skilled volunteers to decode it before it appears online.
In a recent article in the New Yorker, Assange summed up the power of WikiLeaks. He told the magazine that "a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the internet itself."
In effect, WikiLeaks has managed to carve out a place at the edge of the media-industrial complex. It has revealed exactly the point where the accepted dichotomy of good versus evil begins to break down. Like the whistleblowers before them, those who contribute to WikiLeaks are essentially asking us to question the accepted narrative, suggesting that our concept of individual freedom inherently accepts a degree of coercion from those in power.
Though many lauded WikiLeaks' release of the Collateral Murder video depicting two US Army helicopters firing on a group of men in Baghdad that included two Reuters journalists, others weren't so kind. After the video's release there was speculation about WikiLeaks' agenda, and whether both the editing of the video itself and the title given to it unfairly contextualised the content. But that was never really a concern for WikiLeaks. After all, it doesn't aim to tell the entire truth, just some of the details of the greater meta-narrative. Its agenda is to poke holes in what it perceives as the veil of the accepted version of democratic liberty, which hides secret tyrannies.
This is also why the setup WikiLeaks has perfected is virtually bulletproof. Assange's assertion that to destroy the site, one would have to dismantle the very medium through which it operates, also speaks to WikiLeaks' agenda. The internet is predicated upon the very same ideas of personal freedom and expression that WikiLeaks suggests are partially fabricated by authority. To destroy the site would be the ultimate exposition of the accepted system as exactly what Assange suggests it is: reactionary, violent, controlling and – above all – interested only in its own preservation.
As such, WikiLeaks' goals are clear: it seeks to damage that framework by achieving maximum impact for any piece of information it releases. Why hasn't it been more successful?
WikiLeaks is reportedly preparing to release another video, this time of an air strike in Afghanistan against what the US government says were mostly insurgents. Afghan authorities claim that the majority of the victims were innocent civilians. No doubt it will attract the same kind of attention that "collateral murder" did. So it might be prudent to examine why, despite making massive media waves initially, that video altered neither the US government's approach to Iraq, nor the view of the general public overall.
For all the freedom that the internet grants users, we still ask that the kind of information in "collateral murder" be interpreted for us. That interpretation and contextualisation of the footage took place on a more traditional medium: TV news and opinion programmes. There it fell victim in the very system it tried to undermine. It became part of a homogeneous message of The Way Things Are.
The "collateral murder" video has been viewed almost 7m times on YouTube – that's 128 times fewer than the video for Miley Cyrus's Party in the USA. That comparison might seem silly, but it hints at a bigger problem. That is, the "collateral murder" video, as it became a part of the usual TV structure of message-advertisement-message, was reduced to an equivalent of all other parts of the usual pattern of disarticulation and abstraction of signs. In essence, "collateral murder" was overshadowed by a Miley Cyrus video because, in the end, it became part of a structure inherently designed to nullify its message by promoting the status quo of the culture industry.
So, as much as WikiLeaks thrives in its online setting, its information still falls prey to the sameness of modern media. Even if someone were to see the video on YouTube, the same mechanisms prevail, with all information – including web advertisements and other videos – being presented as equal. Effectively, the only way one can view a WikiLeaks video without that influence is on the site itself, where it lives within certain confines, and with less influence.
The reason even major leaks coming from WikiLeaks haven't had a more profound effect isn't due to the site: it's thanks to us. Even though WikiLeaks has done an impressive job of ensuring its existence and safety, our endless adherence to the influence of the culture industry prevents us from truly internalising and acting upon the information the site presents. If we're not aware of that, we'll continue to fall victim to exactly the kind of censorship that WikiLeaks aims to destroy.
Colin Horgan, a Vancouver-based freelance writer.