Wikileaks and the Long Haul

Clay Shirky has a very nicely packaged piece on the Wikileaks saga, called Wikileaks and the Long Haul.

While there's been a lot of stuff written about the massive dump of secret cables, Shirky's piece is worth reading if you're looking for a more nuanced view of the issue.

His discussion captures much of what I've been thinking about the way this story is playing out. There's a profound lesson to be learned, but I don't know what it is - yet.

What I do know is that I'm really confused about the fact that newly-elected Congressman Rand Paul is the only US politician who's willing to step up and support Wikileaks. His reasoning, as told to Fox Business last week, is rock-solid and should be supported by all political sides:

In a free society we're supposed to know the truth,” Paul said. “In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it." (quoted here.)

Today, this story continues to take new and interesting turns, as governments around the world appear to be ratcheting up the pressure to haul Assange into custody. But of course, that won't stop what's happening. If anything, it could turn him into a martyr - which is not an effective way to silence your critics - as the Burmese government understands.

Here's the opening of Clay Shirky's article, Wikileaks and the Long Haul:"

Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks.

Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls ‘counter-democracy’*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities.

On the other hand, human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. (If Aaron Bady’s analysis is correct, it is the damage and not the oversight that Wikileaks is designed to create.*)

And so we have a tension between two requirements for democratic statecraft, one that can’t be resolved, but can be brought to an acceptable equilibrium. Indeed, like the virtues of equality vs. liberty, or popular will vs. fundamental rights, it has to be brought into such an equilibrium for democratic statecraft not to be wrecked either by too much secrecy or too much transparency.

As Tom Slee puts it, ‘Your answer to ‘what data should the government make public?’ depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government.’* My personal view is that there is too much secrecy in the current system, and that a corrective towards transparency is a good idea. I don’t, however, believe in pure transparency, and even more importantly, I don’t think that independent actors who are subject to no checks or balances is a good idea in the long haul.

If the long haul were all there was, Wikileaks would be an obviously bad thing. The practical history of politics, however, suggests that the periodic appearance of such unconstrained actors in the short haul is essential to increased democratization, not just of politics but of thought.

We celebrate the printers of 16th century Amsterdam for making it impossible for the Catholic Church to constrain the output of the printing press to Church-approved books*, a challenge that helped usher in, among other things, the decentralization of scientific inquiry and the spread of politically seditious writings advocating democracy.

This intellectual and political victory didn’t, however, mean that the printing press was then free of all constraints. Over time, a set of legal limitations around printing rose up, including restrictions on libel, the publication of trade secrets, and sedition. I don’t agree with all of these laws, but they were at least produced by some legal process.

Unlike the United States’ current pursuit of Wikileaks.

I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here’s what I’m not conflicted about: When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want.

Link to the full post.