Leaktacle: Wikileaks Vault 7 and Leak as a Spectacle
In this podcast we muse about the newest (“greatest in history”, of course) Wikileaks data dump/reality show, dubbed Vault7.
We point out how movie like character of the Wikileaks approach to public is extremely suspicious and that information provided serves, first of all, not to reveal the facts but to confirm pre-existing and, more often than not, conflicting hopes and fears of disparate groups of people.
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Branko Malić
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Assuming there’s a reason for the spectacle, what’s the purpose of these leaks?
I like to think it has something to do with demoralisation and the Panopticon – make people think they are being (or could be) watched all the time and they will police themselves. There’s a massive saving of time and effort on behalf of the powers that be. All that’s needed is a well-publicised arrest from time to time to promote the impression that nothing you write or say gets past their vigilant eyes and ears.
If anyone is interested in what regular Joes are writing and saying, it is advertisers – is it beyond the realm of possiblity tha the NSA (or whoever) is in league with them to better target the spam that clutters our inboxes?
If there indeed is a reason for spectacle, I’d say that to a certain extent this is its purpose. However, there are few more things. Namely, one of the main reasons for the leak is Assange’s astonishment over low security these cyberweapons were kept under and his neutral’cum’affirmative quote of Microsoft SEO who advocates “Digital Geneva Convention” precisely to amend this. This tells us two things: that Assange has no apparent problem with public-private giant Microsoft whose very business policy is founded on privacy invasion, and that he assumes that CIA should keep it’s secret better. Perhaps that was not what he really meant, but that’s what he said on press conference. The other thing is overall function of Wikileaks and Snowden in pseudo-global society. They seem to pose as information sources or a kind of basis for new, internet based, media. They are both being hollywoodized – metaphorically and literary – and serve to affirm everything upon which new media speculates. This, in itself, seems to me to be the purpose of Wikileaks in general: an important subsystem of emerging new media serving the function of infusing it with appropriate dosage of “reality”. That’s why I call it a “Leaktacle”. It appears to be a reality show, quite appropriately bearing in mind that both men of the hour – Trump and Putin – are in fact reality show stars.