I used to jokingly say that I loved the human race, it was just the dirty little specks that make it up that I wasn’t always so crazy about. I think this is something most of us share to some degree; we may be much more particular about whom we allow into our more intimate circle, but “the crowd” is okay enough that we’ll go watch a football game with them, even if we favor opposing teams. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as the whole WikiLeaks drama has unfolded over the last few months. I find myself having some conflicting thoughts, first being gung-ho about the information being leaked, then pondering if Assange has ruined the future of this kind of transparency with his celebrity, and then thinking that perhaps having his face on the organization is the only way it could all work. But when Tea Baggers start calling for the CIA to kill Assange, and party-hopping, self-interested plutocrats like Joe Lieberman intimidate Amazon.com into refusing to host WikiLeaks’ content, I become convinced that regardless of my or anyone else’s personal opinions about Assange as a public figure, he’s playing a crucial role. Apparently Daniel Ellsberg (of the Pentagon Papers fame) agrees, and with much more integrity than I; he actually canceled his Amazon account. We live in an era when an oligarchical corporatocracy runs a government that’s comprised mainly of wealthy team players that put on an exceptional dog and pony show to maintain the illusion that they’re representing a populace they’ve divided straight down the middle with peripheral issues while they midwife the birth of the full-blown corporation state. And that glimpse into the collective psyche I mentioned? It’s first of all very telling that a lot of Wikileaks’ insiders departed as soon as the heat started rising a little. His harshest critics are people in the same field; the founder of Cryptome.org criticizes him in the tech media, while on the Cryptome site they call WikiLeaks “cowardly” for too much redaction of the documents. It smacks a little of the kind of quiet rage you expect amongst young hackers who are jealous of each others’ accomplishments. But it’s even more telling that a government that taps our phones, places bomb conspirators in our places of faith, and demands full body pat-downs when we travel doesn’t want US to know what THEY’RE doing. In the end, I think this is all really about the almost universal assumption that deceit is a fundamental requirement of human interaction and governance. Personally, I don’t think it is. And I think (or at least hope) that whatever happens to WikiLeaks in particular, that this could be the dawn of a new era in journalism and information sharing. Mark Pesce of ABC (the Australian one) takes an interesting look at that idea here, and the Associated Press acknowledges their implication in the leaks in this piece, in which they talk about the cooperation between WikiLeaks and The New York Times, Le Monde in France, El Pais in Spain, The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany.