johncusack

John Cusack · @johncusack

24th Oct 2014 from TwitLonger

my unsolicited midnight book review


Besides the brand busting of Google and the chilling dissection of the rapid merger between private corporations and the State, what emerges from Assange’s “When Wikileaks Met Google” is a fierce and fully independent mind at work . The book raises many crucial operational and philosophical questions about who owns the secret information that flows between governments and private players controlling the reigns of power, and what the act of making those secrets public really means. Who owns the historical record? Literally…

No Davos/Ford Foundation GROUPTHINK here —Assange's is the kind of thinking that cannot be assimilated or digested by the apparatus of any state or "corporate tyranny" as Chomsky aptly calls it.

It’s a direct challenge to the monetization and privatization of political and strategic information. There's a delightful absence of the increasingly pervasive smell of the market/state and its subsidiary tentacles of NGO / Foundation-based THINK—all those catchphrases, assumptions and vernacular of pre -formatted thought which always, sooner or later, funnel radical ideas back into existing power structures.
Sponsored High Priests and their foot soldiers acting as ventriloquist's puppets may try to put benevolent/ missionary airs on this subterfuge— but who are we kidding- all roads do eventually lead to back to Rome .

Assange is a rare champion of genuinely adversarial journalism /publishing in an era where practicing it puts you at grave risk.

Chelsea Manning is in jail for exposing war crimes ( the collateral murder footage ). Julian Assange faces a similar future.

I have no trouble excusing the occasional lapses into unwarranted conceit that some will pounce on to critique this book—you know the kind of tech /geek self love & narcissistic bullshit that can be heard much louder at any TED talk or Apple launch—the difference ( to me anyway) is that the latter is IPO speak designed to make stock prices jump.
So perhaps we should overlook a bit of it from a man under house arrest for the crime of fucking with world superpowers.
Assange is nobody's pet. And he’s written a meaningful book. No small feat…
I say read it and see “Citizen Four" and go to https://freedom.press/about- ASAP to understand this oh so modern world we live in a little better...

jc


https://citizenfourfilm.com/see-the-film

http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/when-google-met-wikileaks/
"A fascinating conversation with one of the most far-sighted thinkers in technology. Assange is consistently ahead of the curve." —Edward Snowden

https://freedom.press/about

A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.”
—Judge Murray Gurfein, Pentagon Papers case, June 17, 1971




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