Did I ever tell you about the time Nataliya took me out to go get a drink with her? We go off looking for a bar and we can’t find one. Finally Nataliya takes me to a vacant lot and says, ‘Here we are.’ We sat there for a year and a half, until sure enough, someone constructs a bar around us. Well, the day they opened we ordered a shot, drank it, and then burned the place to the ground. Nataliya yelled over the roar of the flames, ‘Always leave things the way you found ‘em!’

Julian Assange is, obviously, the man of the hour — Times Magazine Person of 2010, official or not. Go to any news site and he’s on the front page, and has been for almost a week.

The media is doing its “tacitly-support-the-state”-thing and not really digging, so I thought I’d collect and summarize some of Assange’s essays and writing for your perusal.

To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.

– State and Terrorist Conspiracies. November 10, 2006.

With commentary here via BB, this is the essay wherein Assange models higher levels of government as weighted connected graphs and theorizes that they are asymmetrically, non-linearly affected by information leaks, degrading their interconnectivity and, hence, effectiveness.

If all links between conspirators are cut then there is no conspiracy. This is usually hard to do, so we ask our first question: What is the minimum number of links that must be cut to separate the conspiracy into two groups of equal number? (divide and conquer).

One of the major government/media critiques of the Wikileaks dumps is that they make it less likely that people in-the-know will volunteer information informally to US Ambassadors in the future (by endangering people who already have). State and Terrorist Conspiracies makes it clear that this is actually part of Assange’s stated intent.

We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power [weight] until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment. We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links.

Second, here’s a more poetic piece about his Guevara-esque motorcycle journey from Ho Chi Min City to Hanoi, “up the highway that borders the South China Sea.” It’s a meditation on the political context of potholes and the related benefits of “truth, and lots of it”.

Road decay is, like a dental decay, a run away process. Utility rapidly diminishes and costs of repair accelerate, and just like teeth it is more efficient to fill a pothole as soon as it is noticed.

But this measure of efficiency is not the metric of politics and it is a political feedback process that lays behind the filling in of potholes on almost every road on earth.

– The Road to Hanoi. December 5, 2006.

Next, Assange’s archived blog is a passionate paen to the love of language, truth, and rhetoric. Overwrought, perhaps, but I find the prose enjoyable and sympathetic:

Often we suffer to read, “But if we believe X then we’ll have to…”, or “If we believe X it will lead to…”. This has no reflection on the veracity of X and so we see that outcomes are treated with more reverence than the Truth. It stings us, but natural selection has spun its ancestral yarns from physically realized outcomes, robustly eschewing the vapor thread of platonism as an abomination against the natural order, fit only for the gossip of monks and the page.

Last, here he is directly on Wikileaks’ mission with a meaningful observation from signalling theory (something accountants study):

Our particular view on the mechanism of transparency is to selectively go after material that is concealed. Because organizations that have material and want to conceal it are giving off a signal that they believe there will be reform if that material is released.

The essential nature of secrecy is to block reform. Without regard to the particular reform in question, Wikileaks seeks to trigger societal changes pointed to, and revealed along with, paired secrets.

(Assange also researched and appeared in a book called Underground, available free here, detailing exploits of famous hackers — including Assange — from the ’90s.)