Julian Assange

[rich]

long (and interesting) piece on working with Julian Assange. compare the
following excerpt contrasted with what's in BE described below.


"That is why I didn't walk out. The story was just too large. What Julian
lacked in efficiency or professionalism he made up for in courage. What he
lacked in carefulness he made up for in impact. In our overnight
conversations, he told me about the mindset of the expert hacker. He
described how, as a teenager, he'd wandered through the virtual corridors
of Nasa, Bank of America, the Melbourne transport system or the Pentagon.
At his best, he represented a new way of existing in relation to authority.
He wasn't very straightforwardly of the left and couldn't have
distinguished dialectical materialism from a bag of nuts. He hates systems
of belief, hates all systems, wants indeed to be a ghost in the machine,
walking through the corridors of power and switching off the lights. I
found myself writing notes culled from what he said to me about himself.
'When you're a hacker you're interested in masks within masks,' and 'We
could undermine corruption from its dead centre. Justice will always in the
end be about human beings, but there is a new vanguard of experts,
criminalised as we are, who have fastened onto the cancer of modern power,
and seen how it spreads in ways that are still hidden from ordinary human
experience.'

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/andrew-ohagan/ghosting

i wonder if Pynchon missed an opportunity weighing down Bleeding Edge with
a cuddly family in the words of Tom LeClair


'Like earlier Pynchon novels, *Bleeding Edge* impresses with the energy of
its numerous characters in multiple plots and with its command of American
vernaculars both educated and ignorant, but Pynchon lacks Coover's -- and
Gass's--passion.  The events of 9/11 in New York City and their
consequences are described with odd detachment by the author of the
sublimely passionate *Gravity's Rainbow.  *His satire of dot-com schemes
and Internet foolishness demonstrates that he probably knows how to program
his VCR, but his depiction of the recent past seems more dated -- less
imaginative -- than the distant pasts of his historical novels.  Pynchon
focuses his narration through his protagonist Maxine Tornow, a fraud
investigator with two small children and a wandering husband.  Her
sensibility, seemingly tough but really tender, becomes increasingly
identified with the author, who provides a cuddly family ending to the
novel.'

But from Pynchon -- even at 77 -- I expect more than a work that too often
beats with a bleeding heart.

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/A-Country-for-Old-Men/ba-p/12459
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