Julian Assange

[John Bailey]

I don't think P missed that opportunity, as he'd already written that
novel in the form of AtD. That book does a remarkable job of
navigating the pros and cons of Assange's ground-up anarchism along
with plenty of others. BE is more aligned with your Snowdens or
Mannings, filled with people who are part of the system and
occasionally realise it, try to tell others about it, but can't escape
it.

Assange, despite his own rhetoric, is more about the idealist trying
to imagine that he can exist outside of systems and attempting to
wield power over them. He scares me for that reason, because he
doesn't seem to have an understanding of the authoritarian power
dynamics of his own role (same with Anonymous and lots of other hacker
groups). That seems to me to be much closer to the modernist
revolutionaries of AtD who want to smash the system but haven't gotten
their own in order yet.

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 4:25 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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