Page 12 of 13 [ 196 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 9, 10, 11, 12, 13  Next

ouinon
Supporting Member
Supporting Member

User avatar

Joined: 10 Jul 2007
Age: 60
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,939
Location: Europe

22 Dec 2010, 2:42 pm

Totally totally amazing article by Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks, published at Webstock:

http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/

:D



wavefreak58
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 26 Sep 2010
Age: 66
Gender: Male
Posts: 4,419
Location: Western New York

22 Dec 2010, 3:39 pm

ouinon wrote:
Totally totally amazing article by Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks, published at Webstock:

http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/

:D


Excellent article. Thanks for the link. 8)


_________________
When God made me He didn't use a mold. I'm FREEHAND baby!
The road to my hell is paved with your good intentions.


ouinon
Supporting Member
Supporting Member

User avatar

Joined: 10 Jul 2007
Age: 60
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,939
Location: Europe

22 Dec 2010, 3:48 pm

A few excerpts from the article, those paragraphs which are about Assange specifically; his "character"/persona, skills, qualities, etc, ( many AS ones ), as perceived by Sterling anyway! :lol, ( as opposed to the history of hacking, the National Security Assoc., the "leak" Bradley Manning, diplomats, the impact of Wikileaks generally, etc which the article also looks at ):

From "The Blast Shack" by Bruce Sterling, published by Webstock at: http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/

Bruce_Sterling wrote:
Then there is Julian Assange, who is a pure-dye underground computer hacker. ... he’s not an “ex-hacker,” he’s the silver-plated real deal, the true avant-garde. Julian is a child of the underground hacker milieu, the digital-native as twenty-first century cypherpunk. As far as I can figure, Julian has never found any other line of work that bore any interest for him. ...


Bruce_Sterling wrote:
Ever the detail-freak ... part and parcel of Assange’s other characteristic activities, such as his inability to pack books inside a box while leaving any empty space.

While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.


Bruce_Sterling wrote:
Assange has carefully built this role for himself. He did it with all the minute concentration of some geek assembling a Rubik’s Cube. ... He’s a darkside player out to stick it to the Man. The guy has surrounded himself with the cream of the computer underground, wily old rascals like Rop Gonggrijp and the fearsome Teutonic minions of the Chaos Computer Club. ... Assange has had many long, and no doubt insanely detailed, policy discussions with all his closest allies, about every aspect of his means, motives and opportunities.

Furthermore ... Assange has managed to alienate everyone who knew him best. All his friends think he’s nuts. I’m not too thrilled to see that happen. That’s not a great sign in a consciousness-raising, power-to-the-people, radical political-leader type. Most successful dissidents have serious people skills ... not this chilly, eldritch guy. He’s a bright, good-looking man who — let’s face it — can’t get next to women without provoking clumsy havoc and a bitter and lasting resentment. That’s half the human race that’s beyond his comprehension there, and I rather surmise that, from his stern point of view, it was sure to be all their fault.


Bruce_Sterling wrote:
Julian Assange doesn’t want to be in power; he has no people skills at all ... . He’s certainly not in for the money, because he wouldn’t know what to do with the cash; he lives out of a backpack, and his daily routine is probably sixteen hours online. ... I don’t even think Assange is all that big on ego; I know authors and architects, so I’ve seen much worse than Julian in that regard. ...

He’s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. He’s certainly not a “terrorist,” because nobody is scared and no one got injured. He’s not a “spy,” because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its own civil population. He is orthogonal. He’s asymmetrical. He panics people in power and he makes them look stupid.

Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.


Bruce_Sterling wrote:
A guy as personally hampered and sociopathic as Julian may in fact thrive in an inhuman situation like this. Unlike a lot of keyboard-hammering geeks, he’s a serious reader and a pretty good writer, with a jailhouse-lawyer facility for pointing out weaknesses in the logic of his opponents.


Bruce_Sterling wrote:
Assange is never gonna become a diplomat, but he’s arranged it so that diplomats henceforth are gonna be a whole lot more like Assange. They’ll behave just like him. They receive the goods just like he did, semi-surreptitiously. They may be wearing an ascot and striped pants, but they’ve got that hacker hunch in their necks and they’re staring into the glowing screen.

Assange is like some digitized nightmare-reversal of a kindly Cold War analog dissident. He read the dissident playbook and he downloaded it as a textfile; but, in fact, Julian doesn’t care about the USA. It’s just another obnoxious national entity. ...

... The American diplomatic corps, and all it thinks it represents, is just collateral damage between Assange and his goal. He aspires to his transparent crypto-utopia in the way George Bush aspired to imaginary weapons of mass destruction. And the American diplomatic corps are so many Iraqis in that crusade. They’re the civilian casualties.


Bruce_Sterling wrote:
... Julian Assange seems remarkably deprived of sympathetic qualities. Most saintly leaders of the oppressed masses ... are all keen to kiss-up to the public. But not our Julian ... He’s extremely intelligent, but, as a political, social and moral actor, he’s the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid. ...

The chances of that ending well are about ten thousand to one. And I don’t doubt Assange knows that. This is the kind of guy who once wrote an encryption program called “Rubberhose,” because he had it figured that the cops would beat his password out of him, and he needed some code-based way to finesse his own human frailty. Hey, neat hack there, pal.

... Saints, martyrs, dissidents and freaks are always wild-cards, but sometimes they’re the only ones who can clear the general air ... the catalyst for historical events that somehow had to happen. They don’t have to be nice guys; that’s not the point. Julian Assange did this; he direly wanted it to happen. He planned it in nitpicky, obsessive detail. Here it is; a planetary hack.


It is good isn't it! :) Brilliantly, magically, written, and full of insights into the Wikileaks phenomenon, aswell as Assange. :D
.



Last edited by ouinon on 22 Dec 2010, 4:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

wavefreak58
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 26 Sep 2010
Age: 66
Gender: Male
Posts: 4,419
Location: Western New York

22 Dec 2010, 4:16 pm

ouinon wrote:
It is good isn't it! :) Brilliantly, magically, written, and full of insights into the Wikileaks phenomenon, aswell as Assange. :D
.


Indeed. There need to be more of this type of stuff. What hits the mainstream is so stripped down that nobody gets any clue to the complexities of the situation.


_________________
When God made me He didn't use a mold. I'm FREEHAND baby!
The road to my hell is paved with your good intentions.


Moog
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 25 Feb 2010
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 17,671
Location: Untied Kingdom

22 Dec 2010, 5:02 pm

I knew looking in this thread one more time would be worth it. Cheers, ouinon.


_________________
Not currently a moderator


Moog
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 25 Feb 2010
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 17,671
Location: Untied Kingdom

22 Dec 2010, 5:09 pm

flamingshorts wrote:
EnglishLulu wrote:
...
An internet dating profile that is alleged to be Assange's has been posted. OKCupid has 'personality tests' and apparently he scored 39 on the Asperger's test.
...


It appears to be the wired one. Some webpages say its "39%" (grrr sic), . I dont have an okcupid account so I cant see for myself. I assume it 39 out of 50 can anyone confirm that is the case?


In case no one else covered this, it's the AQ test and his result (if it is he) is 39, not 39%

Dude is 2 more aspie than me :wink:

His Myers Briggs result is slightly un aspie though; ENFP


_________________
Not currently a moderator


Kea
Butterfly
Butterfly

User avatar

Joined: 25 Dec 2010
Gender: Female
Posts: 10

26 Dec 2010, 10:57 pm

As a gifted Aspie Aussie scientist, of the same generation as Assange, I feel obliged to give my opinion here: I think he is an Aspie. As a feminist theoretical physicist ex-Aussie woman who has lived in Scandanavia, I also feel obliged to give my opinion here: I suspect that 90% of virile, awkward Aussie males would break the modern Swedish law in question, simply due to cultural differences in the respect shown to women. Of course, I have never known any one actually being charged for this offence.



MrNobody
Tufted Titmouse
Tufted Titmouse

User avatar

Joined: 23 Oct 2010
Age: 32
Gender: Male
Posts: 25

27 Dec 2010, 4:58 am

I found that Assanges old blog very interesting to read - http://web.archive.org/web/200710200519 ... ://iq.org/

From that and seeing him in videos- yes I think he has AS

Taking sides or judgements I cant really do yet ... but he is an intelligent thinker and perhaps it will wake up some ignorant people to the complexities and horrors that governments dirty their hands with. But then again some people dont read between the lines or think for themselves anyway.....

On the subject of analysing the smearing that the media are festooning upon him - its just bizarre and I am not really that informed and either are the media to make such judgements.

I am a curious person by nature... but I wonder if he is just doing it to gain maximum "surprise" effect rather than thinking about the follow up consequences in detail. He might think its "his plan" but it could damage the freedom on the internet - with the big nations flexing the muscles even more than they already do to muffle potential whistleblowers or sites there not fond of.

But what do I know - I'm barely functioning right now... :?



StuartN
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 20 Jan 2010
Age: 60
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,569

27 Dec 2010, 5:02 am

Kea wrote:
Of course, I have never known any one actually being charged for this offence.


I have seen several cases where men have been convicted of rape under circumstances similar to those alleged in the Assange cases, in the UK, for example http://www.timesherald.com/articles/200 ... 228843.txt

Sex without consent is wrong and Australian people I have met agree.



Chronos
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 22 Apr 2010
Age: 44
Gender: Female
Posts: 8,698

27 Dec 2010, 2:25 pm

No, I don't think so. Just because someone is smart and against the mainstream doesn't mean they have AS.



Libelula85
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

User avatar

Joined: 19 Nov 2010
Age: 39
Gender: Male
Posts: 56

27 Dec 2010, 2:30 pm

Lisa Rusy wrote:
Asperger syndrome, in fact, is not the "Geek Syndrome" (as described in a famous article in Wired Magazine). All people with AS are NOT brilliant, technologically savvy, creative and intriguingly eccentric. Some people with AS have a hard time with numbers, enjoy reading fiction, and engage comfortably with a wide range of people. Some, on the other hand, are living with serious and debilitating symptoms that make it difficult to find or hold down a job, or even engage in ordinary daily life.


Assange is not AS



Kea
Butterfly
Butterfly

User avatar

Joined: 25 Dec 2010
Gender: Female
Posts: 10

27 Dec 2010, 3:00 pm

StuartN wrote:
Sex without consent is wrong and Australian people I have met agree.


Yes, of course I agree, as a feminist. But this case is not necessarily about sex without consent. We do not know the details, and there appear to be grey areas. The point is that Sweden has a law that other countries do not. One of the U.K. judges was informed that the crime in question would NOT be considered a crime under U.K. law. Personally, I feel this makes Sweden more advanced ...



Warsie
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 3 Apr 2008
Age: 33
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,542
Location: Chicago, IL, USA

30 Dec 2010, 12:01 am

MrNobody wrote:
I found that Assanges old blog very interesting to read - http://web.archive.org/web/200710200519 ... ://iq.org/

From that and seeing him in videos- yes I think he has AS


HE seems narcissistic as hell from that. I've also read his OKCupid profile too


_________________
I am a Star Wars Fan, Warsie here.
Masterdebating on chi-city's south side.......!


SusannahG
Tufted Titmouse
Tufted Titmouse

User avatar

Joined: 16 Jan 2011
Age: 47
Gender: Female
Posts: 27

30 Jan 2011, 2:35 pm

I know this thread is old now but I didn't want to start another.

Typical DM trash article but some curious insights if true.

I have to confess to being a little fascinated with Assange :oops:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -book.html



StuartN
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 20 Jan 2010
Age: 60
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,569

30 Jan 2011, 5:55 pm

SusannahG wrote:
I know this thread is old now but I didn't want to start another.


It looks like the whole Assange circus has started up again after that NYT hatchet-job on Friday - for instance this just in from the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/ja ... ks-profile (and 89 other stories today), I guess all advertising the book.

He certainly has the ability to piss people off big-time, which fits with the narcissistic and manipulative sociopath profile.



Moog
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 25 Feb 2010
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 17,671
Location: Untied Kingdom

30 Jan 2011, 9:38 pm

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/com ... 051.column

Related; LAtimes obituriating wikileaks.

Amusing.

Quote:
we still need journalists to decipher what raw information means.


Hahaha, so funny.


_________________
Not currently a moderator