What is Wrong with WikiLeaks

I am a hopeless idealist. In my little head, I inhabit a world filled with considerate people who work and ply their trade because it is needed (or at least wanted) by their neighbors, not for money. So there is none. The god of this world doesn't even exist.

But of course, I can't actually live there any more than I could travel to Middle Earth, which would be just as awesome, but for a very different reason. No, I live here, in the real world where the concept of Greed has somehow become sanctimonious and the economy and market are believed omniscient. Physically, I have to interact with reality more often than I would like to and that drags my mind along into this screaming, fiery, tormented world that we have created. The comparison makes me want to do something about the horrors that exist here.

...I am also a cynic.

Because I am an idealist first, the idea of WikiLeaks is compelling to me. I sorta like it and I like the disestablishmentarians who maintain and support it. I laugh at their audacity to take down Visa's website for a few hours and cheer on the effort happily. In my ideal world WikiLeaks would be valued and would be as energetically plied by those people who currently oversee it as it is in the real world. But in this ideal world, they would have very little to do. In my ideal world, everyone has absolute freedom because they are wise enough not to use it; and that is the true key. The secrete. Freedom is something that shouldn't actually be used. We (people) do not have absolute freedom anywhere on this earth anymore. Instead we have a disturbingly labyrinthine, casted, multi-layered, endlessly faceted legal system which we have been designing and refining for the last 4 to 10 thousand years. Since the days of Urukagina and Hammurabi at the least.

We maintain it because we know that it is needed. "Freedom" is a nice word and a fine idea, but there is and should be a limit to everything; otherwise it is called "anarchy", which is not such a nice word. Only the worst parent in the world would give to their toddler the same liberties they afforded their teenager and we could only hope the toddler (and the teen) would be confiscated from their parents by Social Services before they got killed by a passing truck or methamphetamine needle.

That is how WikiLeaks treats information: like a toy. They profess to know the power of information, which is the entire reason they do what they do. But complete freedom of information can be far more damaging in the hands of the wrong people than the freedom to cross the street is to a toddler. We, as a species, are not ready for such a power. Unlike Spiderman, we can't just can't handle that kind of responsibility. No, we cannot handle the truth!

Not that it is beyond the realm of our minds. There are people on this planet I would trust with this information. I think there are very many people with the maturity to deal rationally with this level of power. And all of them are far too rational to have gained any 'power' for themselves. They are not congressmen or CEOs; they are not dictators or heads of state. They are sometimes business owners, often activists, but not much more.

However, even then, the main thing is that this information doesn't concern them directly. That can change something. I wouldn't tell everyone of my friends all the mean, nasty, ugly things I hear about them, said behind their backs. If I did, not only would I shortly have no friends at all, but few of them would have any friends either. And if we were playmates on the scale of Israel and Palestine, our scuffles might leave some holes in the ozone layer and maybe even the earth's crust.

Most people with their eyes open can see that there are a lot of problems abound in our world. The question of what to do about it can be tormenting and sometimes lead to rather egregious decisions. WikiLeaks, while a nice idea, I don't think is really sustainable. It could be more dangerous to the world's ecosystem than excess carbon if the wrong person reads the wrong thing.