The worst thing that could possibly happen to world governments is the murder of Assange. Death by foul means will instantly make him the world’s first digital martyr. The martyrdom of their arch-foe is the last thing cloak and dagger-loving governments need, because you see, the world is changing, and WikiLeaks has proved to be the catalyst for the cataclysm.
All across the globe, pasty-faced, anorak-clad youth are emerging from their parents’ basements and staring at the sun — their sun, not ours and it as a wrathful sun. As the Internet snakes its way into homes where just a few years ago newspapers and TV channels were the only source of, often unreliable, information the scent of anarchy — unadulterated and unflinching — is in the air.
Over the last few decades of the 20th century and the opening spasms of the 21st, anarchy in its truest sense was relegated to fiction and urban legend. Assange may not be a Fawkesian idealist with a penchant for arson, but he is an anarchist nevertheless. Christopher Hitchens hit the nail on the head when he described Assange as a megalomaniac, but which anarchist isn’t. Quite like the martyrs we love to put on pedestals and crosses, there is a smidgen of narcissism in all of them… the legacy of life in death.
The world may be modernising at a pace that would make an astronaut’s head spin, but the machines of state are creaky, and hark to a day when the diplomatic corps ran the world with a smugness that begged to be drawn and quartered. The Internet is more than just a virtual spanner in the globe’s political works, it is a highway to the truth; and as we all know, the truth hurts. Assange will soon fade, his name will become but a footnote in the pages of a history being written as we speak. His WikiLeaks has released nothing capable of bringing down governments or sending nations to war. What it has done, however, is to give the Internet and its teeming minions a route map to a future. A future where nothing is sacred, and the stench of dirty laundry hangs heavy in the air.
It is a future like nothing we can imagine — one where the old guard stands bowed against the hordes of Huns with carpal-tunnel; one where an outdated moral code is shredded to make way for an amoral universe. This world is closer than you think and thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter et al, it is gaining strength every day.
To wax cliché, the winds of change are gaining hurricane strength. We must not stand in their way; rather we must open our closets and throw the skeletons out into the street. Let no government stand in our way, no politician ever decide our path for us. It is the Age of the Anarchist…rejoice, for finally, the geek shall inherit the Earth.
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