The Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange
By Robert Manne
()
About this ebook
'There are few original ideas in politics. In the creation of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was responsible for one.'
This essay reveals the making of Julian Assange – both his ideas and his world-changing actions. Robert Manne explores Assange's unruly childhood and then his involvement with the revolutionary cypherpunk underground, all the way through to the creation of WikiLeaks. Pulling together the threads of his development, Manne shows how Assange became one of the most influential Australians of our time.
Robert Manne
Robert Manne is emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University. His recent books include Making Trouble- Essays Against the New Complacency, and The Words that Made Australia (as co-editor). He has written three Quarterly Essays and is a regular contributor to The Monthly and The Guardian.
Read more from Robert Manne
W.E.H. Stanner: Selected Writings Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5On Borrowed Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Cypherpunk Revolutionary
Titles in the series (8)
Short Black 2 Fat City Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Short Black 3 The War of the Worlds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Short Black 6 Booze Territory Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Short Black 4 Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Short Black 8 Prosper: A Voyage at Sea Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShort Black 11 No Fixed Address Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShort Black 12 Tradition, Truth and Tomorrow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related ebooks
Kim Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unto This Last Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnna Karenina (Dream Classics) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5AFA5 Are We Asian Yet?: History vs Geography Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Money Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Modern Utopia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Invisible Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Laplace's Demon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Little Trouble with the Facts: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Luck of Politics: True Tales of Disaster and Outrageous Fortune Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDonald Horne: Selected Writings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRare Earth: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Evolution in Modern Thought Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSoldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of James Lovelock's Novacene Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Time Machine and The Invisible Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Brothers Karamazov: New Revised Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOn the Correlation of Center and Periphery: Global Humanities. Studies in Histories, Cultures, and Societies 01/2015 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn Leviathan's Belly: Essays for a Counter-Revolutionary Time Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEverything Under the Heavens: how the past helps shape China’s push for global power Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Yankee In Canada (Illustrated and Annotated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Human Scaffold: How Not to Design Your Way Out of a Climate Crisis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJean-Christophe in Paris: The Market-Place, Antoinette, the House Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Nordic Secret: A European Story of Beauty and Freedom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Limits of Knowledge Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Role of External Support in Nonviolent Campaigns: Poisoned Chalice or Holy Grail? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of Andrew Lownie's The Mountbattens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Last of the Masters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blantyre Mission and the Making of Modern Malawi Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Biography & Memoir For You
A Stolen Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, and Live Fearlessly Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jack Reacher Reading Order: The Complete Lee Child’s Reading List Of Jack Reacher Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: the heartfelt, funny memoir by a New York Times bestselling therapist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mommie Dearest Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Eating Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good Girls Don't Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Taste: My Life Through Food Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Rediscovered Books): A Triumph Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leonardo da Vinci Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5People, Places, Things: My Human Landmarks Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Crack In Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the Mob: The Fight Against Organized Crime in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Cypherpunk Revolutionary
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Cypherpunk Revolutionary - Robert Manne
SHORT BLACKS are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.
SHORT BLACKS
1 Richard Flanagan The Australian Disease:
On the decline of love and the rise of non-freedom
2 Karen Hitchcock Fat City
3 Noel Pearson The War of the Worlds
4 Helen Garner Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice
5 John Birmingham
The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999
6 Anna Krien Booze Territory
7 David Malouf The One Day
8 Simon Leys Prosper: A voyage at sea
9 Robert Manne
Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange
10 Les Murray Killing the Black Dog
11 Robyn Davidson No Fixed Address
12 Galarrwuy Yunupingu
Tradition, Truth and Tomorrow
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd
37–39 Langridge Street
Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia
enquiries@blackincbooks.com
www.blackincbooks.com
Copyright © Robert Manne 2011
Robert Manne asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.
First published in the Monthly, March 2011.
This edition published 2015.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry :
Manne, Robert (Robert Michael), 1947– author.
The cypherpunk revolutionary : on Julian Assange / Robert Manne.
9781863957717 (paperback) 9781925203554 (ebook)
Short blacks ; no.9.
Assange, Julian. WikiLeaks (Organization) Publishers and publishing. Web publishing. Leaks (Disclosure of information)
070.57973
Cover and text design by Peter Long.
ROBERT MANNE’S many books include Making Trouble and The Words That Made Australia (as co-editor). He is the author of three Quarterly Essays, In Denial, Sending Them Home and Bad News.
Less than twenty years ago Julian Assange was sleeping rough. Even a year ago hardly anyone knew his name. Today he is one of the best-known and most-respected human beings on earth. Assange was the overwhelming winner of the popular vote for Time magazine’s Person of the Year
and Le Monde’s less politically correct Man of the Year
. If Rupert Murdoch, who recently turned eighty, is the most influential Australian of the post-war era, Julian Assange, who will soon turn forty, is undoubtedly the most consequential Australian of the present time. Murdoch’s importance rests in his responsibility for injecting, through Fox News, the poison of rabid populist conservatism into the political culture of the United States; Assange’s in the revolutionary threat that his idea of publishing damaging documentary information sent by anonymous insiders to WikiLeaks poses to governments and corporations across the globe.
Julian Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice, most recently to a journalist from the New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian, and some fifteen years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of computer hacking, Underground, for which Assange was the primary researcher. In what is called the Researcher’s Introduction
, Assange begins with a cryptic quote from Oscar Wilde: Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Nothing about Assange has ever been straightforward. One of the main characters in Underground is the Melbourne hacker Mendax. Although there is no way readers at that time could have known it, Mendax is Julian Assange. Putting Khatchadourian and Dreyfus together, and adding a little detail from a blog that Assange published on the internet in 2006–07 and checking it against commonsense and some material that has emerged since his rise to fame, the story of Assange’s childhood and adolescence can be told in some detail. There is, however, a problem. Journalists as senior as David Leigh of the Guardian or John F. Burns of the New York Times in general accept on trust many of Assange’s stories about himself. They do not understand that, like many natural writers, he has fashioned his life into a fable.
According to Assange, his mother, Christine Hawkins, left her Queensland home for Sydney at the age of seventeen, around 1970, at the time of the anti–Vietnam War movement when the settled culture of the Western world was breaking up. Christine’s father, Dr Warren Hawkins, was the principal of the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education; her mother was a specialist in medieval literature. Christine fell in love with a man called John Shipton in Sydney. A year or so after Julian was born, in Townsville, they parted. Assange did not meet Shipton again till he was twenty-five.
When Julian was about one, Christine met and married a roving theatrical producer and member of what was by now called the counter-culture, Brett