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    Short Black 9 Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange
    Short Black 9 Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange
    Short Black 9 Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange
    Ebook76 pages42 minutes

    Short Black 9 Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange

    By Robert Manne

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    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.

    Short Blacks are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.

    Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University and a regular commentator with the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and ABC radio and television.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateSep 23, 2015
    ISBN9781925203554
    Short Black 9 Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange
    Author

    Robert Manne

    Robert Manne is emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University. His recent books include On Borrowed Time, 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.

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      Book preview

      Short Black 9 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

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