India, May 17 -- Part nostalgia, part information, part revenge and part whine, Daniel Domscheit-Berg's Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website, is a tell-all memoir that borders between a confessional and an attack. Purportedly, Domscheit-Berg's intention was to shake the mantle of mystery, illusion and secrecy that has shrouded WikiLeaks, which, ironically, claims to defend transparency and truth. However, by the time you are done with the rather shoddily written book, you realise that the book is more an exercise in exorcising personal demons and in catharsis rather than a coherent, insightful and reflexive narrative of WikiLeaks and its posterboy Julian Assange.
In the book, the author says, "Whistleblowers could be frustrated employees, unsuccessful job applicants, or individuals motivated solely by moral concern." And his book, which blows the whistle on WikiLeaks-publishing not only private conversations, with only the author's word for it, but also confidential chats-is an example where Domscheit-Berg plays all the three roles in a fractured, rambling narrative. It has a reminder that he was suspended from WikiLeaks a few months ago, and as he sees Assange getting embroiled in a legal drama that has attracted global attention, he finds it his duty to blow the whistle on a man who started WikiLeaks with an idea-that more access to information would lead to decentralisation of concentrated power and lead to a utopian and egalitarian world.
Beginning with his infatuation with Assange, the book leads us into a frat-boy adventure drama of two men, a plan, a world to save from the powers to be, and the subsequent disillusionment as the idol forms feet of clay. Domscheit-Berg creates a black and white world where he plays a slightly smug, holier-than-thou, white swan, with relative moralism, to the paranoid, ill-mannered, delusional and megalomaniac black swan of Assange, who slowly alienates, victimises, ignores, humiliates and dismisses the people who supported him and helped him, as his secret (and rather small) empire falls apart.
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To be fair, one must remember that Domscheit-Berg is not a writer by training, that he is writing in a language he is not fully familiar with, that he has been unfairly maligned by Assange, and that he has not had many spaces to say his say. The high points of the book are the detailed stories about some of the most celebrated WikiLeaks cases, from Sarah Palin's leaked emails and scientology confessionals to the US cables and the Iraq videos. The revelation of WikiLeaks' vulnerability, artifice, opaque policies and its lack of reflexivity can sustain some interest, though it fades when you realise that it is a build up to his contending brand-OpenLeaks, which the author launched after his exit from WikiLeaks.
It might be an interesting case study, though, of how new digital collectives emerge and shape and the strategies that can be employed (or used with caution) in building up global networks of resistance and protest. All in all, the book is less about WikiLeaks and more a sordid adventure of an errant knight and his foolhardy ways, told by the chief of his entourage, who decided to lay bare the inner workings of the adventure that has been WikiLeaks.
Nishant Shah is Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru.
nishant@cis-india.org
Published by HT Syndication with permission from Tehelka.
For any query with respect to this article or any other content requirement, please contact Editor at htsyndication@hindustantimes.com
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