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2026-01-19

Why I love Julian Assange

Disclaimer

• Quick Note
• I wrote this in a hurry. Will fact check later. Might contain inaccuracies.

copy-pasting from elsewhere:

• I have read many blogs of software developers turned political activists: Aaron Swartz. Alexandra Elbakyan. Anna (of Anna's Archive). Satoshi Nakomoto. Timothy May. Vitalik Buterin. Roman Storm. Julian Assange. Edward Snowden. Moxie Marlinspike. Richard Stallman. (List goes on, it's a long list)
• Out of all these people, I think Julian Assange is the person whose philosphy I align with the most.
• Why?
  • Long write up incoming later. For now here's a short writeup.
  • I agree with his philosophy of attacking elites directly by leaking all their secrets.
  • I agree with his philosophy that actors operating transparently will tend to outcompete actors operating in secrecy over the long run (unless these secret actors use lots of violence).
  • I agree with him on greater good can justify some harm.
  • Not the most important point, but I like that he was willing to publicly start conflicts even with his allies (Bill Keller at New York Times, openleaks founder), not just his enemies. He wasn't willing to play the "mutual reputation" game as it's called on LW. (Normally in most industries, you accumulate a bunch of allies and then make an implicit commitment to never criticise them in public.)
  • Many of the other people on this list, either they ended up in prison, or their attack was not strong enough to fix politics/geopolitics, or both.
  • Ultimately though I don't think a single person on this list has actually fixed very big picture political stuff. Everyone failed, if I assume extremely big goal.
  • By extremely big goal, I mean things like turn a dictatorship into a democracy, or stop a major war from happening, or invent a new form of government that can compete with old forms, or similar.
  • The track record of developers turned activists in general is poor. Useful to remember since I am also part of this reference class.
  • The only software developers with actual power at the geopolitical scale are the people running the Big Tech and AI companies. I don't want to become the founder of a Big Tech or frontier AI company.
  • Due to the existence of nuclear weapons, power has been radically centralised into the hands of a very small number of players. If we are on track to ASI, that is going to centralise it even harder.

In terms of impact on the world (in a direction I like)

• I think I would put Snowden, Satoshi, Stallman and Torvalds in a similar category as Assange.
• Satoshi's impact still seems like an open question. BTC price could still go up further and maybe some minor countries will use it as reserver currency. I am open to this possibility.
• Stallman and Torvalds obviously made huge difference in preventing the NSA and Big Tech from locking everyone into their ecosystem until the end of time. Open source movement would have probably happened even without these two, but they definitely accelerated it. I still think linux coreutils is one of the best pieces of open source software ever lol.
• Assange and Snowden failed to cause sufficiently large change all by themselves, but they've definitely accelerated amount of anti-govt protests in the US. Assange's leaks did affect atleast 1 or 2 elections though, I should make a detailed writeup about it sometime.

More info on Julian Assange

• read his blog iq.org on internet archive. His writing style can be a pain to get through, but I basically agree with his points in the important posts like "Conspiracy as Governance"
• Ask AI for his older interviews. He became more secretive once he was desperate to get asylum from any country. But before this, he was fairly transparent about his policies and his opinions on various people. He did do a fair bit of PR speak, but even his PR speak didn't contain outright lies.
• He got into conflicts with lots of people. Not just the people whose info he leaked, but even his own supposed allies, including Bill Keller at the New York Times, and the guy on his team who broke away to start OpenLeaks.
• US intelligence created a (IMO likely fake) rape case againt him. This is rare, even if you compare with how vindictive the US IC was in other cases where they went against whistleblowers.
• He spent a few years in Ecuador embassy in London. After the Ecuador govt changed (I think that was the trigger???), Ecuador took away his asylum, and he spent a few years in prison in UK
• He gave an impressive interview after being released, and is now in Australia. Wikileaks website is still up but I'm assuming they're not operational.

More info on what happened after Wikileaks shut down

• Another team built SecureDrop, probably inspired by Assange (my speculation).
• SecureDrop was basically to teach mainstream media houses good opsec, like how to run Tor servers, redact material, etc.
• Mainstream media houses obviously don't have same level of freedom or courage as independent actors like Assange.
• The Intercept was founded by left-leaning billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who wanted to basically gain political power by verbally attacking all the silicon valley companies. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (from Snowden leaks) worked with The Intercept.
• Due to The Intercept making opsec mistakes, Reality Winner ended up in prison. Both Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras ended up resigning in protest. Greenwald runs his own channel on rumble now.
• I guess they understood that the most ambitious journalistic work cannot be done at mainstream media houses.
• Stefania Maurizi who worked with wikileaks now runs an independent securedrop server. I presume Greenwald and Poitras also still have good opsec if anyone wants to submit information to them. (Haven't fact checked all this, please give me time.)

In conclusion, I think the basic dream of Assange continues to live on, although many people are not willing to publicly say they were inspired by him (and maybe some people do have various genuine disagreements with him).

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