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of a networked device with audio or visual capability. The reason the NSA and Facebook can be conflated, and the reason Snowden and Manning are caught up in this slipstream as well, is that leaking falls into the realm of a larger word (a larger vessel): sharing. Leaking is sharing and sharing is the purported model of the digital network. Files are shared, information is shared. Photos, music, video. Shared, shared, shared. And what Snowden has shared with us is that we are sharing our information with the NSA even if they don’t want to share theirs with us. Manning shared what she knew about the military’s activities and now she’s not allowed to share anything with anyone any more. Not even a cell.4 Things get a little bit tricky when the thing we are sharing is a secret. Of course secrets, and the sharing of them, aren’t intrinsically bad or good. They operate, as so many things do, as what Bernard Stiegler describes as a pharmakon, that is, they have both the potential to cure and to poison. The pharmacological aspect of secrecy is a major problematic of digital culture. There is a significant public movement towards something problematically called ‘free information’ that grows from the hacker/open source communities on the internet. These are, generally, the same folks who promote file-sharing, are anti-copyright, and demand the kind of transparency from organizations and governments that leakers like Snowden and Manning facilitate. But at the same time, many of these people are self-described ‘privacy advocates’ who believe in protections that, at first blush, seem antithetical to their free information leanings. Information should be free and open to all except for information about them and then it should be their private property. One year before the first Chicago Manual of Style was published, sociologist Georg Simmel released his now-cherished text on secrecy. In it, he acknowledges, quite sensibly, that some degree of nescience (not knowing, aka: secrecy) is required for intimacy, which in turn is required for group formation. Fast-forward a hundred years and this concern for intimacy and what comes to be called psychic and collective individuation appears in Stiegler when, writing on digital social networks, he says, “On a psychical level, [the destruction of secrecy] is perhaps the destruction of the possibility of a psyche endowed with intimacy and of singular individuation, if it is the case that the unconscious is what remains hidden and secret to oneself.”5 Simmel, in his text, innately understands the pharmacology of secrecy, observing that, “the possession of full knowledge does away with the need of trusting, while complete absence of knowledge makes trust evidently “Amateur” in the Stiegler sense that they have leaked out of love and not, clearly, out of economic rationality. 3
I don’t know for certain Manning is in solitary at Leavenworth, but she was while at MCB Quantico so I hope you’ll forgive the dramatic flourish. 4
Lovink, Geert, and Miriam Rasch. 2013. Unlike us reader: social media monopolies and their alternatives. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. 5