Politics in the technological age

By D.L. | PHILADELPHIA

MY COLLEAGUE (along with Andrew Sullivan) is right, of course, that to focus too closely on Julian Assange in analysing the fall-out from the latest WikiLeaks document dump is to miss the larger story, which is that if Mr Assange were to be neutralised tomorrow—an eventuality some conservatives (and apparently the attorney general of the United States) have begun to fantasise about—he would quickly be replaced by some other anarchistic commando. That's because technology makes it exponentially easier to publicise information than it once was, when everyone from admirable whistle-blowers to far-left anti-liberal subversives like Mr Assange, faced the considerable obstacle of stealing large numbers of physical documents from organisations to back up their claims. Today nearly anyone with access to private files and armed with a flash drive can easily make off with gigabytes of information attached to a keychain in the front pocket of their jeans.

My fellow blogger and Mr Sullivan are also right to treat this development as a fait accompli. It is indeed "our new reality", as Mr Sullivan says. But could we please pause for a moment amidst all of our technological triumphalism to reflect on the potential downside to all of this antinomian empowerment of the individual? The libertarian imagination, amply furnished with metaphors of invisible hands and spontaneously generated order, is thrilled by such technological empowerment. What could be better than giving every human being on the planet the capacity to subvert all established authorities and institutions, private or public, tyrannical or meritocratic? What would be better, I submit, is lucid self-awareness about how much our liberty depends on the existence of stable, functioning institutions to protect it against those who long to extinguish it in the name of sundry anti-liberal theological and ideological projects.