Anonymous and dangerous: the cults of Julian Assange and the history of hacking in the twentieth century

© 2013 Jacob Anthony KavanaghOn 13 December 2010, Time magazine ran a controversial cover article depicting the now famous founder of the whistle blowing website Wikileaks, Julian Assange. The cover photograph is intentionally bold; in it we see a large portrait of Assange, charismatically rendered in black and white tones and positioned on a dark background, although his mouth is covered by a coloured red, white and blue American flag. While the symbolic gaging of Assange by an American flag may appear, at first glance, to be a somewhat elementary statement about the politics of secrecy in the twenty-first century, illustrating the issue of secrecy and who has the right to tell and not to tell secrets, or what Slavoj Žižek has labelled ‘the Wikileaks story...represented as a struggle between Wikileaks and the US empire,’ it represents the fundamental question at the heart of a secret, sovereignty. ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ - the question accompanying the image of Assange on the cover of Time gives the reader (in the context of a globally networked society, a global democratic citizen) the power to answer yes, but on one condition: that in another unsurprising act of symbolism, they must first (metaphorically) rip the flag from Assange’s mouth, subverting the sovereign power of the state, and let the secrets pour out from between Assange’s lips. (From Introduction