Bruce Sterling's thoughts about the Wikileaks story are excellent, probably the best I've read so far.
Let's pick out one Infocult theme from them, the use of horror story tropes and language. Sterling's been working this theme for a while, from his sense of Gothic High Tech to Gothic spam, fearsome Cold War architectures to a Gothic world in crisis.
So it makes sense for Chairman Bruce to look at Wikileaks and see the house of Usher.
It’s the damage to the institutions that is spooky and disheartening; after the Lewinsky eruption, every American politician lives in permanent terror of a sex-outing. That’s “transparency,” too; it’s the kind of ghastly sex-transparency that Julian himself is stuck crotch-deep in. The politics of personal destruction hasn’t made the Americans into a frank and erotically cheerful people. On the contrary, the US today is like some creepy house of incest divided against itself in a civil cold war. “Transparency” can have nasty aspects; obvious, yet denied; spoken, but spoken in whispers. Very Edgar Allen Poe.
More American Gothic:
The cables that Assange leaked have, to date, generally revealed rather eloquent, linguistically gifted American functionaries with a keen sensitivity to the feelings of aliens. So it’s no wonder they were of dwindling relevance and their political masters paid no attention to their counsels. You don’t have to be a citizen of this wracked and threadbare superpower — (you might, for instance, be from New Zealand) — in order to sense the pervasive melancholy of an empire in decline. There’s a House of Usher feeling there. Too many prematurely buried bodies.
Turning to Assange, Sterling is fascinated by this character, seeing him as a kind of classic hacker, but with a Robespierre or vampire or alien-monster vibe:
Julian Assange doesn’t want to be in power; he has no people skills at all.. he’s something we don't have words for...Most successful dissidents have serious people skills and are way into revolutionary camaraderie and a charismatic sense of righteousness. They’re into kissing babies, waving bloody shirts, and keeping hope alive. Not this chilly, eldritch guy.
"Eldritch". Perhaps Assange is more like Charles Dexter Ward, or Herbert West, smuggling secrets out of Miskatonic.
Note, too, how Sterling returns to the classic jock-vs-geek culture war:
He didn’t just insult the captain of the global football team; he put spycams in the locker room. He has showed the striped-pants set without their pants. This a massively embarrassing act of technical voyeurism. It’s like Monica and her stains and kneepads, only even more so.
This makes for an interesting pairing with Aaron Sorkin's slam at Facebook's team.
I can't summarize the entire article here; read the whole thing, as the expression goes.
which are another example of what some people call the "lexicalist hypothesis", a view that has occasionally -- but erroneously -- been inferred from some previous writings of mine. Since my linguistic creativity is infinite, I can categorically state that there aren't templates of any sort.
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