Victor Serge is among the first of the radical - not rogue - archivists. After the Bolsheviks took power, he was tasked with sorting through the vast files on snitches, provocateurs and double agents. There was a vast wealth of information that had to be sorted, interpreted, and assimilated in some way to maintain the Revolution. Properly understood, this meant absolvement, prison or death, depending on circumstances, for those who had insinuated themselves into revolutionary circles in order to betray them. A mass of information was suddenly at the disposal of Bolsheviks and action was absolutely necessary for the survival of proletarian state.
Recently, a massive trove of information has been released by Wikileaks concerning US war and diplomatic policy and operations. The reaction to these releases has been moderately interesting, having elicited a mostly normal range of reaction: calls for Assange's head from the right-wing of the US, cries of hypocrisy from the 'international community', and uneasy lecturing on the need for the openness of information in a modern democracy from the 'left'. Among many, though, the question remains - so what? 'Anonymous', a nebulous group of cyber activists, took up Assange's and Wikileaks cause through online sabotage to limited effect. As the hacker magazine 2600 tried to show, however, these attacks are largely counterproductive. Rather than crippling Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, it creates the conditions under which they become sympathetic entities.
Overshadowed in all of the hubbub is the fact that very little of what has been made public in these cables is either surprising or new. Perhaps they confirm something about what many had thought about the way the US saw its role in the world, but as a pure release of information, there is little to keep it from dissipating into the ocean of information that the internet makes available - like a rock thrown into a lake. The reaction by the US state does also reveal something about information, in that this is one of the few times that the US has not been the aggressor in an information war and, as such, we see how it defends itself when provoked. Beyond that, it does not seem out of the question to wonder what use will be made of the bounty of information available to anyone who seeks it.
In a recent conversation, my neighbor, Jimmy, and I were discussing this very problem. Information exists, what was necessary, he thought, was for someone to draw a line between what the information is and what it means - that the US backs up dictatorships and uses international democracy as a ruse for its own ends. This, though, misses the essential element that Serge and the Bolsheviks implicitly knew: information, even if it reveals state machinations, is worthless without an institution in which to put that information to use. While our own times are far different than the Red Terror, that does not mean that its lesson are then consigned to the dustbin. If it is correct to say that information wants and needs to be free, and that it must be corralled and made to reveal its secrets, those secrets change nothing unless they are made to work within an organizational form.
Another step, though, must enter: Serge writes in What Ever Radical Should Know About State Repression that, "Nothing great is achieved without disinterestedness. And the autocracy had no disinterested supporters" (68). It is arguable that inertia is a defining characteristic of human life: unless it is made evident that a transformation of a given is not only necessary but also possible, very few people willingly engage in a course of action to address that given - whether that be picking up clutter, introducing more a more efficient operating system or changing the shape of a state. You could call this inertia 'disinterestedness'. If there is an active core on multiple sides of an issue, how those who are disinterested lend their support decides the issue. In the US, the conditions under which last three characteristics might provoke radical transformation are absent or weak. So, the question becomes, how are they installed?
That is where, I believe, rogue and radical archivists come into play. 'Anonymous', in the aftermath of its negligible affect, wrote that what must be done now is to cull the information that Wikileaks made available, distill that, and then make that public. That is a good first step. As the mass of information that the internet and networked communication makes available has ballooned, the need for accessing and assimilating information has become more dire than ever. Installing that information into organizational memory so that it can be activated in the manifestation of that organization is now an essential activity of those who would understand themselves to be on the political left. What the organizational form with a shape to challenge for the support of the disinterested looks like is yet to be determined, though, here too, there are hopeful signs on the horizon in the shape of international student movements and the international workers fighting against austerity measures. For those to move forward though, critical and radical archival methods are a manifest necessity.
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